Pet Wellness and Happiness R Us

A puppy mill is an inhumane high-volume dog breeding facility that churns out puppies for profit, ignoring the needs of the pups and their mothers. Dogs from puppy mills are often sick and unsocialized. Puppy mills commonly sell through internet sales, online classified ads, flea markets and pet stores. In fact, the majority of puppies sold in pet stores and online are from puppy mills. Responsible breeders will be happy to meet you in person and show you where the puppy was born and raised—and where their mom lives too.

HSUS also has the disturbing numbers.

• 10,000 puppy mills are estimated to be currently active in the United States.
• 194,000+ dogs are kept solely for breeding in USDA-licensed facilities. Sadly, a license is not a guarantee of a breeder’s quality.
• 2 million puppies are sold each year after originating from a puppy mill.

The Puppy Mill Project, a Chicago-based organization, says that the U.S. Government, unfortunately, does little to prevent puppy mills from operating.

In order to sell to a pet store, a breeder must obtain a USDA license. The fact that the breeder has a USDA license does not provide an assurance of quality or humane breeding. Instead, it means that it is held only to very minimal standards of care and is most likely a puppy mill. To learn why a USDA license does not mean that you are purchasing a responsibly-bred pet, click here. Responsible breeders do not sell to pet stores, and are prohibited from doing so by their breed club guidelines.

Fortunately, the trend, as Steve Dale reports, is away from those operations.

More than 380 cities across the U.S. and Canada now have restrictions on the retail sales of dogs and cats. In Texas, Austin, Waco, Fort Worth, El Paso and The Colony — a suburb of Dallas — ban all retail sales of dogs and cats at pet stores.

In Illinois, there are now 20 cities and two counties as the DuPage County Board also just passed an ordinance that declares puppy and kitten mills a public nuisance along with the stores that peddle them. The new language gives the county more authority to stop the sale of mill puppies in stores in unincorporated DuPage. Cook County already has a law in place. And Freeport, IL enacted their ban in October.

Chicago’s actions against puppy mills

In 2014, Chicago City Council passed a law against puppy mills, but the wording was not strong enough, and that left three stores in the City continuing utilize those mills. In July, Chicago’s alders moved to fix the problem.

On Monday, the City Council’s Committee on Health and Human Relations moved to close a legal loophole that has allowed pet shops to get around that ordinance by forming what Hopkins has called “phony rescue organizations.”

Marc Ayers, Illinois director for the Humane Society of the United States, noted that Iowa’s attorney general recently cracked down on “sham rescues.”

“Two of those fake rescues that they have just shut down were notorious for selling to the three remaining stores violating the intent of the Chicago ordinance,” Ayers said.

However, while the revised ordinance passed the committee, it has still not been acted upon by the whole council. Another person who has been thrown herself into the puppy mill fight is Jodie Wiederkehr. You might remember her as campaign director for the Chicago Alliance for Animals (CAA), and founder and executive director of the Center for Ethical Science (CFES).

She has been on the show a number of times, mainly to report on her campaign to bring an end to the use of carriage horses in Chicago. Last April, after years of monitoring the violation of city rules regarding treatment of horses, Chicago City Council finally acted, voting 46-4 to ban horse-drawn carriages. Wiederkehr says that, even though the carriages were allowed to operate until the end of the year, they have by and large disappeared.

She says that CAA has launched petitions to shut down the remaining pet shops that allegedly obtain their animals from puppy mills: Pocket Puppies (in Alderwoman Michele Smith’s ward), Pet Luv Pet Center (in Alderman Derrick Curtis’ ward), and Park Pet Shop (in Alderman Matthew O’Shea’s ward)

Other pet wellness issues

But we’re not going to spend the entire hour talking about puppy mills. Here are some other stories that Steve Dale has written about lately.

• Latest on SARS CoV-2 and COVID-19 and Pets
• Pet Ownership in Europe and U.S. on the Rise
• Animal Abuse MUST Be a Felony
• Pet-Safe Lawns
• Penn Vet Dogs Find Spotted Lanternfly Eggs

And who knows what else? Get your pet wellness questions ready and send them to us via email (mike@mikenowak.net), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube chat.

Stop polluting Chicago’s southeast side!

At the end of August, I wrote this in a blog post.

Whether the issue is petcoke storage or dirty industries or expanding a toxic dump at the mouth of the Calumet River on the shores of Lake Michigan or general vulnerability to environmental toxins, the southeast side of Chicago is almost always near or at the top of the list of places you wouldn’t want to live if you had a choice. During this year’s Earth Day, celebrated in the midst of a pandemic, activists called upon Chicagoans to save the southeast side.

After this month’s demolition of the old Crawford Coal smokestack that blanketed Little Village with a cloud of thick dust, Lincoln Park residents began calling on Mayor Lightfoot to shut down metal scrapper General Iron. While that fight continues, General Iron is planning to move to to the East Side at the end of this year— a move Gina Ramirez, co-chair of The Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, said is a slap in the face to area residents.

“It’s moving from a wealthy white community to a low-income minority community, so it’s enriching the North Side community at the expense of the residents of the Southeast Side,” Ramirez said. “… It’s a clear symbol that this neighborhood is a sacrifice zone.”