Purchasing a French Bulldog - Pet Store Puppies
| Buying from a Breeder | Buying from a Pet Store | Buying from On Line Sites | Buying from a Broker | Buying from a Puppy Mill
Those little flat faced darling you saw in your local pet store certainly
can be tempting. It all seems so simple - walk in, pay for your puppy,
and bring home an instant companion.
However, the price you pay may be a lot more than you bargained for
- and it might make you part of a chain of misery that no caring individual
could ever condone.
Where do pet stores get their puppies from?
Almost every pet store has the same answer to this question - 'caring
local breeders'. Plain and simple, this is a lie. No
caring breeder is going to be willing to let a pet store sell their carefully
produced puppies to total strangers, with no screening, qualification
or contract. The very act of allowing their puppies to be sold in this
manner would contradict the term 'caring'. Even if any of them were willing
to do so, their breed club code of ethics forbids
it, and makes doing so grounds for dismissal from the club. In Canada,
selling to a pet store is grounds for disbarring from the Canadian Kennel
Club, and all registration priviledges.
Pet stores get their puppies from one of three sources:
Back yard breeders who don't know any better,
or don't care
More here...
Commercial breeders directly - aka puppy mills
From the HSUS site:
"Puppy mills are breeding facilities that produce purebred puppies
in large numbers. The puppies are sold either directly to the public
via the Internet, newspaper ads, at the mill itself, or are sold to brokers
and pet shops across the country. Puppy mills have long concerned The
Humane Society of the United States.
The documented problems of puppy mills include overbreeding, inbreeding,
minimal veterinary care, poor quality of food and shelter, lack of socialization
with humans, overcrowded cages, and the killing of unwanted animals.
To the unwitting consumer, this situation frequently means buying a puppy
facing an array of immediate veterinary problems or harboring genetically
borne diseases that do not appear until years later. In 1994, Time magazine
estimated that as many as 25% of purebred dogs were afflicted with serious
genetic problems"
There are dozens of pages out there which detail the deplorable conditions
that puppy mill dogs suffer in. For some examples, visit http://www.prisonersofgreed.org/kennel-examples.html
To truly understand the plight of the puppymill dog's life, view
their movie (warning: graphic and upsetting imagery).
Commercial dog brokers or dealers
Commercial brokers are the first chain in the price mark ups of puppy
mill puppies. A broker is the "middle man" for puppy mills
and pet stores. They are the ones who buy a puppies, often in bulk lots,
from puppy mills, and then sell the pups to the pet store, another broker,
or (less frequently) directly to the public. Brokers may also frequent
puppy auctions to find, and may sell puppies on to other brokers.
For Frenchies, the average pet store price as of two years ago was $1600
A broker will buy Frenchie puppies for the mill itself for aproximately
say $300. This low price is possible because the mills breed in volume,
pumping out litter after litter from a bitch until her uterus literally
disintigrates, skimping on food and vet care, and moving out puppies
as soon as they are as young as five weeks old. The broker then sells
the puppy to the pet store for $500 - $800, and the remainder is the
pet store's profit margin.
 From HelpingAnimals.Com - "The
nation’s largest puppy broker is the Hunte Corporation in Missouri,
which also exports dogs overseas. The company has been linked to numerous
negligent pet stores and breeders and has sponsored American Kennel Club
(AKC) meetings. The USDA has loaned the company more than $4 million
for expansion and upgrades in the last three years—taxpayer money
used to bring more misery to dogs and puppies."
Like most brokers, Hunte buys puppies from puppy mills in several Midwestern
states and then sells them to pet stores all over the country, using
windowless transport trucks to haul the pups like the commercial product
brokers regard them as.
"The truck is loaded, it's packed with dogs and puppies and they're
driven for two days -- nonstop." a former worker said. "I'll
bet there were about 70 or 80 dogs in that truck," another former
worker said. "It had an odor like a dead carcass."
Breeders can either drop the puppies off at the Hunte building or a
Hunte truck goes out to pick them up. If the pups, after being inspected
by Hunte employees are deemed to be less than 'Grade A' - ie; possibly
suffering from some form of illness or congenital defect - the breeder
may receive a lower price for them. The breeders usually accept the lower
price, as they have no use for the puppies.
Hunte's "Grade A" puppies, the supposedly healthier ones,
are sent to pet stores. The "Grade B" puppies, the sicklier
ones, are sold in other ways. Some are sold to people who sell then re-sell
them over the Internet or through newspaper ads.
Others were formerly sold at Missouri flea markets and in Canada, at
pet stores. Puppies that are rejected by pet stores and sent back to
Hunte also fall into this "Grade B" category and are disposed
of in the same way.
Not all the puppies survive to be sold anywhere at all. In 2003, the
Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) found that the Hunte Corporation,
was in violation of the Clean Water and Solid Waste Management Law. At
a kennel owned by Hunte, dead puppies were being buried in trenches in
a sludge pond too close to the edge of the property, near a leaking septic
tank and a large pile of trash. There were also questions as to whether
or not Hunte was exceeding the legal limit of 1,000 pounds of dead
animals per acre per year, a charge which Hunte denies.
