Glendale to ban pet store pet sales and yard sales

Araks

http://thenewsbuzz.info/pet-ban-could-extend-to-backyards/

Good news for the pet stores no longer selling puppy mill dogs.

What concerns me is that because this law is extended to people's yards as well, which I feel will also affect the actual reputable breeders.

souggy

I never got why lobbyists keep pressuring politicians to ban retail and increase regulations such as pet limit laws upon dog owners.

Most dog breeders don't break even on selling puppies. When one considers all the expenses associated with raising a litter or caring for a bitch, even a pet breeder or the "evil cross breeder" is losing money.

The commercial breeders actually take advantage of loopholes in the laws, usually ones that pertain to agricultural or industrial zones-- not residential. They are the ones who stay on the good side of the USDA to look like they are not the bad ones. They are the ones who somehow find a profit and politicians don't really want to lose their tax revenues; so they will villianize hobbyists as "backyard breeders" so everyone feels better about themselves in all the in-fightings and bickerings about who is a "responsible breeder" and who isn't.

The fact is: most puppy mills don't deal with the public. They don't advertise in newspapers; they don't go online; most don't even have a website and they sell directly to wholesalers acting as middlemen for petstores and pet auctions. Narrowing the options will only just hurt the hobbyists who are responsibly breeding dogs-- which increases the demand for puppies from mills since Joe and Jane cannot find a well-bred dog in their neighbourhood.

If you want to hurt them, audit the suckers. Say... 30% or more of your income cannot come from breeding pets or be subjected to a lot of paperworks to stay legit. Telling people what they can or can't do will just force people to go elsewhere.

Araks

I personally don't *usually* agree with regulations exactly for the reason you stated, because it hurts the people responsibly breeding dogs. Because seriously, in the end the puppy mills are still going to make their money one way or another and find loop holes just like you said.

This is good in one way though in that it is taking away a source of demand from the puppy mills, and a couple pet stores over here have gone "humane" and only have dogs and cats from shelters or rescues available.

shibamistress

A couple of points:

I think in the US a lot of puppy mills DO advertise. They advertise online. On the Shiba side of the forum, we had a long discussion about puppy mills and many examples of places where members got their Shibas that were CLEARLY mills. I'm one of those people. I found the place I got my dog online. I didn't know, then, the signs of what a mill was or I would have avoided them (they had USDA certification, bred a wide variety of puppies, etc). My girl has serious health and behavioral problems. I am not the only person who ended up with a dog from a place like this. another person got a dog who had giardia, then found videos of her "breeder" she found it was a typical mill, even to kennels piled up one on top of another.

Most pet store puppies come from mills, so shutting down the pet store sales is a good thing.

So I'm in favor of part of this. I agree with souggy that it likely will not shut down mills....there needs to be another way to get to them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the big internet presence of some mills isn't in reaction to the fact pet store sales have dried up.

I'm pretty hesitant about the backyard sales, though, as I also think it could hurt reputable breeders. What I've noted about these kinds of laws, though, is that there is often a bias against purebred dogs at all, so people operate under the logic that there are enough dogs in the world, and that it doesn't matter if some breeders get hurt. Obviously I don't know if this is the case with this law, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were.

souggy

Oh, puppy-milled dogs are advertised. Just not usually by the people who produce them.

I stated looking looking into this issue when I was in the market for a corgi. However what I noticed was-- there's a lot of puppy flippers. As in people who will buy dogs from the mills, and resell them to the public. I couldn't figure out why there's a lot of flipping going on online; then I realized: the producers don't want to be subjected to health inspections, so they keep themselves distant.

Nekopan

My city has recently enacted a bylaw which requires any dogs, cats, or rabbits sold in pet stores to be fully vaccinated and spayed/neutered. They have attempted to extend this to the local online classifieds, but have only been successful with adult animals. They have also banned the advertising of stud services.