Seminole County
has passed a ban on retail sales of puppies, and Lake is poised to follow. Lauren Ritchie says Orange needs to do the same.
Puppies! Pink-bellied fuzzy puppies! Warm, sleepy puppies that nuzzle their noses under your chin and snore sweetly. Faith in humanity can only tick up a notch or two when snuggling a puppy.
Or not — if the puppy is from a large-scale breeding operation where dogs are kept in cages or kennels and constantly bred to provide pet stores with continuous puppies to sell to the public.
Recently, Seminole County commissioners voted to ban retail sales of dogs and cats, and Lake commissioners are expected to do the same on Tuesday. Now Orange County must get on board with a ban. This won’t work if only two neighboring counties do it.
Halting the retail sales of the two most popular household pets is an effort sweeping across the country — 23 states have some sort of legislation limiting storefront sales.
The main reason is to rid the country of greedy people making money off the backs of adorable puppies, and to shorten the leash on backyard breeders who don’t follow good practices, such as vaccinating and providing health certificates.
The new laws are doing something else, too: They’re serving to define the place that dogs and cats hold today as family members, not stay-in-the-yard creatures chained to trees. Dogs used to live mostly outside, often confined to a kennel or tied to a doghouse. Now, they’ve got their own beds (or yours), clothes and health insurance, and 52 Florida municipalities and three counties recognize the change. We don’t sell children in these parts, after all.
Nobody was selling puppies or kittens in Seminole, but Lake has at least one business that operates at a flea market on weekends. As soon as the ordinance is passed, animal control officers will be shutting down those operations.
“We don’t want these businesses coming in,” said Lake Commissioner Leslie Campione, an animal advocate who suggested the ordinance.
Limiting retail sales sounds like a strike at small businesses, and it is. Too bad. Some shouldn’t exist.
Orange County Animal Services Director Dil Luther said he gets rare complaints about petshop puppies.
“But that doesn’t mean they’re wonderful,” Luther said.
Still, Orange will have to consider a ban for the ones in Seminole and Lake to be effective.
“We believe in the value of consistency. It’s going to work better if we all do it,” he said.
Orange might get some pushback because 17 businesses sell live animals of some kind, though not all offer dogs or cats.
One is a Just Puppies store in Orlando’s Colonialtown on State Road 50, a franchise that has
been targeted in various cities as a purchaser from puppy mills. Of course, any store that sells puppies is going to deny it if a buyer asks. And what do you know? You see a nice clean operation, not a cramped, dirty breeding facility. Nobody from Just Puppies returned a call or email to talk about retail bans or the source of the store’s puppies.
Folks, some stores limit the number of litters they take from any given breeder, but it’s hard to figure why they bother. By definition, trustworthy, respected breeders do not sell puppies to stores, period. They want customers to come see the animal’s origins. They want to be sure that high-energy, whiz-bang breeds don’t end up in the hands of a little old lady with a walker who goes out to the get the mail once a day.
The only reason to buy a puppy from a store is because you want the typically overpriced but adorable creature for your kid’s birthday right
now and you don’t feel like driving around and listening to breeders yammer. Those are lousy reasons. Stop it. Man up and do the right thing for the canine world.
“We have plenty of dogs here, but some buyers want purebreds, and they want them this moment,” Luther said. “They’re misguided as to what they’re getting into, and they get into messes because they don’t really know what to expect.”
Among those are health problems and genetic problems.
“Responsible breeders are doing it for the love of the breed” with an eye toward health and confirmation, said Whitney Boylston, director of Lake’s animal shelter.
Is selling puppies really that profitable? You decide. Here are facts to help you:
Puppy-mill advocates tried slyly to get a state constitutional amendment on the ballot for November using a measure that never mentioned animals — it only said that local governments couldn’t restrict legal trade in any way.
When it became clear that mass breeders were behind the measure, the committee examining amendments ditched it. Then, the pet-sale industry tried two more times to hijack other agricultural and tax bills that had nothing to do with pet sales by inserting the same language. Eventually, animal advocates, consumers and local governments leaned on them enough to get it withdrawn.
Orange County should get on this — failure to ban retail sales is just one big fat OK to puppy mills.