Reasons people use to justify purchasing from pet stores:
I want to 'rescue' that poor puppy!
Of course you do - and pet stores know this. They'll play on your questions
about what will happen if no one buys the 'poor thing', and then they'll
phone in a re-stocking order as soon as you and Junior walk out the door.
After all, there's a sucker born every minute, and you were just one
of them. Worse than that, your well intended 'rescue effort' just condemned
another bitch in another cage to pump out another litter, and another
puppy to get crammed in a truck and shipped across the country when it
was barely weaned.
If you really want to rescue a Frenchie, get one from rescue. Leave
the pet store puppies alone. It's hard, but if we don't cut off the demand,
they won't cut off the supply.
But the petstore offers a 'Health Guarantee'!
From PetStoreCruelty.Com:
"Suppose you go to a store and buy a brand-new top-of-the-line
refrigerator for $1,300. It comes with a year warranty. You take it home,
and it works for the first day. The second day, it conks out. You're
angry, and you immediately call up the store to complain. They apologize
profusely and send out someone to take away the defective refrigerator
and give you one that works. That is how it should work and usually does
work with appliances. When the store doesn't provide a good product,
people complain to the Better Business Bureau, they sue, they tell their
friends. Word gets out, and the store either cleans up its act or goes
out of business.
Now suppose you buy an adorable puppy for $1,300 at a petstore. That's
a lot of money for a dog, so you assume he's top of the line in terms
of health, especially since he has AKC papers and is from a USDA-licensed
breeder. You are told the puppy comes with a "14-day health guarantee"
that you don't bother to read. You get the puppy home, and he's a happy,
playful boy the first day. The second day, he starts coughing frequently,
and thick mucus comes out of his nose. You call the vet listed on your
puppy's sale papers, but it's a Saturday night, and her office is closed.
Her message says if you have an emergency, go to an emergency animal
hospital, so you do. The vet there says you have an extremely sick puppy
who will die without round-the-clock care. You don't want your new puppy
to die, so you leave him there at a cost of over $2,000, which you figure
will be covered by the 14-day health guarantee.
The next morning, you call the petstore. Surprise! They will not pay
for ANY emergency care, not even one day after purchase. It would not
pay for it even if the emergency care was provided by its own vet. In
fact, it will not pay for NON-emergency care for ANY illness, even at
its vet, other than these five illnesses: parvovirus, distemper, hepatitis,
corona virus, or canine influenza. That's what's written in the 14-day
health guarantee - and that's if even those are covered.
So if it won't help you pay the vet bills, what DOES the 14-day health
guarantee mean?
It means that if you notify the store immediately, you can bring your
deathly ill puppy back to the store, and they will either (1) give you
your money back or (2) they will take your sick puppy back and give you
ANOTHER puppy.
When you return a defective refrigerator to a store, you don't worry
what happens to it next. But a puppy is not a refrigerator. Though you've
had your puppy only a short time, you feel a strong sense of responsibility
to this suffering little baby whose life depends totally on you. You
suspect that the store is not what it appears to be, or maybe you even
bought him in the first place to "rescue" him from that little
cage where he looked so sad. You're reluctant to give your puppy back,
and you're right to be.
What will happen to that puppy if you give him back? Do you think the
pet store would spend over $2,000 on vet care for a sick puppy who might
die, when they could only sell him for $1,300 if he were perfectly healthy?
It's not profitable for pet stores to pay for expensive diagnostic tests
and treatment. They will try inexpensive drugs to get sick puppies healthy
enough to sell, and if that fails but the puppies are still alive, they
routinely send them back to the broker. The broker may then return the
sick puppies to the puppy miller, who might kill them or, if they survive,
use them as breeders. You may not know that, but you know you care a
lot more about that puppy than they do. So if you can afford it, you
deal with the emotional stress and hang on to your poor puppy. You no
longer trust the store's vet, since she gave the puppy a clean bill of
health only days earlier, so you take him to a vet you do trust. Instead
of spending thousands of dollars on vet care over the course of many
years, you've spent it in the first WEEK, with more to come. Your decision
to keep the puppy rather than return him and get your $1,300 back works
out very nicely for the pet store, which made a tidy profit off a puppy
that they paid very little for. This happens over and over at pet stores. "
The pet store said that their puppies come from loving breeders!
How can I put this politely? Pet stores lie. They are in the business of selling lies - cute puppies, available at the drop of your credit card - and they won't hesitate to lie to do so. Plainly put, NO caring, ethical breeder would ever hand over their precious puppies to a pet store to sell. Good breeders have long, long waiting lists - why do they need a pet store to sell their puppies for them? All pet stores get their puppies from the same bad sources - brokers, puppy mills, and clueless back yard breeders (and not even many of those, in French Bulldogs).
