3 Gen Gap

Puppy Mills – what’s all the fuss about?

The young adults of the 1960s hippy era were generally softer towards pets – but part of the hippy movement including going back to nature, and having your own little farm – which meant raising animals from their birth and then slaughtering them when they matured, and then eating them.

The parents (from the 1950s era), did NOT want to go back to the farm. Not because they cared about animals, but because it was so unsophisticated, so bumpkin, so rural.

There was also, at this same time, among the hippies, a vegetarian movement – which shocked some adults, because “Why would people not eat meat?”

It is NOT that some of the hippies thought up or imported vegetarianism, it is more of a flux between what was very rare to what was, “not unheard of”. I did have a relative who was a vegetarian – and that was starting back in the 1930s.

Today, while there are more vegetarians, the big push is in treating animals better, and in recognising the bond that people have with their pets.

There still are unsolved consumer issues with how puppies are produced, marketed, sold, and controlled. There are issues with monopolising an industry and the brute force needed to do so, as well as the slyness often involved in sells.

There are also issues where the use of pets, influences of the consumer, without the consumer being aware of it – like deliberately breeding dogs to have health problems or temperament problems, and selling puppies with “a string attached” (a return to sender clause) and then selling the returned pet for research.

The whole issue of animals being used in painful experiments, or kept cruelly, really separates the young crowd from their grandparents era, but it not wholly one way, there are always people who are cruel, like young guys who make their dogs fight, and there are always lots of older people who love their pets, but still a trend can be seen.

In the 1950s, parents and teacher sometimes spoke well of using animals for experiments simply because that helped “progress” – never mind that that progress produces cancer causing chemicals, and toxic chemical waste, progress itself was some people’s holy grail.

The 1960s saw many hippies against using animals for research, but that was sometimes in keeping with the ideal of returning to a simpler life, not always just for the animals themselves.

Like the 1950s, the 1960s still had a thing against “Dr. Frankensteins”, who people feared were taking society to a bad end, making chemical & toxic pollution, and waste products that were not contained.

Big industry laughed at the idea that toxic waste would hurt people. Big industry mostly won – but time has shown the environmentalists were right.

Of course, there always have been some people who cared about the animals. But today, if you read between the lines, you can see the difference between people under 30 and people over 65.
Americans who were adults during the wars of WW2, Korea, or Vietnam, tend to have been raised with a harder attitude towards animals – most of them have softened and changed with the times.

But the people who are still doing what they have always done, using animals for fun and profit, are sometimes really baffled by the animal rights movement.

To them, it is some weird idea that comes out of left field somewhere.

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Mama!

Is this where your puppy really came from?

The bigger image shows it better: – note that these dogs are just one pen in a line of adjoining pens – see another pen on the right side?
photo source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Puppy_mill_01.JPG

This is a puppy mill.

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What puppy mill?

So what is a puppy-mill? To some people it can mean:

1) A place that produces a large number of puppies. AKA: a high volume breeder.

2) A place that produces at least one litter of puppies, but the mother dog is not well cared for. AKA: animal neglect.

3) Only those places that produce lots of puppies, and also have substandard conditions.

4)To some people, all breeders are bad, “puppy mill” is an insult, so “All breeders are a puppy mill”.

So they are simply using a negative term to insult, like a person who can’t find the right word, but who knows the tone he wants to express, calling someone who he is angry at a “murderer, thief, stupid, ugly, the son of a popular woman, or various body parts”.

Let’s calm down and find the right words, shall we?

“High Volume Breeder” – they produce lots of puppies. This is NOT illegal in most states – at least not on the state level, but counties, cities, and landlords can all set limits on how many pets you can have.

The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) WAS looking at legislation (PAWS) to have mandatory inspections of breeders who sold more than (I think it was) 25 puppies, dogs, cats,and/or kittens per year. (But the legislation ended up with wording that “left the fox guarding the hen house” and it got shelved.)

Breeder WHO SELL WHOLESALE are limited to (I think it is) 3 adult female dogs, unless they pay for a license and pass a yearly inspection. (IMO, yearly is NOT good enough, every kennel needs to be inspected in both the winter and in the summer – not just in the summer).

