Who doesn’t dream at least once in their lifetime about what it being someone’s hero? Ask yourself, what would you do if you knew someone’s life were in danger? According to the online website, deadlyroads.com, four people will die today in the United States in a hit and run accident. For every dead individual, 72 people will be injured. This may seem like a lot, and it is, but compared to the number of dogs being killed every day on puppy mills, it is a very slim number. The chances of you saving the life of a dog are all up to you; if you choose to save a dog’s life, then you choose to be its hero.
My family took the chance of being the hero of a dog named Brandi. According to the online website, PetRescue.com, six to eight million dogs each year enter animal shelters in hopes to be adopted. If it were not for my family, Brandi could have been one of the three to four million dogs who are euthanized every year due to being unwanted and not enough room in animal shelters. When my family went to adopt Brandi, the shelter could not provide us with any birth history; this means one of two things…1) she was born on a puppy mill and neglected or 2) she was a stray and neglected. Either way she was a neglected dog, looking for a home. The only information that the shelter could provide us with, was her planned date of euthanization.
Today my goal is to inform you all about the presence of puppy mills, why they are nothing but harm to our society and what we together can do to fight against them.
To begin, what exactly is a puppy mill? According to Rachel A Lamb’s article “Prisoners for Profit: The Shame of Puppy Mills, which she wrote in 1999, Lamb defines the words puppy and mill together to describe large scale commercial dog breeding facilities. Lamb defines the word mill on its own as an operation that churns out dogs in mass, while using female dogs as nothing more than breeding machines. In the 5,000 puppy mills found across the country, thousands of dogs...