Well, I got a response from the Sun-Herald publisher. I got a lot of empathy but no commitment to change their policy
. He kept coming back to the difficulty of monitoring the ads since most are placed online and I kept re-iterating that it was easily doable with just a little effort and offered suggestions on how it could be done. We ended our conversation with him saying he would bring it up with his staff to see if it would be workable. I'm holding out hope and will give it some time to see if they can construct a policy.
What's really disappointing with this is that I could tell that, with both the ad manager from McClatchy and the publisher at The Sun-Herald, their sensibilities were shocked. The lady at McClatchy is in California and was clearly surprised at this and the local publisher is from out of state and stated more than once how much of an animal lover he was. Whether they develop a policy for this remains to be seen. I did put the bug in the publisher's ear that their policy was enabling unethical breeders and that dogs were dying as a result. We'll see....
I still think this (contacting newspapers about their policy) is a good tactic in stopping this abuse. We can't just wait around for a law to be passed about everything before anything is done. For now, I'm considering where to go from here if they don't change this policy. I have a few ideas but will give them the courtesy of some time (but not much) to make this change.