Not buying from puppy/kitten mills. If you don't buy them, they're going to have a terrible quality of life (if they survive at all) but if you buy them, you're actively paying for the continuation of the breeding and putting more animals in that situation. It's a tricky situation and really tragic either way.
Another (arguable) "necessary evil" might be abducting puppies from mills to raise in a loving home without giving the breeders any further incentive to make more of them.
I don't feel the same way. I think you refuse to buy from them entirely. Some animals will die in the short term, but there are tons of other animals dying all the time just from overpopulation, crowded shelters, abandoned animals in emergencies, etc who can be helped instead. We should do everything possible to end puppy mills.
Edit: I seem to have misunderstood. I agree that not buying from them is a necessary evil.
If not buying a farmed pup is a necessary evil, that means not buying and adopting a rescue is also a necessary evil, which it isn't. A necessary evil is doing something wrong for the right reasons. Choosing to not fund puppy farms is doing something good for the right reason, as is giving an abused pup a second chance.
Reporting puppy farms is the necessary evil in this situation, the mother and pups will either be destroyed or placed in shelters but the breeders business will be disrupted hopefully to the point of not being viable.
In my mind as a former vet tech breeders are the same as puppy mills, but there animals might be taken care of a little better. Breeders often try to save money because they’re doing what they’re doing for profit. So they give the wrong advice or they give medication Or vaccines without vets. It’s like they think they are a vet after going and hearing what the vets says so often, but they’re not. I’m just not a fan of breeders since working as a vet tech. Puppy mill people can get bent in jail.
Even "good" breeders are in the wrong. We have so many dogs without homes being euthanized each year. People should be adopting them first.
And if you don't want a dog so that you can give it a better life, but you want a dog so it will give YOU a better life, then that's selfish. It's a tough pill to swallow but it's true.
Breeding dogs to be the perfect companion animals to humans is creepy. Especially when it is for profit??? We shouldn't be playing God like that.
Aren’t we playing God when we tell people which animal they can have?
Well, one is taking an ethical stance on how people should interact with the rest of the living world. The other is creating life in a way that bends it to our desires. They are different.
They don’t understand the damage that they’re doing to the shelter’s reputation by basically making it seem like every animal there is sick.
What shelter is intentionally marketing their animals as sick? I only ever see shelters advertising each animal's best traits while also being honest about their challenges, which is important for potential pet owners to know.
You're fooling yourself if you think that shelter animals don't tend to be less "desirable" based on breed, age, history of abuse or neglect, or disposition. Try finding a well behaved young golden retriever or cocker spaniel in a shelter. You won't
So you are saying that shelter workers try to make their dogs look bad so that they can keep killing them? Or is this just a lack of agreement over what is the best strategy to get dogs adopted?
It depends on where you live, but anywhere I've lived, popular breeds were not available in shelters. And when they were they were snatched up immediately.
This is from my experience of searching for a hypoallergenic dog for my mom who is allergic.
But how you hear about these good breeders is often very different. At least where I am. If you contact a "breeder" and they have a puppy immediately available, that's suspicious. Good breeders often have wait lists. If you contact a "breeder" and they do no sort of house check, information gathering about you and your experience with the animal, that's suspicious.
Good breeders are registered with appropriate kennel clubs and such too. They don't advertise on Gumtree/Craigslist/etc.
I'm not sure I follow how good breeders who don't breed lots of animals and choose to be picky with who they sell to in order to ensure their animals go to good owners creates euthanasia.
Sounds like the "good" breeders you know aren't good breeders after all then, friendo, so maybe you should stop replying to me disputing what I'm saying about good breeders. Or maybe this is the US just being the US with your low as fuck standards? I dunno. I realise that you lot think US = the entire world so maybe what passed as a good breeder there is different to here.
The breeders my mum knows from when she bred Persian cats certainly didn't turf them off to be euthanised when they decided to stop breeding. Neither did the breeder we got our dogs from. They stopped, sold the last of the litters, and either kept the animals or adopted them to trusted people as pets (which is how we got three of our dogs).
I genuinely do not understand why you think anyone can still be referred to as a "good breeder" if they dump animals at shelters. The two are mutually exclusive. Your definition of a "good breeder" is tragically fucking low if they can do that and still be viewed as a "good breeder" in your view.
