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Next time you handle or feed that beautiful puppy or kitten, look into its eyes and ask yourself if you can guarantee that this animal won’t be one of the 60,000 that will be killed this year.

Click here to read a letter from a Shelter Manager

Many animal owners will NEVER shop or support a Pet Shop that sells kittens and puppies.

Pet shops - why not team up with a Shelter and work with them in partnership to re-home Rescued animals? Why not do that?

TodayTonight ran a program on 19th June 2008 on puppy farms. Click here to read the story.

See what Pets at Home, Melbourne and PetSmart in the USA have achieved with in-store adoption of "second chance" animals.

"This little puppy was bought in a petshop.  The owner decided she didn't want her after all and dumped her in a pound.  She is 8 weeks old. (Which Petshop in NSW sold this puppy under 8 weeks?).  A caring worker at the Pound managed to find a friend to foster her and she will be rehomed with all her vet work done when she is old enough. She's a lucky little puppy. What I can't help thinking about are the other litter mates, and the mother..."

For every animal that dies in a pound, there is someone, somewhere, responsible.

 

Petshops and shelters

Do you work in a Pet Shop?

If your place of work sells cats and dogs for a profit, and they are not bona-fide Rescued animals, then that shop is a part of the problem.

Your place of work may have the best systems and infrastructure to look after and care for the animals whilst they are in the pet shop, and you may genuinely care for their welfare in the shop, but at the end of the day you are supporting a marketing machine that creates and pushes a vast excess of dogs and cats into the market, resulting in the deaths of around 60,000 animals every year.

"I used to work for a high profile pet shop chain in NSW. I couldn't stand to see the amount of puppies that the pet shop I worked for would come from puppy mills. They would get a delivery of average 15 pups a week to split amoungst the stores. Most of these would be sick and a lot were less than 8 weeks of age.

I was also very upsetting at the amount of backyard breeders who would bring in pups (some every 6 mths!) just so they could make a quick buck. If pet stores were not allowd to sell pups then hopefully these breeders would get their dogs desexed as they would find it a lot harder to sell them privately.

With this particular pet store, they would encourage their staff to sell a puppy to anyone, no matter their circumstance, in order to make budget. They even introduced a layby system to make the pups seem more affordable and then they would play down all the ongoing costs involved in owning a pup. 1 out of 3 customers would call a day or two later to see if they could bring the puppy back as they had had time to think about their impulse buy and realised they cannot keep the puppy, but this pet stores policy did not allow us to take them back, therefore most of these puppies would end up in shelters."
A Former Pet Shop Employee

Next time you handle or feed that beautiful puppy or kitten, look into its eyes and ask yourself if you can guarantee that this animal won’t be one of the 60,000 that will be killed this year.

"The first eight weeks of a puppy's life are the equivalent of two-and-a-half  human years.  So it is not surprising that it spends this time wrestling with a dizzying array of questions.  Who am I?  What am I?  What is my relationship with the dogs and humans around me?  How does the world in which I find myself function?  And how am I going to survive within it?** 

To deprive a puppy of the company of its litter mates before the age of 8 weeks can only cause psychological damage, which will create many behavioural problems throughout the animals life.  Social depravation can never been acceptable for any species especially one that is expected to spend its whole life in human societies.  Therefore, to place such a baby in a lonely, baron, and sterile world is totally unacceptable."
Jan Fennell.  Author of the International best selling book  'The Dog Listener', and television series.
**The Seven Ages of Your Dog. Chapter 2

Do you work in a Pet Shop? A Puppy Farm? Do you know someone who has?

Would you like to contact us? We would like to hear from you. This will be treated in the strictest confidence. Please tell us what you know.

“And how could we forget the literally hundreds of cats and kittens that are brought in to our facility every year, particularly during the Spring/Summer months. These include dozens of mother cats, each with litters of anything up to seven kittens who have just been dumped by their owners – owners who were not responsible enough to have their cats (either male or female) desexed. Many of the cats that are brought in are already sick with Cat Flu, Diarrhoea or Ringworm. Sadly so many of these sweet creatures are put to sleep, simply because there are too many cats and not enough responsible owners."
Sydney Dogs and Cat’s Home

Are you the principal of a Pet Shop that sells live (non-Rescued) animals?

We understand your need to make income and profits from your business. We have no issue with that at all.

However, we believe that your efforts are one part of a marketing and distribution chain that pushes tens of thousands of animals into the market.You don’t have to sell kittens and puppies – there are other ways of generating income for your business that don't contribute to the over-supply problem. There are increasing numbers of Pet Shops that are ceasing this part of their trade.

Tthere are many animal owners who will never shop at a Pet Shop that sells kittens and puppies. You are losing this business right now, so why not get it back? Pet owners spend thousands of dollars on products and services that you are currently missing out on.

Why not team up with a Rescue Shelter and work with them in partnership to re-home Rescued animals? Why not do that?

This is already being done so very successfully in Australia and abroad. See Pets at Home, Melbourne

Another pet store chain in the US is called PetSmart. Here's what they say and do: "We created the In-store PetSmart Adoption Program because each year 10-15 million pets are abandoned in the U.S. Of those, 6-8 million enter shelters, and an estimated 3-4 million are euthanized -- simply because they do not have loving homes. Since its inception in 1987, PetSmart has encouraged and supported pet adoption as the means of finding lifelong, loving families for homeless pets. Through our Adoption Program, the number of unwanted pets that are euthanized has been significantly reduced."

Do the right thing and be a leader in your industry in NSW. Help set the standard.

Finally - do you breed kittens or puppies from your back yard? Whether registered or not, do you churn them out in huge quantities for profit? Do you sell them through the Trading Post, Internet and Pet shops, not desexed?

Please stop it now. You are the major contributor to the 60,000 cats and dogs killed in NSW every year. You are fuelling the over-supply problem. The world simply cannot provide enough decent homes for yet another dozen kittens or pups. You are profiting from every innocent life cut short. Please reconsider.