Outlaw the sale of dogs in petstores in all states.

Each year hundreds of thousands of dogs are born in puppy mills for the pet trade. The parents of these pups live horror filled lives full of disease, parasite infestation, mental illness, and depression. Often these dogs must fight for food and water, traits they pass down to their puppies. Many of these dogs live their entire lives without seeing sunshine, touching solid ground (they live in wire cages), or being able to engage in normal canine behavior- absolutely no one loves or pets them and even if rescued from their horror filled existence they seldom recover enough to live normal lives. The pups produced by the dogs living as breeders in these puppy mills are not much better off. They are pulled away from their mothers too soon, packed into crates and shipped all over the country to stores where they are cleaned up and presented as ideal pets to the public, where they are sold for 10 times what their original cost was. As for being better off, nothing could be further from the case as they nearly always have mental and emotional scars that ultimately end in their winding up in a shelter somewhere, sometimes more than once or twice, often with their adding to the number of dogs destroyed each year by shelter staff. As a dog trainer I have seen how much work must be done to fix the various problems and the average pet owner is generally not up to the task. Legislation to prevent the operating of puppy mills has only caused the people running them to hide their operations more carefully, they will continue to do so as long as there is a profit to be made. By removing the largest reason for them to continue operating it will help shut them down forever. Please join me in ending this cycle of horror.