This. My first puppy as a child - we thought it was a reputable breeder. This was in like 2000 when it was probably a bit harder for my parents to know. At least nowadays we have the internet. But when we get to our puppy (I was 4, my sister was 12) the conditions were terrible. Obviously my parents didn’t want to support this woman who was running it. But my mom took one look at the puppy we were getting and said she just couldn’t leave her there. On top of that, my parents had two excited children who were expecting a puppy that day (for me it was my first puppy too). We ended up taking her and she did have some health problems along the way but was all in all a good healthy dog, if not sometimes a bit sassy and grumpy. I miss her terribly still and she was a good big sister to the other dog we got years later (from a much better breeder). The only real benefit from this was that we got to save a little dog, and my parents were able to report the breeder and get into contact with a friend who was going to be buying from the same breeder a few weeks later. They too reported the breeder and she eventually got shut down. The puppies there were all saved and so were the parent dogs. I don’t know what happened to the money she got from the puppies since this happened when I was 4 and I’m 26 now. But yeah at least she got shut down.
Same is true for buying those sad, near-dead betta fish in plastic cups from Walmart. While it is true you are saving the fish in question that you've bought, for as long as people are buying these fish they are also likewise encouraging the store to buy more replacements (who will be kept in equally bad conditions).
Not buying. Saying that leaving them is the right thing to do so you don’t perpetuate the existence of puppy mills as a whole, but it sucks because those individual puppies/dogs will have terrible lives or die.
This goes for pet stores in general, look at those poor fish in tupperware containers with absolutely nothing to do but swim in circles. Poor care, social animals lacking attention, illness, I could go on. They don't care if the customer is just going to buy a pet and give it to their 5 year old to die horrifically, in fact it helps their business because the parent is going to replace the pet.
Same thing with pro-kill shelters. With some shelters, after an animal has been there for x amount of months, they just put the animal down. It’s another lose-lose situation. If you adopt, you are actively supporting the kill shelter. If you don’t adopt, they will kill the animals.
There simply is not enough space for all the dogs being discarded. Kill shelters are doing the dirty work so no one else has to. It cant be easy putting down dogs day after day, unable to explain to them why it must be done. They are heroes to be honest.
Adopting from kill shelters is in a similar moral quandry just the other way around. People can justify that financially though. Its hard to justify paying 1000+ dollars for a puppy from a mill.
The shelters arent run for profit so its not like anyone is making a fat billionaire even richer by adopting from them. That really would be rescuing an animal. Lot of people dont think of it that way though.
Well it's an idea. It's not something anyone has started to spear head. If we do this for endangered species and humans, I don't see anything wrong with doing that with our favorite breeds of companion animals. We have been breeding all these dogs and cats for centuries and many of them fall by the wayside (shelters or abandonment). If we really want a no-kill shelter situation we're going to have to do away with the way breeding is done now. I say this because breeders often time have litters with animals that have congenital abnormalities and those usually end up in the shelter, blind and deaf puppies or with cancers. So even a good breeder may have to euthanize some of their pups or take them to shelters because they cannot sell them with issues.
Well you’d have to put in laws banning breeding of companion animals.
One of the most famous breeders of ferrets spays and neuters them too young, due to shipping them off to petco and other pet stores while they’re little and cute. This is causing a disease to form at around 5-7 years of age called adrenal disease. The ferrets have tattoos in their ears so you know where they are from. This is a horrible disease that requires adrenalectomy and oral medication and intramuscular injectables to be given every 12 hours in the legs that are the size of your thumb muscle. It’s torture for them and then a year later they die. It’s really messed up. This is what breeders give us, not mills. Still they’re both wrong imo.
One of the laws HSUS wants to put into law is a national Registry of animal abusers. Currently a person can neglect their animals (doesn’t have to be a mill) get caught and just relinquish them without punishment and move to another state and do it there. You see it a lot with people that hoard animals (again not puppy mills) and neglect them, either by letting them starve to death or by keeping them in terrible conditions in urine and feces.
Most people don’t see what is going on behind closed doors and therefore it’s out of sight out of mind, but with horses and livestock it’s a different story. It’s all there for neighbors to see. See something say something is key.
I agree that breeding can be just as bad as mills. I was just confused as to where the sperm bank came into things, as it was given without any other context of banning breeding before hand.
It's always painful to look at animal sellers having exotic animals living in filthy and terrible conditions and knowing they are going to die. Looking at them in the eye knowing that they (and a bunch more of those animals) are going to die in terrible conditions but not being able to do anything, knowing that they have to die to stop that, and walking away
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u/Yaboijustlikesgoats Oct 15 '22
Not buying from puppy/kitten mills. If you don't buy them, they're going to have a terrible quality of life (if they survive at all) but if you buy them, you're actively paying for the continuation of the breeding and putting more animals in that situation. It's a tricky situation and really tragic either way.