What is wrong with a puppy mill?
We have over 1,000 licensed “commercial breeders” in Missouri. Our best guess would be that the vast majority of those are what we would categorize as puppy mills, i.e., people who are indiscriminately breeding a large number and variety of dogs for sale in pet stores. A normal size mill will have 200 to 300 adult dogs. Every weekend in the spring and fall, two auction houses sell 500 to 1,000 dogs. And, of course, we export 12,000 puppies a month. Although there are some mills that will handle larger dogs, for the most part the mills all raise small dogs. The dogs are seldom kept in grass or gravel runs – that takes up way too much space and is too time consuming to clean. The smallest dogs are kept in rabbit hutches. Larger dogs may be kept in “kennel barns” . Kennel barns are small sheds that have two rows of cages with a center aisle. The cages have openings to outside elevated wire runs. The wire runs have to have large enough holes so that feces can fall through. Unfortunately, f
