Puppy Mill: Cuteness Kills!

This landed in the Newsdesk inbox this morning; as the City Council recently levvied additional fees on breeders in the city limits, doesn't it stand to reason they try to regulate, in some fashion, the sale of these overbred animals?

Protests Ramp Up for Petland Grand Opening

Austin, Texas – On Sunday, March 29th, concerned citizens are staging an all day protest against the Petland store scheduled to open on the same day at the Southpark Meadows shopping center. Opposition to Petland’s presence in Austin is growing with over 1,750 people having signed the online petition.

Petland, one of the largest pet retailers in the country, purchases their pets through the Hunte Corporation, the largest distributor of “Puppy Mill” pets.

Puppy mills are large commercial breeding facilities where hundreds of dogs are packed into small cages and live in deplorable conditions. These dogs live in cages that are rarely or poorly cleaned, often without fresh water or proper shelter, and little if any veterinary care, and they are never let out of their cages or receive social interaction. Many will die in their cages before they ever make the long journey to your local pet store. At 6 to 8 weeks old, puppies are "harvested" and cleaned up for the trip to the broker. They are bathed to clean off the feces and urine they have been living in during their brief lives in the puppy mill. They are then packed into a container with many other puppies often without water or proper air circulation. Some will die on this long trip, and others will be rejected by the broker only to be sent back to live out their lives as “breeding stock”. Many others will be killed for their lack of monetary value, and others are sold to research facilities. The survivors can be seen at your local pet store, often with a host of undetected health and behavior problems. Meanwhile the breeding parents of these puppies continue to live out their lives in their puppy mill cages until they can no longer produce puppies, and then they too are sold to research facilities or are killed.

“Austinites are horrified that a retailer of “puppy mill” puppies is going to be doing business in their own backyard, and want Petland to know that Austin does not support the puppy mill trade. Most consumers have no idea what a puppy mill is, or that when they purchase a puppy at a pet store, it comes from a puppy mill. Many of these pets have undetected health and genetic problems leaving the new pet owner with exorbitant veterinarian bills,” says Kynama Wald, of Austin’s Pet Directory.

In addition horrific puppy mill trade, Petland will be bringing in thousands of unaltered pets adding to an already difficult pet overpopulation crisis, which results in over 12,000 animals being killed at Town Lake Animal Shelter every year, just because they cannot find homes.

“All of the spay and neuter efforts that organizations around Austin have been working so hard at over the years will be deeply negated by the influx of unaltered animals brought in by Petland, not to mention the anticipated reduction in adoption rates for the Town Lake Animal Shelter and rescue groups in the greater Austin area, it’s a real set-back for Austin.”