Puppy Mill article
Inside the Puppy Mills from Newsweek
Posted by: ssjane | December 16, 2007 | 7:04 pm
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People = Stupid
Humane Society claims Pets of Bel-Air buys from puppy mills
Statement from Pets of Bel-Air:
To the best of our knowledge, our beautiful puppies purchased out-of –state are from USDA approved pet breeders. We rely on our governmental agency to be sure that these breeders are inspected.
Dear Pets of Bel-Air,
Are you not aware that there are very few inspectors and many, many breeders? Way to blame the government for sticking your heads in the sand.
We do not condone puppy mills; we would never knowingly buy a dog from a puppy mill; and we are appalled by the possibility that this may have happened. We are investigating all of our sources so that we continue to nurture the finest and most reputable dogs from the best breeders, a practice that we’ve held central to our business since we opened nine years ago.
How could you not know where your puppies are coming from? Let me introduce you to something I like to call “math.”
In order to make a profit, the breeder has to spend less on creating the dog than what s/he gets for the dog. So take what you paid. Subtract a reasonable profit. The amount left over has to cover:
- Stud fees (assuming these are actually bred puppies, and not puppies created by throwing two dogs together)
- Deworming the puppies
- Regular heartworm treatment, applicable vaccinations, flea/tick treatment for parents/puppies
- Basic supplies: food, beds, treats, toys, vet care
- Kennels/housing facilities for parents and puppies
- People to wash/change bedding, clean the dogs
- People to feed the dogs, refill the water bowls, bring dogs to the vet when necessary
- People to play with the dogs/socialize them
- Transporting the puppies to the store
- Euthanizing dogs that are too ill/old
So what’s a puppymiller to do? Well, for starters, s/he can cut out all the nonessentials. Which leaves:
- Stud fees (assuming these are actually bred puppies, and not puppies created by throwing two dogs together)
- Deworming the puppies
- Heartworm treatment, vaccinations, flea/tick treatment for parents/puppies
- Basic supplies: food,
beds, treats, toys, vet careOkay, I have a choice of feeding them premium dog food or supermarket dog food…supermarket dog food = more profit for me - Kennels/housing facilities for parents and puppies
- People to wash/change bedding, clean the dogs
- People to feed the dogs,
refill the water bowls, bring dogs to the vet when necessary
- People to play with the dogs/socialize them
- Transporting the puppies to the store
- Euthanizing dogs that are too ill/old
Every employee at Pets of Bel Air is an animal lover, as evidenced by the care and love we show our puppies and kittens each day; the healthy environment we provide; and the respect we show each of you. We continue to be a community pet store you can trust.
You can be an animal lover, and still not want to see the truth. It’s nice you’re providing a healthy environment with care and love. But if you’ve never visited the breeding facilities you buy from, you have no way of knowing whether the puppies started out in equally nice conditions or, even worse, if there are still adult dogs at the facility living horrible lives just so their puppies can be sold for a profit.
It’s tempting to “rescue” a dog from a pet store. Don’t do it. Every dog or pet supply you buy from a pet store that sells dogs creates money in someone’s pocket that will only make them continue to produce these dogs.
Posted by: ssjane | December 12, 2007 | 5:48 pm
Posted in: Dogs | Rants | Comments (0)
You Know You’re Messy When…
…you clean up the house to get ready to sell it, and it is so clean that not only can’t you find any of your stuff, but the dog trots around the house with the chickie in her mouth and has to stop every few feet to look up at you like, “Where the fuck have all my beds gone?”
Posted by: ssjane | November 27, 2007 | 10:58 am
Posted in: Bits | Dogs | Comments Off
How Mina Stays So Thin
I was washing some pots and cleaning up in the kitchen when I saw Mina trotting up the stairs to me. She was clutching the Tigger in her mouth, and she disappeared around the corner into the living room.
“Hello, Tigger!” I said, because when you don’t have kids, you eventually begin to talk not only to your dogs, but also to the dog’s toys. (This is generally considered the third step in the four steps to becoming the “Crazy Animal Person With Hair All Over Clothes Muttering to Self.”)
A few seconds later, Mina reappeared, still with the Tigger, and marched back downstairs with it.
Then she came back up with the Tigger and went around the corner again.
“Mina, what are you doing?” I called.
Sadly, Mina has not yet learned to speak English, so she merely ran past me and went back downstairs with the Tigger.
When she came up again for the third time, I peeked around the corner to see what she was doing. As I watched, Mina carried Tigger up her ramp, onto the couch, over the armrest to the loveseat, and then stood on the loveseat with the Tigger in her mouth.
I went back to washing pans, and then saw Mina walk around the corner and go downstairs with the Tigger.
