Voice of the Mid-Columbia | Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Wash. |
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closeFriday, Jun. 05, 2009
Puppy mills profit on neglect of man's best friend
By Dan Paul, Special to the Herald
The recent raid on a Kennewick puppy mill that freed about 400 miniature American Eskimo dogs will quickly fade from local headlines and public consciousness.
It shouldn't.
Behind the innocuous phrase "puppy mill" hides a grim reality. The vast majority of the more than 2 million puppies sold annually by retail pet stores, through classified ads or on the internet, are mass produced in abysmal conditions in these horrible mills, using breeding dogs that are caged all their lives, never to become part of a family.
Puppy mills maximize profits by churning out the highest number of dogs for the lowest possible overhead cost with scant regard for the health and well being of the parent animals and their offspring.
Hence, the growth of a wretched industry that cuts corners at every opportunity and for all practical purposes operates with few regulations and minimal oversight.
Those of us who dedicate our professional lives to closing down the worst of these pet factories and working for legislation to clean them up, are driven by the shocking sights and sounds and smells we invariably experience when accompanying law enforcement on a raid to serve a complaint warrant for cruelty or neglect.
Typically, you smell the place before you actually see the flyblown filth up close. At the Sun Valley Kennels in Benton County, there was the overpowering and familiar miasma of accumulated urine and solid waste. Ramshackle makeshift cages made from plywood and rusty metal doors housed the hundreds of breeding females. We even found dogs imprisoned in shopping carts.
We are too often confronted with the tragic plight of dogs that spend their entire lives in squalid confinement, indoors or outside, broiling in the summer heat and chilled to the bone in the depths of winter.
They get no exercise and never touch grass or solid ground. Frequently infested with fleas and ticks and riddled with intestinal parasites, some are barely able to breathe or defecate through matted fur encased in hardened feces.
Some suffer from paws that are raw and bloody from urine burns. Many are malnourished. Other typical puppy mill conditions are ulcerated eyes, rotten teeth and diseased mouths. Bred repeatedly from their first heat with no time to recover between litters, the females are quickly killed or discarded when their fertility wanes.
Sound awful?
It is - heartbreakingly so.
Inbreeding, minimal or no veterinary care, poor quality food and shelter, lack of human socialization: That's life in a cruel and callous industry that treats dogs like a cash crop.
The product: unsound family pets who retail for hundreds, even thousands of dollars, then end up costing their owners double or triple or more in veterinary bills, if they don't have to be euthanized.
The Kennewick raid illustrates the importance of the new law recently signed by Gov. Chris Gregoire that will crack down on puppy mills by capping the number of breeding dogs at 50 in these canine assembly line facilities. It also establishes some basic animal welfare standards.
If you're planning to get a puppy - whether mix or purebred - go to http://humanesociety.org/puppy. The Humane Society of the United States provides free information on obtaining your new pet from a shelter, a rescue group or a responsible breeder.
* Dan Paul is the Washington state senior director of The Humane Society of the United States.
Editorials are the consensus of the Tri-City Herald editorial board.
Editorial board members are Rufus Friday, publisher; Chris Sivula, editorial page editor; Ken Robertson, executive editor; Matt Taylor, contributing editor; Lori Lancaster, editorial writer; Shelly Norman, editorial writer and Jack Briggs, retired publisher
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