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Originally Posted by yorkie_mama22  Not to stir anything up but I remember when you bought Sadie and all the drama on the board with everyone warning you and telling you about puppymills so I don't get how you didn't understand until AFTER 
Needless to say I do agree with you about the subject and glad you've learned your lesson!! by the way, when will you be sharing new pics of Miss Sadie? |
i know it might not make sense to some people, but there are several factors that went into my finally understanding the full affect of puppy mills and BYB.
1. I live in MO, the puppy mill capital of the world
this being said, people in MO have puppies for sale all over ALL The time, it's an everyday thing and no one around here really thinks anything of it, when you are used to farmers and farm dogs, you are used to boxes of puppies on the side of the road for sale. dogs run free in the country and they get pregnant and the owners sell the pups or give them away all the time, also, as farming communities, there are quite a few homes that don't think of dogs as such valuable creatures like we do, they think of them as livestock, breeding stock, and money in their pockets. it's terrible, but that's honestly the way it is. i was born and raised in MO in a very small town. i lived a sheltered life and honestly did not know about or hear about puppy mills at all until i was about 17 from the Oprah show. even when i saw that show, i didn't fully understand or realize that those were everywhere in this state and so close to home and so REAL.
2. It didn't really hit me to care about this until i got Sadie:
As a person who has never owned my own dog in my whole life, I didn't really care about what was going on the the "dog world" until i actually had Sadie in physical form. i had a golden retriever growing up but that was always "dad's hunting dog" and never truly mine. also she was a kennel dog always outside and never a house pet, therefore i never knew the same love that it is like to have one sleep in the same bed as me or live in my living space every day. i loved Ruger (golden) to the core, but it's still not the same, so in saying that, having Sadie after a few days i started to have a passion for her and started to realize how much it would hurt to know that her mother was being tortured into breeding over and over and never saw daylight or grass or had a loving and normal life. when i thought about that it upset me and stirred an anger up in me that people could do such a thing.
3: Ceasar Milan's special about puppy mills:
Shortly after getting Sadie, i saw this episode and after being older, wiser, and more open and aware of the puppy mill situation, seeing another show about them made it all sink in hard. i realized how real, how close to home, and how awful they are. i saw the sick and wounded mommy dogs and the horrible conditions they lived in, i lost it, bawled the whole way through the episode, and swore that i would not ever support this or go there again and that i would try my best to teach others that will listen about this as well.
we in MO don't get it, lots more like me have NO idea because it's just normal to have BYB everywhere around here. no one really understands the full force of puppy mills because they see them as hundreds of caged up dogs in filth...some puppy mills are, but most in MO are just BYB who have 15-20 breeding bitches that are not pets or loved but breeding stock. to the average Missourian that isn't aware of puppy mills or BYB this is quite normal because they are EVERYWHERE. they don't realize that's not reputable or right, they just go with it. the papers are filled for FOR SALE ads for dogs and people don't have the education to go look for a dog anywhere else but the classifieds and the street corners where they are sold. unfortunately on the way to a place like PetSmart in my town you pass three different BYB and their pups and most people never make it into the Pet Smart to find the beautiful rescue waiting for them, also people are into designer dogs and pure breds, most of the dogs in the rescues locally are those farm dogs i was talking about, labs, hounds, ext. they are large, not the most popular breeds and almost always mixed. so naturally stopping at the BYB stand for a "pure bred" toy dog wins out over the rescues. it's a sad world around here, but i hope that makes more sense as to why i didn't get it and where i live....