She came up again with Tigger, but by now I was done cleaning up the kitchen, so I didn’t see what she did next. I went all the way upstairs to get my clothes for my shower and when I headed back down toward the kitchen, I saw Mina and Tigger coming up the stairs to me. She turned into her room and brought Tigger up the little stairs to the chair in the room, which is where we usually find her sleeping in the mornings.
I thought she had finally found a good place for Tigger, so I went downstairs and put my clothes in the bathroom. Then I remembered I still had a load of blankets in the dryer to take out. When I brought the blankets to the family room, Mina had returned with Tigger.
I spread the blankets on the recliners in the family room and watched Mina. She brought Tigger to the green bed on the floor in front of the TV and stood there indecisively for a minute, and then marched resolutely across the room to her puff ball bed beside the elliptical machine. Then she checked out the red bed by Chris’s computer, and then went back to the green bed by the TV. She and Tigger made two more laps from the green bed to the red bed and back, with a minor detour up her little stairs to look at the recliners, which evidently did not pass muster.
I finally began to worry that she had some sort of obsessive compulsive disease, since Mina appeared intent on indefinitely continuing her search for the perfect spot for her baby. She already had trouble keeping her tongue in her mouth, what with all the rotten teeth she’d had to have removed, and if she developed lockjaw from carrying Tigger everywhere, Chris would never forgive me. So I plucked Tigger from her mouth and carried Mina and the toy to the recliner.
I set her firmly on a blanket, and put Tigger where she could see it.
“Just sit here,” I told her.
Mina seemed relieved that her arduous journey was over, and scratched at the blanket so that I could tuck her in. Completely ignoring her Tigger, she curled into a ball to take a nap. This motherhood stuff was exhausting.
Posted by: ssjane | November 3, 2007 | 8:46 pm
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Stanley and Bunny
Is Stanley trying to play with the bunny? Is he trying to hump it? Or is he trying to wear it like a lei? No one knows…and will ever find out, thanks to the door.
Posted by: ssjane | November 1, 2007 | 8:21 pm
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Question: How Do I Cheer Myself Up?
Answer: I watch the Bean.
Today the Bean has:
- Carefully put her baby (right now, it’s Tigger) into the brown cube bed, which can squash down to form a bed or stay open to form a cube in which the dogs can crawl. Tigger has been placed inside the cube.
- Climbed on top of the cube, which insisted on staying in cube shape, and attempted to squash the Tigger.
- Shoved the snuggle sack off the bed and onto the ground after watching me push in the top of the cube so that she could get in the bed.
- Attempted to get inside the snuggle sack, even though it’s on the floor.
Finally I took pity on her and pulled Tigger out of the cube, put the snuggle sack on the bed, and held open the sack so she could climb inside.
She’s happy, I’m happy, it’s all good.
Posted by: ssjane | October 22, 2007 | 10:27 am
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Guess Which Dog Only Understands “Sit”
We went to my parents’ house for dinner last night, and as usual, my mother sent us home with little plastic containers of leftovers.
The leftovers included pork chops, which were my favorite and apparently also the dogs’ favorite, because I took a piece of pork chop outside with me just now and ordered the dogs to “Hurry up!”
Mina, who just half an hour ago had disdained to do anything outside other than stare aimlessly at the sky, stepped off the stoop and immediately squatted down to pee.
She got pork chop.
Stanley and Paco tried to sniff around her, as though somehow the pork chop was growing from the ground around Mina. Then they danced in front of me.
“Hurry up!” I ordered them again.
Paco, anxiously looking at me to be sure I hadn’t given all the pork chop away, stood over Mina’s pee place and began to pee. He peed just enough so that he could see that I had seen him pee, and then he raced over to me.
He got a pork chop.
Stanley ran around so that he was facing me, and sat. I moved away from him and said, “Hurry up!” while trying to shoo him toward Mina’s pee spot. He ran around again so that he was facing me, and sat.
I backed up.
He stood up and backed up, not taking his eyes from mine, and sat.
He got a pork chop anyway.
Posted by: ssjane | October 18, 2007 | 3:27 pm
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Something Is Wrong With Our Dog
We have two or three water bowls for our dogs in our house, and these bowls need to be refreshed several times a day. No, they don’t drink that much water, but Stanley has decided that each bowl is only good for one drink, and that drink can only be taken just after the bowl has been freshly filled.
Wait too long to change the water and Stanley will creep up to the bowl, sniff it suspiciously, and turn his disappointed eyes on us. I can’t blame him, though, because the water usually has strange things floating in it by then. (My theory is that the water gets dirty after Mina Bean takes a drink. Because she’s missing a lot of teeth, taking a drink involves essentially rinsing her mouth and letting some bits of dinner float out into the bowl.)
If Stan’s thirsty, I usually grab the water bowl, go upstairs to rinse it, and refill it from the Brita pitcher in the refrigerator. Stanley follows me upstairs and gazes wide-eyed at me as I go through this process, and he will often do a little dance and lick his lips when I turn toward him to put the bowl of fresh water on the floor.
