Animal welfare groups say Missouri’s large-scale commercial breeders often severely neglect the tens of thousands of dogs used to create about a million puppies per year to be sold in pet stores / Photo: HSUS video (not necessarily in Missouri)
By Katerina Lorenzatos Makris
“The emotion of the puppy, man’s best friend. How do you not want to protect these little innocent puppies?” asked Missouri Farm Bureau’s Kelly Smith in a speech to commercial dog breeders and other farmed animal producers. “That was very hard. And that was something that the rest of animal agriculture had to learn and deal with. It was very, very hard to do.”
The protection to which Smith referred might have been provided by a Missouri law, Prop B, the “Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act,” proposed in 2010 by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and other animal welfare groups, who said it would improve the lives of the tens of thousands of dogs—many severely neglected and ill—who are used to create about a million puppies annually in the state’s 1,000-plus commercial breeding establishments.
But the state’s dog breeders and farmers believed it was a law against which they needed to protect themselves, said Smith, the farm bureau’s marketing and commodities director. Continue reading →
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