Just a quick update on what the hubbub is all about today – I had asked some bloggers and those against puppy mills to take action this weekend by writing about Petland USA’s answer to my question if we would be hearing any news about Petland USA stopping the sale of pets in their corporate stores: Petland answered it has been in business for 45 years, and they hope to keep doing business [as usual] for the next 45 years. Petland USA noticed the call to action and blocked comments on all the Facebook stores targeted. So everyone who is participating – and this was last minute so there are probably not all that many – can go ahead and put the photos up on their own FB and share them. I am sure they will be seen by many. My thought was that sometimes when words fail, photos can create a better understanding of a complaint, and these depict the state of many breeder dogs.
Petland USA believes they do a service for people who want to buy pets, and they also think people should be able to buy pets wherever they want to. I do not know and cannot answer why they don’t think at all about the breeder dogs, of which there are an estimated 1 million (think about that!), who are sentenced to a short life in a cage. Breeder dogs are so overbred they can’t produce after the age of 5 or so, and then are killed having out-lived their purpose. Petland USA feels strongly, and I say that because it was mentioned twice in the email response to 4 main questions (since I did not really get an answer to four or so other questions I asked I am not counting them) that animal rights people have an agenda to get rid of family pets. I do not know *how* to address a conspiracy theory.
They say that Petland USA has never contracted with Hunte (though a lawsuit from 2008 by franchisees stated that franchisees were forced to buy from Hunte – and I realize that just because it’s filed does not make it so) and that all of the places they get pets from are USDA approved and have no direct violations (they are unaware that does not in fact preclude a place from being a commercial puppy mill?). There’s an interesting phrase “no direct violations.” Brokers could not have direct violations since they don’t keep animals, they only trade them, but all the places they get animals from can have direct violations. And of course because it is a franchise, Petland USA can claim the franchisees are the people contracting with puppy mills.
And so we have asked once again, just in case there was some kind of change happening in this corporation, to be fair – to see if Petland USA would join the 21st century and understand that cruelty to animals should not the foundation of any company. We got the answer. You can check out the call to action at Change.org
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[…] all about this. Thanks to a petition she began, nearly 50,000 signatures were collected asking PetLand to stop selling live animals. The Huffington Post named the petition as one of their favorites. Not […]