Tonight Chris and I were in the family room. Chris was preparing to watch the Patriots game, which entailed clearing the Tivo for the night and asking Paco loudly, “Are you ready for the game, buddy? Do you think you’re ready for some FOOTBALL?”
I was sitting beside Chris, checking something on the laptop, when I thought I saw Stanley get up from the bed on the floor and head toward the other side of the room. After a while, though, I realized he was strangely silent.
Sometimes Stan just stands by the door to the garage, if he’s decided he want to go out, but I couldn’t see him there tonight. And sometimes, if we don’t change the water in his bowl fast enough, he walks to the bathroom on this level and into the stand-up shower to lick water from the stall floor if we’ve recently showered. But he had been gone for too long now.
“Chris, have you seen Stanley?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
We kept doing what we were doing. I figured Stanley had gone upstairs. A few more minutes passed, and Stan still didn’t show up.
“You don’t have Stanley on your lap, do you?” I asked Chris eventually.
“No,” he said.
I got up. I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew where he was.
I peered into the bathroom, and there, in the gap created by hanging our bath mat on the shower stall door, was a tiny, Stanley-shaped shadow peering anxiously at me. Apparently Stanley hadn’t quite worked out that if he could fit into the gap going into the shower, he could also fit into the gap to get out of the shower.
This is the second time we’ve caught him “trapped” in the shower, and sadly, I didn’t think to grab a camera to commemorate the occasion. Next time, perhaps.
Posted by: ssjane | October 1, 2007 | 8:46 pm
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You Know the Dog Is Hungry When…
..she gobbles down the liver treat that she usually ignores because it’s too hard, and even eats another treat, and then refuses to come when you call to her to partake of your oatmeal cookie so you go upstairs to look for her, only to find her busily eating what remains of some dog’s/her own vomit.
Posted by: ssjane | September 13, 2007 | 4:48 pm
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“It Must Be Bunnies (Or Maybe Midgets)”
When we moved into the suburbs, I assumed that Halloween would be the most negative part of living in a child-friendly area. And indeed, one year we were inundated with so many trick-or-treaters that we ran out of candy and a mob of determined children began to form on our lawn. The mob was placated only after my husband made an emergency run to the supermarket and returned with another 100 pieces of candy.
Now that I’ve been in this neighborhood for nearly four years, the weeks leading up to Halloween still strike fear in my heart. But I have learned that something more horrifying, more dangerous, lurks in the suburbs.
Rabbits.
Some of you may remember that a few months ago, Stanley inadvertently killed a nest of baby rabbits. (Even now, I still can’t help but to refer to the shovel as the “dead bunny scooper.”) So I had begun to suspect rabbits were becoming a problem, but rabbits did not surge to the top of my suburbia hatred list until a few weeks ago.
We had just finished a nice walk around the neighborhood with our dogs. As we came back to our house, we took off the dog leashes as usual. Mina likes to conduct a quick surveillance of the house after walks, paying particular attention to the gutters because she once heard a chipmunk in a gutter and has remained suspicious of noises near the gutters since then, even if she has to make the noises herself.
Today, though, Mina decided she wanted to look at the holly bushes in front of our house. She trotted into the bushes and I was yelling at her to come out and into the house, when something leaped out of the bushes, bounced heavily off my shin, and raced away.
I am not ashamed to admit that I screamed.
Chris was in the garage already, taking the harnesses off Paco and Stanley, and he yelled, “What happened? Are you okay?”
I was staring into the distance where a rabbit had rounded the corner of the garage, leaving behind only a flash of the white underside of its tail.
“A rabbit just bounced off me,” I said. “And I can’t get Mina out.” My old fears resurfaced. “What if she’s eating some rabbit babies!?!!”
“Nah, I think it’s too late in the season for babies,” Chris said, in a tone of voice which suggested that no matter what he found, he was going to tell me there were no dead babies in the bushes. Because sometimes a man has to sneak out of the house and quickly dispose of dead things if that means he’ll be able to sleep through the night without his wife waking him up every half hour to ask if bunnies go to heaven.
By now, all we could see of Mina was a faint rustling of the holly branches closest to the ground. Chris walked around the bushes, calling for her. When she ignored him, he pushed his way through the branches and felt around the ground.
After a few minutes, he emerged holding Mina. Mina had a tiny spider hanging off one of her whiskers, and dirt on her back. She also looked startled to have been interrupted in her rabbit-hunting.
We brushed her off and took her inside. She spent the rest of the day perched in the windowsill, alertly surveying the lawn. Maybe it had taken the humans four years to figure out the true dangers of living in the suburbs, but she had known all along about the rabbits.
And also, the squirrels.
Posted by: ssjane | September 9, 2007 | 11:43 pm
Posted in: Dogs | This Life | Comments (0)