Wolbers 1 Jeremy Wolbers 17 September 2021 Problems With Puppy Mills Do you know where your puppy came from? If not, your four-legged friend could be from a puppy mill. Puppy mills are dog breeding operations that put profits over the health and well-being of the dogs. This type of operation can lead to very high vet bills on helping your four-legged friend. Puppy mills generate a lot of problems. One of the problems the puppy mill owners do is make the dogs spend their lives in 24-hour confinement in cages. It is common to see wire cages stacked on top of each other. They generally do not have protection from heat, cold, or inclement weather Another problem that the owners do to the dogs is they live in dirty, unsanitary conditions. The owners also give the dogs living in puppy mills receive “little to no veterinary care (and puppy mill owners often provide veterinary care without anesthesia or veterinary training)”(“What Is So Wrong With Puppy Mills?”). One of the worse things about puppy mills is that the owners breed the mothers every heat cycle and are usually killed when they can no longer produce. The way the owners kill the dogs are not practices humane euthanasia. Dogs are killed in cruel ways, including shooting or drowning. One other thing the owners do is take the puppies away from the mother dog too young and can develop serious health or behavioral issues due to the conditions in which they are bred and shipped. This leads to expensive veterinary bills, heartbreak, and stress for their owners. There is a way to fix this problem. Wolbers 2 Don't worry there have been laws put in place to help this problem, but the laws did not help the problems, the problems are still here in 2021. A law they put in place is, “The Animal Welfare Act was signed into law in 1966. It is the only Federal Law in the United States that regulates the treatment of animals in research, exhibition, transport, and by dealers. Other laws, policies and guidelines may include additional species coverage or specifications for animal care and use, but all refer to the Animal Welfare Act as the minimum acceptable standard. The Act is enforced by USDA, APHIS, Animal Care”(“Animal Welfare Act”). Another way that we can help to fix this problem is to join with rescue organizations to help foster the dogs that a person buys at a dog auction and from that person they give the dogs to the fosters in the rescue organization. They can foster the dog to become pets for humans again and get them ready to put them up to adoption. Imagine a world where puppies get to stay with their mothers and get the nutrients from their mothers. The world would be great because the dogs won't have major health problems. The owners don't have to spend a lot of money on veterinarian's bills for the dogs. The owners can live happy that their four-legged friend won't die from a lack of nutrients from their mothers. This doesn’t have to be this way. So go out online to find rescues for you to join to help with this cause, or start to be a breeder and breed dogs but not do what puppy mills do. As in when a dog has its puppies let the mother dog take care of the puppies and get the puppies the veterinarian needs to stay healthy. When you go and look for a dog to adopt make sure, you do your research to make sure the dog is not from a puppy mill. Puppy mills are devastating but together we can fight against them and hope to bring them down. Wolbers 3 Works Consulted “Animal Welfare Act.” National Agricultural Library , 2013 https://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/animal-welfare-act Meyers Cari. “About Puppy Mills,” Puppy Mill Project , 2018 , https://www.thepuppymillproject.org/about-puppy-mills/
