Puppy Mills
Everyone may love going into the pet store and seeing all of the cute puppies in the window. What many people do not think about is how much those puppies have gone through in their short period of life. That one dog that you see in the window was born from a mother who has had a litter of puppies every time she came into heat since the age of one year old. That one puppy has been around hundreds of howling and barking dogs since the moment they could first hear. That one puppy may not have been fed for weeks before entering the pet store. Finally, that one puppy rode in a crate for six hours in the back of a tractor-trailer before it was delivered inside the pet store. Pet stores sell more than 500,000 puppies a year. All of those puppies come from puppy mills. There are more than 4,000 licensed commercial breeding kennels, or puppy mills, accounted for in the United States today. This number does not include the number of puppy mills that do not require to be licensed. The United States Department of Agriculture should make puppy mills illegal due to the inhumane treatment of animals while they are at the mills.
Puppy mills are high volume commercial breeders that sell their dogs for a profit without providing public access to the breeding site (Kahn). The first puppy mill was seen right after World War II. The farmers crops were not doing very well and they had to make a living somehow. They decided to start raising and selling dogs. Farmers would raise these dogs without knowing the proper way to take care of the animals or without the correct tools. In the end, the farmers would raise the dogs for fairly cheap and sell the animals for a profitable amount. The first puppy mills were extremely unsafe and the conditions have no gotten much better today. The dogs were mainly kept in chicken coops or cages and would go many days without any food or water. Dogs are considered to be livestock, so any random person could start a puppy mill.
Puppy mills are high volume commercial breeders that sell their dogs for a profit without providing public access to the breeding site (Kahn). The first puppy mill was seen right after World War II. The farmers crops were not doing very well and they had to make a living somehow. They decided to start raising and selling dogs. Farmers would raise these dogs without knowing the proper way to take care of the animals or without the correct tools. In the end, the farmers would raise the dogs for fairly cheap and sell the animals for a profitable amount. The first puppy mills were extremely unsafe and the conditions have no gotten much better today. The dogs were mainly kept in chicken coops or cages and would go many days without any food or water. Dogs are considered to be livestock, so any random person could start a puppy mill.