Go Adopt a Dog!

Yesterday on Oprah, she did a show on puppy mills (it may have been a re-run, but I rarely get to watch Oprah) and it literally brought me to tears. I have always heard about puppy mills and the dangers of buying pets at pet stores, but I never realized how awful they really are. While millions of animals are waiting in shelters to be adopted and are being euthanized b/c nobody wants them, puppy mills all over the country are over-populating society with soon-to-be-unwanted animals. Ordinary people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to buy a designer dog from pet stores rather than rescue a dog from a shelter.

Oprah sent her staff undercover to visit the puppy mills (where 99% of pet store dogs come from) and what they found was apalling. The owners were using the same female dogs to breed litter after litter of puppies to sell off to pet stores. The pet stores then turn around and sell them to you for even more. Before the puppies are shipped off to pet stores, they are kept in filthy conditions and some even die. The females who are kept behind to breed other litters are the worst off. They are kept in small cages ioften too small for them to even turn around and are forced to deliver dozens of litters throughout their lives. Their bodies suffer from this abuse and once they can no longer breed, they're killed.

So if anybody is thinking of getting a dog anytime soon, please don't go to a pet store to buy one. Go to your local animal shelter adopt a dog. 1/3 of the dogs there are purebred and many of them are puppies so even if you have your heart set on a certain breed of dog, you can still find it at a shelter. You also will pay a fraction of the cost and will have the satisfaction of knowing that you saved a life and didn't support animal abuse. This dog is in a DC shelter, look at that face!

How could you resist??