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ENC1101
Informative Essay
Puppy Mills, Be gone!
Bulldogs on sale! Yorkie puppies available here! Have you ever wondered where all these cheap puppies for sale in pet stores come from? The answer is that they are produced in factory-like environments known as “puppy mills”. Puppy mills are large-scale dog breeding operations where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs. Puppy mills treat dogs like products, not living beings, and usually house them in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions without adequate veterinary care, socialization, or even food and water.
The cute puppies for sale at your local mall were probably bred from dogs that don’t play outside or get groomed. Puppy mill dogs are typically kept in cages with wire flooring that injures their paws and legs and cages can be stacked up in a column, which means waste falls on the dogs housed below them. Compromised health and conditions like matting, sores, mange, severe dental disease and abscesses are often widespread. Many puppy mill puppies are born with or develop overt physical problems that make them unsalable to pet stores, which mean they end up abandoned or just left to die. Many sick puppies do manage to end up at pet stores, though, where the new puppy owner unknowingly purchases the sick dog.
Breeding dogs at the mills sometimes spend their entire lives outdoors, exposed to the elements, or crammed inside filthy structures. When a parent at a puppy mill is no longer able to produce, the dog may be given to the nearest shelter, abandoned, or even destroyed. Also, because the puppies produced in puppy mills do not have safe and healthy homes selected for them ahead of time, if they are not purchased by the time they hit a certain age, they may suffer the same fate. Female dogs usually have little to no recovery time between bearing litters. When, after a few years, the females can no longer reproduce or when their breed goes out of style,