Pet Store Lobby Seeks to Kill New York Puppy Mill Ban
Some pet store owners, and their lobbyists, view rescue animals as competition. They don't like competition.
The Scoop New York is a newsletter dedicated to companion animals and the New Yorkers who care for them, from Buffalo to Brooklyn. NYC ACC KILLS, published by TSNY, enumerates and memorializes adoptable cats and dogs who were nonetheless exterminated by Animal Care Centers of New York City.
Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn
Update: A judge late Friday ruled against the plaintiffs, clearing the way for the Puppy Mill Pipeline Act to take effect December 15.
It’s December 13, 2024. This is The Weekly Poop.
This week, we’re discussing “preferential treatment.”
Each of those numbers up there, every one, represents a life, and the end of that life. Do the math and you’ll see they total 22,311 cats and 16,118 dogs, for a combined sum of 38,429, all killed by NYC ACC from 2014 to 2023.
At a typical shelter — or kill pound, like ACC — about 1 percent of intakes are irremediably suffering, and, if everyone does their job, are euthanized to end their pain. In ACC’s case, that would come to about 384 cats and dogs, combined, between 2014 and 2023.
The rest — 38,045 cats and dogs — were exterminated, because they had no homes and because NYC ACC is an unsupervised death house.
Of the cats and dogs who made it out of ACC with their lives during those 10 years, data show the majority were turned over to independent rescues, which for the most part depend on private citizens to do the work ACC refuses to do — homing all the cats and dogs the public pays them to home.
A well-run no-kill shelter depends on rescues to handle about 20 percent of its intakes. ACC is neither no-kill nor well-run. Outcome data show that only once in 10 years did ACC adopt out more cats and dogs than it handed off to outside agencies:
So not only do New Yorkers foot the bill for ACC to not do its job, they support an untold number of rescues out of their own pockets. To say nothing of those who run and work or volunteer for the rescues — many of them one-person operations, everyday New Yorkers who literally dedicate their lives to cleaning up after ACC.
All the while, as those 38,045 cats and dogs were suffering and dying in pain and fear, as harried advocates desperately pledged rescue money from their own pockets only to watch as those they couldn’t save end up in trash bags, as countless other New Yorkers gave and gave and gave to their own preferred (actual no-kill) shelters and rescues, pet stores and breeders were making bank on companion animals born and bred for profit.
Now we (finally) come to the point: Rather than partner with those actual no-kill shelters and rescues, as many pet supply stores do, a small number of breeder-supplied businesses, and their lobbyists, are suing to stop New York’s puppy mill pipeline law from taking effect Sunday.
“We have concerns about whether pet sale bans are an appropriate vehicle for addressing animal welfare,” Mike Bober, chief executive of the Pet Advocacy Network, told Newsday. “And we're concerned about … setting up a situation in which there is an interested entity — in this case, shelters and rescues — that are being given preferential treatment over what is essentially a competitor.”
Bober’s group, along with six other plaintiffs (among them: Best Quality Fence d/b/a Pet City), want an injunction so they can keep selling animals, rather than have stores rent adoption space to shelters and rescues, as New York’s Puppy Mill Pipeline Act calls for and allows.
Following Big Puppy logic, then, a dog like Mr. Worldwide — found on a Bronx street, malnourished but alive, after apparently escaping dog fighters, only to be exterminated by ACC — would be a “competitor” whom Big Puppy would not abide receiving “preferential treatment,” defined as being offered for adoption by a rent-paying shelter or rescue in a pet store.
Gamecube, neutered and subsequently killed by NYC ACC while recovering: competitor. Maverick, dragged to his death at ACC while whimpering in mortal terror: competitor.
Or, if not competitors, those poor, doomed dogs were, to dog sellers, competing products. And Big Puppy does not like competing products.
If that sounds like an odd position for a group calling itself “Pet Advocacy Network,” it’s because for the 50 years that preceded 2022 this same organization was known as the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council.
