I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Best Friends organization in Utah,
www.bestfriends.com but they are an animal rescue with over 1500 animals on any given day and have done great work with educating the public about animal welfare. They were one of the few organizations allowed into New Orleans (and are still there) who were very instrumental in saving many animals following Hurricane Katrina.
This weeks forum is on specific breed rescue but I thought people should know how these puppy millers think
Comment from Sue about taking rescues from breeders:
We take dogs into rescue from a miller (someone who runs a puppy mill) that dumps dogs a couple times a year. Some of the young ones do show genetic issues from luxating patellas to malformed hip joints. When this was brought up to the miller, in hopes they would at least stop breeding the dogs that carry the bad genes, we were simply told to destroy any of the dogs we took that had a problem. At least we are altering the dogs before placement so they can't reproduce, but the miller had no interest stopping the problems from happening on their end, and if they had, their solution would have been to simply kill the dogs.
So, this is a comment in reference to the discussion of breeders checking the puppies hips, etc at an early age and they could be easily treated at that point. Some breeders (as in the mass producers - the one I'm referring to has at least 250 dogs) just don't care what genetic flaws they are pumping out but as a rescue, I am still thankful that they release the unwanted dogs instead of selling to another miller or killing them.
Cindy & The Gang