If ALL BREEDERS could only have a maximum of 3 breedable females, or face really heavy expensive restrictions and licensing, then we would not have any puppy mills because we would not have high volume breeders except those whose kennels that are held to very high standards, at that point, it doesn’t matter what else we would call sub-standard kennels because they would be ill-eagle (illegal) kennels.

Very small ‘kennels’, of with just one or two female dogs, are common in Germany.
I will add, that as far as taking care of their dogs goes, some people with only a few dogs, take such bad care of their dogs, that the dogs would be better off in a concrete kennel in with a high volume breeder.But there are other problems associated with high volume kennels – things other than direct lack of care of the dogs.

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Puppy Mill.

A “mill” is something that can really crank it out; that mass produces.

A mill is a top producing place – a real working company – something that really puts out the product.

So what is a “puppy mill”?

A place that really cranks out the puppies.

Sometimes, a modern place, a place that combines technology into its system of production.

Think of concrete runs that hose clean, and drain into a septic system.

Think of air exchangers for clean wholesome fresh air.

Think of central heating.

Think of scientifically formulated pelleted dog food.

Think all that can go wrong when someone has more dogs than what they can take care of.

To the people who are into agriculture, and who run a big kennel that are state of the art, they don’t understand the way some people use the term “puppy mill”.

The big concrete and chain link kennels, are puppy mills in that they are “HVBs” – High Volume Breeders – they really churn out a lot of puppies – but they use what is considered state of the art agricultural methods.

So they don’t understand other people who lump them together with breeders who have “puppy farms” – using the old concept of “farm” not the modern agribiz concept of farms.

But people who understand the web of problems in dog breeding, know that every type of breeding creates it’s own problems.

Photos from:

http://animalsvoice.com/

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Mills

Have you ever seen a mill?
By “mill” I mean a water mill.

It usually looks like a small cottage with a big wooden wheel – like a small Ferris wheel – beside it.

The wheel is always over a stream – otherwise it wouldn’t be a water wheel, would it?

Ice melts in the mountains, and the water flows downhill (down hill).

People put this big wooden wheel that has paddles on it, and when the water flows under the wheel, the water turns the wheel.

The wheel has an axle that turns — oh you get the general idea – one turning thing turns another. You can end up with interlocking cogs and all sorts of things.

Like a mechanical version of electricity, a mill makes it possible to power devices – to get work done.

Where there is not an all year stream, people some time use windmills (wind mills).

Windmills are large paddles that are turned by the wind. This turns an axel, which turns other things. It makes “mechanical energy” – the ability to power things.

Usually windmills here work a pump which pulls water from a well to water cattle.

But windmills can be used to make electricity, that can run your computer.

Dams hold back water, but some water is let through, which turns turbines – much like a water wheel – and so really, it is much like you are still using the same idea to produce power today, as long ago.

Photos from:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/

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crank ’em out

When I search “puppymill” the search asks “Do you mean ‘puppy mill’?”

No, I don’t, but that is the way the search engine thinks it is spelled.

I think we have reached the point that “puppymill” is a word, not a phrase.

Laws often really care about the words themselves.

We, mere mortals, tend to assume that other people know what we mean, and agree with whatever definition we have for a word.

Dictionary meanings, which is what laws use, can be surprising.

For example, way back, the word “funky” became popular.

One popular girl was upset that someone had called her “funky”.

I assumed that I knew what funky meant – it meant “mod, hip, with it, in style”.

She said she thought that was what funky meant too,

but she looked it up in the dictionary and it said funky meant “smelly”.

She wasn’t too happy.

She was a nice girl, and quite hip and stylish,

so I told her that the person who called her “funky”

had probably assumed the meaning of the word like I had.

Good lesson in looking a word up in the dictionary.

So what does “puppy mill” mean?The truth seems to be, that different groups of people each have their own definition of the word “puppymill”.

Maybe some day one group’s definition will win out – but until then, different people each have their own definition of what “puppymill” means.

photos from:

http://animalsvoice.com/

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Red is blue

People often think along predictable paths.

For example: people tend to believe that if a person has one really good trait or ability, that they must be good in other ways too. Like if a person is a good movie star – they must have answers to war, hunger, and who’s the best ball team. Thinking like this is sometimes called “the halo effect”.

