Pet talk

As an animal welfare inspector trained in Kansas, I inspected a lot of commercial dog kennels.  These are more commonly called “puppy mills” as they raised dogs solely for resale into pet shops.  Conditions ranged from pristine to unbelievably awful, but one thing pretty much remained constant: the quality. 

As I walked from pen to pen, I would try to guess the breed of each dog I passed.  Now I am pretty good at guessing the common breeds, so I know a poodle when I see one.  But in these places, the breeds all melted together and finding a poodle that actually met all of the criteria in the poodle breed description became pretty hard to do. 

I soon found the reason why when I came upon a dark, curly haired female dog with a litter of pups hanging off her. I can not remember the specific reason why I needed to see her record, but when I asked for it I was handed over a thick stack of papers outlining her complete medical history and litter information.  Also in that stack of papers was her AKC registration certificate.  On it I found that the dog with all the puppies was 36 years old.  Yep.  It said 36.  That is when I realized that these kennels saved registration papers and when one dog dies, another dog assumes its identity and carries on having and/or siring puppies.  Unfortunately, the AKC does not have the funds or employees to conduct enough kennel inspections to prevent this from happening fairly regularly in the Midwest puppy mills. 

So you may be paying the big bucks for a registered dog when you buy from a pet shop.  But is that dog the breed you really paid for?  Or did it look close enough to assume an identity from another purebred dog? 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.