Your cute pet store puppy is the final link in a chain of misery that leads back to a dog, in a hutch, pumping out litter after litter until they are too used up to be of further worth, at which time they're either killed or re-sold at auction to another mill. Don't think for one minute that 'your' pet store is any different, or that they could care less where the puppies they sell come from. If you don't believe me, ask to see the paper work on the puppy they are selling. Chances are they won't let you, or won't have it, but if they do - ten to one your puppy came from a USDA mill in Missouri or other puppy mill state.
Still not convinced?
Read this article, written by a former pet shop employee:
"I used to work for 'x corporation' and also for 'y corporation'
(names available upon private request). The puppies are all from mills
in the south and the western states. They came in shipped 6 to a crate
that was the size for one, two at the most. Covered in feces and filth
sometimes one or two would be dead. Some were pulled from their mothers
at 4 weeks so that by the time they were shipped to the stores they would
be 6 weeks old. Puppies came to the store that had hardly any teeth and
couldn't eat the food given to them. These pups are also fed a minimal
amount of food so that the sales personnel are selling dogs and not spending
their time cleaning cages. 1/4 cup of food per day per dog only!
We were trained to sell sick puppies by showing how calm (sick) they
were. Many puppies died within days of reaching the store or were so
sick and malnourished that they died within days of being bought. The
store has no motivation to correct this because they get "CREDIT"
for all puppies that die. ALL stores that sell puppies work this way.
They buy a puppy for no more than $100 usually closer to $60 and sell
it with worthless AKC (American Kennel Club) papers for $600 or more.
The customer will not get their money back if the dog dies or becomes
ill but must take a credit for another puppy. The warrantee always states
this in very clever ways. Stores will not spend $100 in vet bills for
a $60 pup so they get minimal or no vet care. Once stores stop selling
puppies the mills will die out too. AKC also benefits by this bogus trade
in hundreds of thousands of dollars in worthless AKC registration applications.
Most puppies are not even of pet quality and harbor birth defects and
other deformities. The puppy mills exist to feed the pet store chains.
They are connected and something must be done on both ends. This is a
multi-million dollar industry rooted in death and suffering.
I thought it was the greatest job in the world until I got a good look
at the behind the scenes of the business end. The day I quit was the
day that a pug puppy died from collapsed lungs in my arms as I took it
to a vet, on my own without the stores permission. The dog came in apparently
healthy but five days later started coughing and had a nasal discharge.
The pup was pulled from out front and put out back, out of view. Out
back it was also about 60 degrees or less. The pup then developed severe
diahreah (excuse the spelling). On the managers orders the pup was to
be given no food or water. His belief was that without water and food
it couldn't have the runs. Two days later the dog was so dehydrated that
it could no longer stand and when you pulled the skin up on its neck
it stayed that way. Now the manager took an IV needle and put about a
cup of fluid under the pups skin on the neck. The pup lay there rasping
and gasping and wheezing( it had recieved no medication up until this
point) and when the manager left for the day I took the dog to the vet.
It was dead before we got there and the vet said it's lungs had collapsed.
The manager was furious that I took the dog to a vet because he did not
need a vet to see the condition of the dog. I quit after that because
so many had died and would continue to die for a buck.
The sales people (myself included) are sent to training seminars on
"How to sell a puppy." Basically, when you see someone looking
at a puppy you go get it and, without asking, put the puppy in their
arms. Then you either back off and force them to stay with the puppy
for as long as possible or you lock them in a little room with the pup.
Either way, afterwards, you make yourself scarce until they have sold
themselves on bringing the dog home. It is not an accident, the sales
people are trained to do this. We are also trained to make a list for
the potential customer on why it is good to have a puppy from the store.
We think of every little thing and write it down. Then we make a list
of all the negatives and we do not help the customer think of any at
all. Guaranteed the PLUS list is much much longer. I used to work as
a Vet assistant before I took this job. When I saw the conditions that
the pups were in and how they were handled I thought that I could help
the store to be better. What I found instead was an animal nightmare
and that they had it set up just the way they wanted. I saw papers fabricated
and medical histories falsified. The customers would ask about a puppy
that they had seen a day or two before and now was missing (because it
died or was going to.) The standard answer was, and still is, "Oh,
he has been sold and has gone to a new home." Medications are not
done by a vet but by the sales people and store workers themselves. Mostly
older teens and young people trying their first job. They cannot be expected
to know what they are doing or how to care for a sick animal properly.
Anyway they are not allowed to because they have to be out on the floor
selling the puppies. You get paid on a commission basis and the more
pups you sell the more you make...........For these reasons, and more,
I don't mind at all if anyone else sees this. I only wish I still had
the paperwork from the 'x corporation' on selling and dog care to give
to someone."
The Bottom Line
Look, how hard is this to understand? Do NOT buy puppies
from pet stores.
Do not purchase pet supplies from stores that sell live animals.
Press your local politicians to do something to stop the sale of live
animals from pet stores in your area.
Pet stores and puppy mills are horrid, but if we don't stop
the demand, they will never stop the supply.
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