What is a Puppy Mill?
This is what customers see if they purchase a dog directly from the puppy miller's home; a bucolic setting of pug puppies in a basket in a tidy kitchen. The real situation lies behind the barn as in the photographs below.
There’s no legal definition for the term “puppy mill” even though it’s been in use for decades. That lack of definition sometimes causes considerable debate as to who is and who isn’t a puppy mill, but one thing is certain: A puppy mill is a large scale dog breeding operation in which dogs are churned out solely for profit with little to no regard to their welfare.
The ambiguity comes in when high-volume breeders who stay within the very loose confines of the law and keep clean kennels declare themselves offended in being lumped together with the lawbreakers – the Elmer Zimmermans, the Joyce Stolzfuses, the Daniel Eshs. More debate is introduced when a friend says that their kindly Amish neighbors breed only two or three kinds of dogs and keep them sheltered in the barn – they certainly don’t run a puppy mill, they’re nice people! It doesn’t matter if the breeding box is sheltered, if the kennel of 500 dogs is clean and sparkling, the common denominator in these situations is lack of human companionship.
The domestic dog as we know it today is a product of 15,000 years of co-evolution with Homo sapiens. It was to their benefit as a species to live alongside us every step of the way and, as a result, canines have become integral components in most of our lives. Dogs were made to live with people. Every part of a dog is built for human companionship. The worst cruelty a human being can inflict upon a canine is not foul weather, beatings or starvation. It’s solitude.
History
Prior to World War II these facilities didn’t exist but in the wake of the war, during times of midwestern crop failures, the United States Department of Agriculture began to promote raising dogs as the new cash crop. Breeding dogs – especially small varieties – takes a fraction of the space, time and effort that it takes to maintain larger animals. And since many farmers already had chicken coops and rabbit hutches, the midwestern puppy mill was born.
Demand for puppies was high among east coast baby-boomers but shipping live animals from the midwest was expensive. Puppy brokers found the solution in Pennsylvania’s Amish and Mennonite population, already equipped with farms. They convinced them that raising dogs, en masse, was a quick and easy way to make a dollar. Thirty years later, Lancaster County, PA, has the highest concentration of puppy mills of any county in the nation and has earned the infamous nickname of “Puppy Mill Capital of the East.”
Conditions
Conditions in puppy mills are uniformly abysmal, some worse than others. The goal of a breeder is maximum profit so veterinary care is either scant or wholly absent. Dogs are kept in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions without the chance for socialization. Many older dogs that make it out alive have never had human contact, never been out of their cage, and have never walked upright or on flooring other than wire. These dogs are feral and take a very long time to rehabilitate.
Adult breeder dogs live lives of utter misery. Females are bred continuously until their bodies give out. If they don’t die on their own at the end of their useful lives, they are killed by the farmer. Again, minimal cost is the goal so dogs are killed by the cheapest means possible which includes clubbing, drowning, electrocution and suffocation in a bag at the end of a diesel generator exhaust. These dogs are literally bred to death.
“Debarking” is practiced to keep dogs quiet, especially in unlicensed kennels where secrecy is of utmost importance. The farmer shoves a pipe or other object into the dog’s throat to permanently damage its vocal cords and render it silent.
The ABC news program Nightline did a segment on Lancaster County puppy mills in 2009:
Pet Stores
Puppies are taken from the farm to pet stores across the US and sold to families and individuals who are never told their dog’s true origins. Sales are often accompanied by claims that the dogs did not come from puppy mills and pet stores successfully dupe customers into thinking that their inventory comes from a caring family down the street or a cozy home in the country. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dogs in pet stores come from places like this:
The owner of this property has been convicted 5 times of animal cruelty, yet numerous small dogs, including Yorkshire terriers, can be heard and seen behind the fence.
or this:
There is a Boston terrier visible in one of the cages at this kennel near Ephrata. The owner told rescuers that she sells her dogs on the internet through a broker.
Those are real, operational puppy mills near New Holland, Pennsylvania. The pug puppies shown above are from the farm in the second photo.
Oftentimes these puppies are sick and suffer from genetic defects due to poor breeding. Consumers typically don’t find that out until after the dog is home and they’ve become attached. The problem with pet stores selling sick dogs has gotten so bad that many states have enacted puppy lemon laws. But these laws protect pet purchasers, not pets, just like buying any other defective commodity.
Buying a dog from a pet store not only increases demand, but it condemns the parents of that puppy to yet more abuse, more abject misery and puts more money in an abuser’s pocket.
Current Situation
Lancaster County’s licensed breeders have declined in recent years due to changes in Pennsylvania’s dog law. Previously there were around 300 and now 100 remain licensed. While some were legitimately put out of business, the founder of A Tail to Tell says that many of them simply went into hiding rather than make the financial investment to conform to new laws.
The dog law, Act 119, was signed in October 2008 by Governor Edward G. Rendell and finalized in July 2011. The law improves standards for ventilation, humidity, lighting and flooring in commercial kennels and provides protections well beyond those that breeding dogs had in the past…in theory. The situation quickly disintegrates when one considers the lack of enforcement by government authorities, unlicensed kennels that disregard animal welfare completely and the fact that no provisions are made for human interaction with the dogs.
Pennsylvania’s legal mandates only apply to facilities under USDA oversight and are still, by any reasonable and responsible pet owner’s standards, woefully inadequate. Those kennels flouting the law, the unlicensed breeders, adhere to no standards whatsoever and governmental oversight is a non-issue. The only way possible to put puppy mills out of business is to eliminate the demand.
What You Can Do
Stop the demand, and the production stops. It’s an elementary tenet of economics. The one and only way to stop puppy mills is to stop buying dogs. It’s that simple. Three to four million cats and dogs are euthanized in shelters every year in the US. Adopt a dog from your local animal shelter or rescue group.
Educate others. Incredibly, most people don’t know where dogs in pet stores originate. Remind everyone you know, especially people in the market for a dog, that puppy purveyors only support the wholesale abuse of dogs. Know someone who is considering buying a dog? Send them a link to our What is a Puppy Mill page. Let them know that there are thousands of needy dogs at shelters and rescue groups right in their community and persuade them to save a life of a needy dog.
Urge your legislators to ensure the humane treatment of dogs in puppy mills. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania has an abysmal track record when it comes to animal welfare. Laws need to be changed. Clearly, current regulations do absolutely nothing to ensure humane treatment.
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Educating people about a pet store dogs’ origins can have ripple effects but this is especially important for people who live in areas of high puppy mill activity. Communities need to stop tolerating this in their midst.
Support groups working to end puppy mills. Our organization as well as several others in the Lancaster and Philadelphia area are always in need of support in the form of volunteers and financial.
Be an online advocate. Join puppy mill awareness groups and canine rescue organizations on Facebook. If you are a blogger, do a post on educating your readers about puppy mills. Not a blogger, but friends with one? Ask to do a guest post.
