Seeking a Furry Friend
A pet is a wonderful addition to any family who can care for one. However, many people don’t realize that deciding where to get this pet affects a lot more than just themselves and whichever furry friend they choose.
The most popular places to purchase a pet are pet stores, backyard breeders, and animal shelters. One step to take before deciding where to purchase your pet from is to think about where that animal came from before he or she arrived on the market. For many pet stores, the answer isn’t pretty.
Greenhill Humane Society encourages pet seekers to adopt pets rather than purchase from pet stores. In their most recent press release, Greenhill explained that some pet stores that sell dogs or cats get their animals from puppy mills or places that are strictly run for profit and not for the care of the animals.
An online community fighting against pet stores that sell puppies, called nopetstorepuppies.com, defines puppy mills for readers. The site says, “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.”
“We definitely encourage people to adopt instead of shop at pet stores, which encourage horrible puppy mill condition,” said Sasha Elliott, spokeswoman for Greenhill Humane Society. “Backyard breeding as well can be dangerous. People might start with good intentions but end up with litters that they can’t care for. Sometimes we see animals come in here that are clearly used for backyard breeding and then are tossed aside.”
The number one adoption site on the internet, Petfinder.com, dedicated to pairing homeless animals with caring families, has a whole page explaining why pet stores aren’t the way to go when seeking a pet.
The first paragraph on the webpage says, “Pet stores that sell dogs and cats regard them as inventory, often getting their “stock” from middlemen or brokers. Though the staff may assure you that the animals in their store were raised humanely, most have little knowledge of the conditions at the kennels where the pets were born.”
The site promoting a boycott of pet stores that sell dogs and puppies and encouraging visitors to take a pledge to not shop there, nopetstorepuppies.com, has listed as many “safe” and “unsafe” pet stores to shop at as it can. The website relies on residents from all over the United States to send in information about pet stores, mainly if they sell puppies or not. If a store does sell puppies, it gets put on the “where not to shop” list. These stores are shown on an interactive U.S. map.
Users of the site can also type in their area codes to see what stores around them are on the “where to shop” and “where not to shop” list. In Eugene, three pet stores made the “where not to shop” list. These shops are Pet Time, Zany Zoo Pets, and Bobcat pets; they are all known to sell puppies from time to time. Unfortunately for these shops, they are given a bad reputation by this website without any information to back it up.
Located on West 11th Ave, Pet Time currently has no puppies or kittens for sale, store employee Aron Cundiff said.
“We’re not selling puppies right now. Sometimes we do,” he said. “We have a couple breeders who bring some in sometimes—mostly smaller breeds, we have a lady who brings in Yorkies. When we do bring [puppies] in we only bring a few at a time so they can get the attention that they need.”
Zany Zoo Pets is an exotic pet store off of West 11th Avenue on Bailey Hill Road. The website boasts, “Zany Zoo remains committed to the community by offering only local, family raised puppies, kittens, birds, small animals, captive bred reptiles and exotics.”
“We are very different from most pet stores,” said Nate McClain of Zany Zoo. “Most pet stores, most of their reptiles, for example, are wild-caught.”
He continued to explain the average lifecycle of a pet store ball python, from the eggs being cut out of a wild python’s belly in Africa to its shipment to the United States and shoved in a plastic bin in a warehouse with no food or water.
“Then finally, a big store in Eugene would call [the warehouse] and say, ‘You know, we need five pythons,’ And the reptile distributer would reach into the plastic bin, take the five that have survived whether they’re healthy or not, put them in a box, ship them in the mail to Eugene, they get taken out and put into a glass box and sold for $20 to little Jimmy for Christmas. Then [they] die two to three weeks later.”
McClain says that all of his reptiles were hatched in Eugene from already captive reptiles or from breeders who have retained a good reputation for 25 years. The birds in the shop come from local breeders who hand raise them and make sure they are comfortable with humans.
McClain also noted that they have no puppies in the store.
“Most puppies in pet stores, not all, but most, come from puppy mills,” he said. “The state of Oregon just recently passed a law banning puppy mills, but what they banned were puppy mills with more than fifty breeding females, and they’ll allow a lot more than fifty as long as they aren’t breeding at the moment.”
Nonetheless, the Zany Zoo does sometimes still sell puppies.
“All of our puppies come from breeders with no more than two breeding females, so they’re family dogs,” McClain said.
He mentioned that his shop does not encourage the breeding of dogs or cats, but they do try and find homes for them and don’t treat them like a commodity.
“I try to operate more like a hybrid shelter than a pet store,” McClain said.
He also spoke of the respect he has for Bobcat pets but hinted that his “rubric” for accepting puppies to sell was a little more stringent.
No proof seems to exist indicating that any of the pet stores in Eugene obtain their dogs or cats, if they sell them, from cruel breeding grounds such as puppy mills. Even the big name stores such as PetSmart and Petco refuse to sell any puppies.
PetSmart’s website encourages adoption rather than finding more dogs or cats to sell. According to the site: “Today, there are millions of loveable, healthy cats & dogs for adoption that desperately need homes. Due to overpopulation of homeless pets, 4 million are euthanized every year– that’s 11,000 pets every day. For this reason, PetSmart has chosen not to sell dogs or cats and instead we join forces with PetSmart Charities to help save the lives of pets through adoptions.”
Although it appears that change is in the air in Eugene and that puppy mills are out of date, many stores elsewhere around the country still keep puppy mills in business. Just last month more than 100 dogs were rescued from horrible conditions in a puppy mill in Columbia County, OR.
In some cities, such as San Diego and Los Angeles, where there is an exploding population of pets, the retail sale of companion animals has been outlawed in attempt to permanently end the success of puppy mills.
Elliott, from Greenhill Humane Society, strongly believes that adopting a shelter pet is the best choice when purchasing and animal.
“When you adopt a shelter pet, not only are you saving that animal’s life, but you’re also saving another by clearing space in the shelter for another animal to come in,” she said.