In fact, your wonderful uncle that is so helpful and makes everybody laugh, might not really work “down at the factory” – he might really be a hit man for the mob.

That dirty, druggie next door with the filthy habits, who you have learned to like in spite of his lifestyle because he seemed so warm-hearted, might really be an undercover federal agent – and you might be wrong about him on both counts – he might really hate drugs, but he might be very cold-hearted.

Why people tend to associate two unrelated traits is beyond me, but they do. Maybe it is because of some past experience they have had? They once knew a tall man who was tight with his money – so now they believe that tall men are tight with their money. They once knew a fat woman who drank like a fish and slept around – so now they believe that all fat women are like that.

The reverse is true too. People often believe that if a person is bad in some way – they must be bad in all other ways too.

For example, when I was in high school, in a history class, one girl made a comment like “All Nazis are Communist!”

When I disagreed with her statement, she loudly argued back. Fortunately, the teacher was not a complete idiot, and tried to explain. But he had a hard time convincing several kids in the class that Nazis were NOT Communist.

I was shocked to learn that some of the other kids could not make this distinction. I had parents who were very different from each other – so I had to work out a common ground. Many other kids had not been raised this way.

Her training had been in “good vs bad” and “us vs them”. To me, the “best” point of view was in the middle – so, of course, that is where I put my country, and I put the Nazis off on one ‘wing’ and the Communist off on the other ‘wing’.

This positioning sent her into a rage. To her, extreme equalled good. She said that you could not be too good – so good was an extreme, and so bad was the other extreme.

So to her, our country was good, so we were at one extreme, so since both the Communist and the Nazis were bad, Nazis and Communist had to both be together at the other end of the continuum.

She could ask which of the two were not so bad as to be all the way at the end of the continuum, but she could not understand when the teacher said that they were both bad, but bad in different ways.

And she really got angry when I tried to explain that the continuum was not one of good vs bad, but of politics, with us in the middle. To her, being in the middle was bad, or at least terribly average; good was always an extreme.

One other kid said it better than I could, and better than the teacher, he said that the 3 political point of views were really like points on a triangle – equally apart, and extreme in their own ways.

Have you heard it said that someone can’t ‘see’ shades of grey? or that to someone, “everything is black or white”? (as if they saw every thing like black ink on a white piece of paper).

Between all the extremes is a whole continuum of shades of grey – and many colors too.

This same inability of many people to make distinctions is found in the arguments about dogs too.

For example: people are sometimes shocked to find out that most puppy mills have purebred dogs, sometimes from show champion lines. I think this comes as a shock to them because they associate “puppy mill = bad”, “purebred = good”. They assume that good and bad can’t be found in the same kennel owner.

I don’t want to simply end the confusion by pointing out that purebred does NOT equal good, and large numbers of dogs does NOT always mean that the kennel is worse than a kennel with only 12 dogs.

As far as the conditions that the dogs are keep under, these two factors can be as unrelated as height and hair color, in that a person can own only one dog but treat that dog so badly that all 50 of the dogs in a large kennel are better off than he is.

I am NOT saying that the number of dogs is not a factor. A person with 50 dogs can NOT give them the attention that a person with only one dog can. But a beagle that lives in a pack of 20 other beagles might actually be happier than a pet dog kept alone in a house.

But most breeds of dogs can NOT be kept in packs, so that, once a breeder has more than about 4 territorial unfixed mature dogs, the dogs often (but no always) start being shoved into cages or shipping crates for part of the day.

I start blogging with this sort of aside, because too many people seem to try to find out where I stand; am I in agreement with them or not? The truth is that I lack the motivation to take a commercial or personal stance that so many people involved with large numbers of dogs, naturally fall into.

When I think you are correct – then I will be in agreement with you, but when I think you are wrong, then I will say that too.

There are no easy answers to most of these problems – most of the easy answers have already been tried.

There are a few easy things that will IMPROVE the situations, but nothing can cure the problems easily or forever, because dogs are living beings, and each generation will bring new problems, and each generation of dog breeders and dog owners, all start out unknowing and untrained at the beginning.

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