Of course. Behind the humanewashing, PIJAC is a trade group. Only instead of representing car dealers or HVAC installers, they’re paid to do the bidding of people who breed and sell sentient beings as commodities. Like Toyotas and Carriers, only with emotions and hopes and dreams.
PIJAC speaks for an industry that since dirt was invented has foisted its fiscally and psychologically devastating externalities onto the rest of us, and which runs to the lawyers when the rest of us tire of the burden. But it’s Pizza Roll and his ilk who are taking advantage, dontcha know.
We’ve all seen this movie — Me big bizness! Me smash gubmint regalayshun! — at one time or another. Unfortunately the plot was lost on the reporters and editors who credulously transcribed and published PIJAC’s gripes while declaring the group’s membership “advocates.” So, mission accomplished with the alias. Yet reality is unchanged.
“Pet stores generally get their animals from CBEs [commercial breeding enterprises], commonly known as ‘puppy mills,’” Nathan Winograd, founder of the California-based No Kill Advocacy Center, told TSNY via email. “CBEs engage in systematic neglect and abuse of animals, leaving severe emotional and physical scars on the victims.”
Big Puppy will at every opportunity bray on and on about the regulations it deals with, as if they’re the only people with rules to follow. Federal inspections, in particular, are a popular talking point.
Here’s Winograd:
“Federal licensure does not mean humane. Indeed, the Office of the Inspector General found that the USDA fails in its mission to protect dogs in puppy mills. As a result, ‘the agency chose to take little or no enforcement actions against violators,’ including repeat violators. In one case, USDA inspectors found ‘dead dogs and starving dogs that resorted to cannibalism, dogs that were entirely covered in ticks, kennels overrun with feces and urine, and food infested with cockroaches. At the facility in which the starving dogs were found, the [USDA] inspector did not remove the surviving dogs, and as a result twenty-two more dogs died.’”
“One in four former breeding dogs have significant health problems, are more likely to suffer from aggression, and are psychologically and emotionally shut down, compulsively staring at nothing,” Winograd adds.
Winograd, who is also an attorney, says laws such as New York’s Puppy Mill Pipeline Act serve three purposes: encouraging people to adopt and rescue; educating the public about dog, cat, and rabbit abuse in mills; and putting a stop to that abuse.
“[Such bans] should be supported,” Winograd said, “and I expect the court to uphold the New York law.”
We’ll know soon enough.
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Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:
In other puppy mill news: A Jersey City state legislator has intro’d a similar bill for his state, after a News 12 investigative series alleged that a fake rescue was actually selling dogs sourced from “large commercial breeders, often referred to as puppy mills.”
Related: Trump’s pick to head the IRS once tried to get the agency to strip non-profit status from The Humane Society of the United States for its support of dog-breeding regulations.
Yet more evidence that selling puppies is a nasty business from any angle.
Like much of New York, Buffalo is mired in corruption and graft, which is not good for those who find themselves at the city’s forgotten kill pound.
Seuk Kim, the pilot killed in the Catskills while flying rescue dogs to Albany, was buried with the remains of the dog who died in the crash, known as Lisa.
Newsweek has an impressively thorough update on Pluto and Whiskey, the last two dogs to get their lives back thanks to Seuk Kim.
A NYC-based pilot group airlifted endangered dogs from Louisiana to Southampton, where they await adoption.
A private rescue in Suffolk County is investing millions in facility upgrades.
Someone(s) is/are shooting domesticated animals in Moriches, causing one pet cat to lose a hind leg.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be told not to leave your pets outside in severely cold weather.
And finally, Big Puppy strikes again.
Adoptables
NYC ACC will hold just one mobile adoption event this weekend, in Brooklyn.
The Staten Island Advance has the hook-up for weekend Richmond County adoption action.
Follow this link to the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation, the org that took in the dogs rescued from Louisiana, mentioned above.
Find a New York adoptable near you on Petfinder.
Food recalls
The FDA issued no new pet food recalls this week. Check here for info on earlier recalls.