Plants: Many plants are toxic to dogs. Levels of toxicity range from mild to severe and can cause seizures, coma or death depending upon the size of your dog (puppies are more susceptible) and how much plant material is ingested. Here are a few common holiday varieties that can spell trouble:
Christmas Trees: Trees and trimmings pose numerous hazards:
Overnight guest(s): Suitcases come packed with hazards – small items can choke, toothpaste can be deadly, and prescription and over-the-counter medications can be lethal. Avoid an accident by providing your guests with a bureau or locked storage area so they don’t leave an open suitcase on the floor.
If your dog has an accident, or you suspect she has ingested a toxin, Dr. Melinda strongly advises immediate action by calling your vet, local animal emergency hospital or the ASPCA’s national animal poison control center at 888-426-4435. If possible, take a sample of the suspected toxin to your vet.
What Is a Puppy Mill?
A puppy mill is a large-scale commercial dog breeding operation where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs. Unlike responsible breeders, who place the utmost importance on producing the healthiest puppies possible, breeding at puppy mills is performed without consideration of genetic quality. This results in generations of dogs with unchecked hereditary defects.
Puppy mill puppies are typically sold to pet shops—usually through a broker, or middleman—and marketed as young as eight weeks of age. The lineage records of puppy mill dogs are often falsified.
What Problems Are Common to Puppy Mill Dogs? Illness, disease, fearful behavior and lack of socialization with humans and other animals are common characteristics of dogs from puppy mills. Because puppy mill operators fail to apply proper husbandry practices that would remove sick dogs from their breeding pools, puppies from puppy mills are prone to congenital and hereditary conditions. These can include:
On top of that, puppies often arrive in pet stores—and their new homes—with diseases or infirmities. These can include:
How Are Animals Treated at Puppy Mills? Puppy mills usually house dogs in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, without adequate veterinary care, food, water and socialization. Puppy mill dogs do not get to experience treats, toys, exercise or basic grooming. To minimize waste cleanup, dogs are often kept in cages with wire flooring that injures their paws and legs—and it is not unusual for cages to be stacked up in columns. Breeder dogs at mills might spend their entire lives outdoors, exposed to the elements—or crammed inside filthy structures where they never get the chance to feel the sun or a gust of fresh air on their faces.
How Often Are Dogs Bred in Puppy Mills? In order to maximize profits, female dogs are bred at every opportunity with little to no recovery time between litters. When, after a few years, they are physically depleted to the point that they no longer can reproduce, breeding females are often killed. The mom and dad of the puppy in the pet store window are unlikely to make it out of the mill alive—and neither will the many puppies born with overt physical problems that make them unsalable to pet stores.
When and Why Did Puppy Mills Begin? Puppy mills began sprouting up after World War II. In response to widespread crop failures in the Midwest, the United States Department of Agriculture began promoting purebred puppies as a fool-proof “cash” crop. It is easy to see why this might have appealed to farmers facing hard times—breeding dogs does not require the intense physical labor that it takes to produce edible crops, nor are dogs as vulnerable to unfavorable weather. Chicken coops and rabbit hutches were repurposed for dogs, and the retail pet industry—pet stores large and small—boomed with the increasing supply of puppies from the new "mills." Today, Missouri is considered the largest puppy mill state in the country.
Seeking a puppy supply source on the East Coast, puppy brokers—the middlemen who deliver the dogs from mills to pet stores—convinced many of Pennsylvania’s Amish farmers in the 1970s that puppies were the cash crop of the future. Brokers conducted seminars to teach farmers how to operate their own breeding facilities. Thirty years later, Lancaster County, PA, has the highest concentration of puppy mills of any county in the nation and has earned the dubious nickname of “Puppy Mill Capital of the East.”
How Can I Help Fight Puppy Mills? There are many ways you can fight puppy mills, starting with refusing to patronize the stores and websites that sell their dogs.