Buying a new friend for the family should be a carefree experience for both the consumer and the new pet, but unfortunately, there is a good chance that the recently bought puppy has faced abuse as a result of one of the 2.6 million puppies that are sold by puppy mills each year.
Puppy mills are facilities that mass-breed dogs for the sole purpose of making a profit, with these puppies often being misleadingly sold as “locally breeded” dogs in pet stores and online shops. In these facilities, hundreds of dogs are abused and put into small, filthy cages where they don’t get any sort of attention, aside from when new puppies need to be made.
Despite the levels of abuse that these dogs face and California’s recent actions in passing laws to prevent third-party sellers from selling puppies online along with requiring more information about where the puppies are actually sourced from, puppy mills are still an issue nation-wide, with some states even having next to zero regulation on how puppies are bred and sold. It’s clear that puppy mills are an abusive system that exploit the many dogs that suffer within the facilities, and while California is making great progress with its recently passed laws regarding the pipeline, there needs to be a nation-wide effort to ban puppy mills throughout all of America, not just a select few states.
The mistreatment dogs face inside puppy mills is unprecedented: the dogs often eat, drink, sleep, breed, and use the bathroom in the small cage they reside in for the majority of their lives, screaming for attention that will never come. Sometimes, the noise the dogs all make is so loud that the perpetrators even make some of the dogs undergo a painful process called “debarking”, where the vocal cords of a dog are torn out, to prevent them from barking.
Due to the previously mentioned level of abuse that these dogs face, the majority of them eventually tend to develop numerous health issues including eye disorders, ear infections, parasites, and many other kinds of health problems. Despite this, the people who work in these facilities still choose to breed these dogs together, causing their offspring to often inherit these disorders or even gain new ones entirely.
After these puppies are sold, the pet stores and online shops that buy them will usually use misleading advertising, often using terms like “USDA (AKA United States Department of Agriculture) approved” to make themselves sound more humane and credible than they really are. While it may seem like these manufacturers being USDA approved makes them reputable, that’s not the full story: being USDA approved just means that you’ve met the bare minimum of survival standards, not that the conditions are humane in any way.
While there are some people that might say that it is impossible to tell if a puppy is from a puppy mill, this is not the case: there are many ways to gauge if a breeder is reputable or not. If the owner doesn’t let a buyer meet the puppy’s mom, see the facility the puppy is from, or the puppy comes from an online store, they are not a reputable source. There are plenty of humane animal shelters and rescues that consumers can buy puppies from without the weight of animals having to suffer in puppy mills before they are either sold or killed.
While all dogs in puppy mills are heavily mistreated in many different ways, female dogs arguably have it the worst: every year, often before they are old enough, they are constantly bred with other dogs to churn out new puppies to the point of exhaustion. Eventually, when their bodies cannot regularly put out puppies anymore, many female dogs are killed in often harsh yet cheap ways to save costs.
In conclusion, with how much abuse, lying, and manipulation has come out of the puppy mill pipeline, it is unfathomable that more hasn’t been done to stop this industry for good. While many states have some kind of regulation to combat the puppy mills that plague America, they just aren’t enough, as everyday, dogs are still abused for these manufacturers’ own gains. However, all hope isn’t lost; with California’s drive to sign bills that more heavily regulate puppy mills, it paints a future where all dogs can live freely, without having to endure the confines of a puppy mill.
