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Can selling puppies be “good business” when less than a mile away homeless dogs are being killed?
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Normally lush and fluffy, 6 year-old Maltese Hope lost her hair and her health breeding puppies for sale in upscale stores Photo: prisonersofgreed.org
Like everybody involved in pet rescue I was elated to hear the news this month that the management of the Beverly Center has decided not to renew the lease of their most controversial tenant, Pet Love, a puppy store that had been located in the Beverly Center for fifteen years.
The decision signaled that the nationwide movement against puppy stores, and the puppy mills that provide their “inventory,” is gaining momentum. Peaceful, information-based protests such as Best Friends Animal Society’s “Puppy-Store-Free LA” campaign and In Defense of Animals’ “Adopt, Don’t Shop” day, along with national efforts including the Humane Society of the United States’ “Stop Puppy Mills” campaign, are not only informing potential buyers of the horrors of puppy mills, they’re demonstrating that selling puppies is no longer good business in a nation that kills millions of homeless pets in shelters every year.
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Trapped in cages for life, breeder dogs get no health care, often passing diseases on to their high price-tag pups Photo: In Defense of Animals
I don’t know what Best Friends and In Defense of Animals are planning in the new year, but one remaining bastion of puppy stores is, oddly, the Westside Pavilion. Despite the fact that the Pavilion stands less than a mile from the West L.A. City shelter, mall management decided just a year ago that bringing a puppy store into the mall would be a good idea – and not just a "Mom and Pop" outlet, but a chain store.
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Barely recognizable as dogs, breeders spend their lives sick and neglected in cramped, filthy wire cages Photo: In Defense of Animals
No doubt the news that the Beverly Center decided to terminate their relationship with a tenant of such long standing as Pet Love has rankled management at the Westside Pavilion. Hopefully it indicates that the handwriting’s on the wall for malls that promote the sale of puppies in the midst of an exploding national crisis of homeless pets. Maybe Pavilion management will think a little harder when lease-renewal time comes up. If not, it’s heartening to know that Best Friends, In Defense of Animals and the Humane Society have developed effective means of getting out the message that the price of that doggie in the window is just too high.
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