Puppy Mills: Dogs Abused for the Pet Trade

Cages, Filth, and Neglect

Puppy-mill kennels can consist of anything from small cages made of wood and wire mesh to tractor-trailer cabs to simple tethers attached to trees. A Pennsylvania breeder confessed that he kept his dogs in cages because it was “the only way to keep a lot of dogs—to keep them penned up.”2 Female dogs are bred twice a year and are usually killed or abandoned when they are no longer able to produce puppies.3 Mothers and their litters often suffer from malnutrition, exposure, and a lack of adequate veterinary care. A puppy mill operator in New York used a makeshift gas chamber to kill 93 dogs and puppies, putting groups of five or six at a time into a sealed “whelping box,” which he had hooked up to a tractor engine. He told a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector that he gassed the dogs after being told that he would have to test and treat them for brucellosis.4

Puppies are torn away from their mothers and sold to brokers who pack them into crates for transport and resale to pet stores. Puppies who are shipped from mill to broker to pet store can travel hundreds of miles in pickup trucks, tractor-trailers, and airplanes, often without adequate food, water, ventilation, or shelter.

Young puppies who survive the unsanitary conditions at puppy mills and endure the grueling transport to pet stores have rarely received the kind of loving human contact that is necessary for them to become suitable companions. Breeders, brokers, and pet stores ensure maximum profits by not spending money for proper food, housing, or veterinary care.

Conditions don’t improve much when the puppies reach pet stores. Dogs who are kept in small cages without exercise, love, or human contact tend to develop undesirable behavior and may bark excessively or become destructive and unsociable. Unlike many humane societies and animal shelters, pet stores do not screen buyers or inspect potential future homes of the dogs they sell. Poor enforcement of humane laws allows shops to continue selling sick animals, although humane societies and police departments sometimes succeed in closing down stores in which severe abuse is uncovered.

Of the millions of puppies born at mills every year, an estimated half of them are sold over the internet. Rolling Stone called online sales of puppies “the perfect crime…Courts don’t care about out-of-state victims, and the feds don’t even fine breeders, much less arrest them, for selling sick pups on bogus sites.”