When you do your puppy search it is extremely important that you understand the different types of breeders that the puppies can be purchased from.  There are preservation breeders, who have the highest standards with respect to genetics related to structure, health, and temperament.  There are backyard breeders, who breed for fun or money and without regard to the outcome of their breeding decisions.  Finally, there are puppy mill breeders, who produce puppies in what is presented as a great environment, but who’s primary objective is volume thereby compromising the dog’s living conditions.  Let’s look at each of them more closely, from worst to best, so that you can know what to look for in your journey to bringing a new puppy home.  In this article we will look at puppy mills.

No doubt you have heard about puppy mills.  We’ve read about situations where the authorities have intervened with such operations only to discover dozens of dogs in deplorable conditions who have not received the basic veterinary needs, are malnourished, and are bred many, many times without their health or welfare in mind.  Depending on the breed or breed mix it is common to discover severely matted dams and sires who have not been groomed for months, sometimes years. 

That is not how all puppy mills operate, however.  There are puppy mills who have slick operations, with well groomed dogs who have their veterinary needs met.  The deciding factor on these puppy mills is volume.  They will have dozens of litters per year.  With this model, the exposure and socialization that puppies are owed are not met.  In addition, attention is not paid to breeding with dogs who have sound structure, which is important for the long-term health and mobility of the dog.  Genetic health factors are also rarely considered. 

In fairness to puppy buyers, it can be difficult to determine whether the sellers are puppy mills.  They may have bright and shiny Facebook pages and websites showing adorable puppies photographed with great lighting and heartwarming staging.  A red flag may be that neither the dam or sire are shown on their pages, as they don’t live in the house and can be too rough to be seen.  If the dam does live in the house, it is normally only until the puppies are weaned. 

Puppy mills can also present themselves with large, state-of-the-art facilities that are run like a well-oiled machine.  There is transparency about their operations and the breeding dogs that they use.  As impressive as that may seem, at the end of the day, it is still about volume. They pump out great numbers of dogs.  This model is not uncommon for designer or fad breeds, where the selling point is novelty.  Breeders of non-breed standard sizes and colours also often fall into this category.  It can at times be hard to tell the difference between this kind of operation and a legitimate, preservation breeder’s setup, but again, if they are producing dozens of litters every year without the necessary criteria for the breeding dogs that have been selected—we will explore this criteria in another article— then they are puppy mills.

The manner in which the puppies are sold is also a tell.  For the rougher operations, they are often advertised on Kijiji and the seller will want to meet you in a public place so that you do not see the puppies’ home environment.  At worst, you will find them being sold from the trunk of a car at a high traffic parking lot.  You may not get to know the seller’s name and sales are cash only.  The puppies are also sold at hard to resist prices.  A surprising place where puppy mill puppies are sold is at a pet store.  This is not very common in Canada anymore, but it does still exist.  The puppy mill breeders provide puppies to the stores—often with claims that they are purebred—with production and profits as their main reason for breeding.

In some situations, you may recognize the fact that a puppy came from a mill, but you wish to buy it anyway.  Your thought is that you are rescuing the puppy from a bad situation.  But you’re not.  You end up with a puppy that has poor structure, unknown health problems and poor or next to no socialization.  The odds are that you will have long-term challenges with this puppy for the duration of its life.  It is also important to realize that for every puppy the puppy mill breeder sells, another one will be produced.  So, while your intentions might be to save that one puppy, more dogs have to go through horrible circumstances to produce the next puppy in the production line.  We feel that we all have an obligation to stop this practice right at the source, as hard as it may seem.  We hope that one day there will be strong laws in place to shutter all the puppy mills permanently.  In the meantime, we can only do our part to stop it by not supporting them.

In our next article we will examine the practice of backyard breeding and why it compromises the dog breeding industry and your experience as a puppy buyer. 

If you found this article helpful, be sure to like and share it, so that others can understand the challenges that happen—and the guidance that we offer—as they go about finding a great puppy to call their own.