Puppy Mills and St. George

Protesters demonstrated with signs on St. George’s Bluff Street Friday against Fur de Leash, a pet store specializing in selling puppies to the public. The Independent has published several articles about the efforts of animal activists in St. George. Animal activist Corinne Nyman has created a petition that has been signed by over 26,000 people asking St. George to pass an ordinance “making it illegal to sell puppies in Saint George pet stores.”

In her petition, Nyman makes a fact-filled case for such a ban. “About 90% of the half million puppies sold in pet stores come from puppy mills,” she states in the petition. Nyman documents the horrible conditions of puppy mills as part of her petition. So far, the city fathers in St. George have turned a deaf ear. Nyman suggests that anyone who has a dog friend in their home should contact Mayor Jon Pike personally about it and ask him why St. George is still an outlet for puppies from puppy mills.

That’s a great idea, and you should do it, but I thought it might create more understanding to document a real case that my close friends experienced. Oliver and Lyndell finally lost a loved member of their family this past October, a Pekingese that Lyndell named “Lulu.” Lulu was one of the very few lucky mother dogs that survived the puppy mill experience. Nearly all mother dogs in puppy mills die there. A few are sold for the meager meat in their emaciated bodies when they can’t produce more litters. Most are simply killed.

My friends weren’t even looking for a dog when they found Lulu at a PetSmart store. PetSmart is one of the progressive pet stores that cooperates with authorities to try to rescue and rehabilitate dogs in puppy mills. Oliver and Lyndell were told that Lulu had been churning out litters of puppies for about four years in a two foot cube, never being allowed to even touch the ground in a puppy mill that was in either California or Texas. The authorities raided the puppy mill, and PetSmart did their best to rehabilitate Lulu, cleaning her teeth and giving her the vaccinations she never got in her factory cage.

Mother dogs rescued from puppy mills have special problems, and Oliver and Lyndell received special training to deal with them. When they took Lulu home, she was all bone due to the poor treatment she got from the puppy mill. She couldn’t even jump down from a sidewalk curb. She couldn’t walk all the way across the yard of their suburban home. She was afraid of all people and would back away and cower whenever anyone approached. She hid and was so afraid that she urinated on the floor. Loud noises frightened her, and for the first few months she threw up almost every day.

In spite of all this, Lyndell told me that, “She was a sweetheart, a really exceptional dog.” As Lulu recovered, Lyndell was able to take her to the office where she became a favorite of everybody there. Delivery people would make a special trip just to see Lulu. Lyndell tells a story about a client who had a severe injury. Lulu must have sensed another soul in pain because she sat next to him the entire day during testing. When the client left, he told Lyndell that there was something about Lulu that turned the testing into a genuinely positive experience. He even came back the next day just to introduce his wife to Lulu.

My family includes a dog too. We’ve named our dog, “Sirius” — for Sirius the dog star, the brightest star in the night sky. Sirius came to our family from the Hurricane rescue group, BAM (“Because Animals Matter”) and is some sort of mix that might be mostly heeler. Even though he only has three good paws (because he was caught in a coyote trap), Sirius is a wonderful dog — very intelligent and affectionate. I attribute this to the fact that he’s a mongrel like all of us are. (Only the royal houses of Europe are purebred. They also suffer from a variety of genetic diseases.)

According to the ASPCA, “Puppy mill puppies are prone to congenital and hereditary conditions including heart disease and blood and respiratory disorders. In addition, puppy mill puppies often arrive in pet stores and in their new homes with diseases or infirmities ranging from parasites to pneumonia. Because puppies are removed from their littermates and mothers at a young age, they also often suffer from fear, anxiety and other behavioral problems.”

The Independent has promised to follow up on the efforts of Corinne Nyman to make St. George stop being a place that creates the profit that keeps puppy mills in business, so I interviewed the owner of Fur de Leash when I visited the protesters on Bluff Street. The owner gave her name as “Haley” but declined to give a last name and also declined to allow pictures to be taken inside the store.

I asked Haley Gardner if her business had any relationship with a Nevada-based pet store that had been closed by authorities. She said, “This is my first business and the only business that I personally have had.”

Gardner was telling the truth. News reports at the time state that the now-closed Pet Pros store in Henderson, Nev. was operated by her father, Scott Gardner. Pet Pros ran into trouble when faced with seven counts of animal establishment violations. The charges included keeping puppies in cages that were too small, having sick animals in close quarters with healthy ones, and five counts of failure to provide adequate water. Fur de Leash did acquire a part of the inventory of Pet Pros, but she said that all of the inventory she acquired had been certified as healthy.

To reassure customers, Gardner provides a one-year guarantee for every sale. If the puppy she supplies turns out to have problems, she’ll give you another one.