Celebrity Pet Shop Judgment: $4.8M

Former owners of the closed Pets of Bel Air shop, which once boasted that all puppies came from family breeders when they were actually getting dogs from a Missouri puppy mill, has been told to pay out $4.8 million in a default judgment of the class action suit brought against them in 2007. 

HSUS confirmed that puppy mill puppies from Missouri accounted for most of Pets of Bel Air’s pets, which meant that their printed website promise that dogs did not come from mills, but from warm and fuzzy home breeders, was false advertising and a deliberate fraud on the public.

There are 800 people involved in this suit…800 who spent a lot of money to get a healthy pedigree dog, from a particular kind of breeder.  The  price tag on dogs sold out of this store started at $2000 after the store paid out $400 to the puppy mill.  The lawyer who began the lawsuit had bought a Chihuahua and 12 days later it got Parvo and died.  Parasites and pneumonia hit another customer’s Yorkie, costing him $10,000 in vet bills just to keep the puppy alive.  You can read the rest of the story by Bill Hetherman here. 

It all sounds so familiar…I’m thinking Petland Corporation might be sweating a little over this one.