Puppy Mill Protest

For our act of public protest, Claire, Kristin and I decided to act out against puppy mills and promote Animal Shelters. We all love animals and especially dogs and we knew a bit about puppy mills and what they do, as well as overpopulation of dogs and shelters. We did some research online and found that 99% of dogs found in pet stores came from a puppy mill. We also found that the mills keep the dogs in horrible conditions - feeding them just enough for survival, keeping them in cages their entire lives, keeping them outside in excessive heat and freezing temperatures and overbreeding them. These acts have caused excessive overpopulation and horribly mistreated dogs. Many of the dogs rescued from these mills have been taken to shelters - kill and no kill - which can only hold and provide for a certain amout of dogs at a time and must either reject taking in more dogs for no kill shelters, or kill the dogs who are disabled, or have suffered the mistreatment of these mills and cannot be helped without expensive medical treatment. These shetlers do not want to end the unfortunate lives of these animals but sadly have no other way unless people adopt the animals. With this information we went out in Claire's neighborhood with her neighbor's adopted shelter dog Trent. We put a sign on Trent that said, "Adopt a Puppy" and walked around seeing if there were any people we could inform about these unfortunate events occuring. Because its beginning to get quite cold out now, there werent many people around but we were able to talk to a few who sadly werent looking to adopt at the moment but listened to what we had to say and were even shocked with some of the facts. I feel pretty good about our act because Puppy Mills must be stopped and every little bit helps. I was also happy to inform people about shelters and I hope that if some of the people we talked to think of getting a dog sometime in the future they will remember what we said and purchase one from a shelter.