Pet shops: we’ll pay welfare to clean up our fails

Bandit was a young pup sold by a pet shop. His new owners hadn’t checked whether their landlord allowed pets and less than three months later Bandit became homeless, surrendered to the RSPCA. This sounds exactly like a case study of failed placement which animal advocates use to justify abhorring retail pet shop sales, yes?

Nope – wrong! This is in fact a “good news story”. So says the Pet Industry Association of Australia (PIAA) in their presentation ‘Working with councils to reduce the number of dogs euthanased in pounds’, at the recent Australian Institute of Animal Management conference.

According to their own self-aggrandisement courtesy of spokesperson Maryann Dalton (ex-CEO of the AWL NSW), the PIAA is the only organisation supporting “all of industry”. And as the major defender of pet shops, puppy farmers and their ilk, they are very concerned about anti-pet shop sentiment in the community;

The community perception is not good, and this is driven in a lot of cases particularly by the activists. And I’m not saying they’re not right, and I’m not saying that they’re wrong, I’m just saying that I don’t believe that the information is all that good. And unfortunately we know that the media tend to advertise everything that is bad about the things that we do, and we don’t see too many good news stories coming out.

A view espoused by many activists and shelters is that pet stores are seen to profit from impulse purchase of pets, and yes I agree with that. But having worked for eight and a half years in shelter work, I can tell you that a shelter can be an impulse buy too. Because when you get out there everybody feels desperately sorry because they know they’ve been abandoned or abused, and its quite often, “here, take two”…

Oh yeah TOTALLY. Pet shops and rescuers – we’re like peas in a pet-profiteering pod. Those activists, THEY’RE the ones with the problem, with their bad stats and meaniepants media. Pet shops and shelters shouldn’t be fighting, we should be joining forces and SAVING these pets.

*fist pumps*

Uh. Hangon.

Did she really just propose that the process of pets being sold at the retail storefronts for industrial breeders – and pets being adopted from shelters – should be considered equal? Or, as she asserts here, should be considered equally bad. 

Surely animal groups have seen right through this ruse of painting ‘activists’ as the baddies, and retail pet sales as the perfect partners in the quest for better animal welfare? Nosommuch…

(The PIAA) need to partner with the Councils and their pounds because we want to help reduce the numbers they have in there. We’ve also partnered with the RSPCA and the AWL in each of the states. We’re also working with the Australian Veterinary Association and have done a lot of work with them. And partnering with the microchip registries.

The plan in a nutshell is the PIAA will lend the reputation of the major animal welfare groups to validate pet shop sales. In return the PIAA will pay the major animal welfare groups cash money for them doing the job they are being paid to be doing, and should be doing already – saving saveable pets;

They’re adjusting the legislation in NSW, so that in pounds and shelters, they will know that they need to contact our office. We confirm that it is one of our dogs. We then arrange with our partnership with the Animal Welfare League or the RSPCA and we pay them to pick the animal up, take it to their shelter, thoroughly vet check it, and if its deemed by the vet rehomable, we guarantee that it will not be euthanised.

So we’re trying to help the Council by moving some of these animals through that they would normally have sitting there, trying to cut the rate of euthanasia by putting them out into the shelters. The shelter gets the rehoming fee and they also get the fee that we give them. So it works really well.

Bandit may have bounced out of his new home who was unprepared for his care – but the fact a shelter didn’t kill him, because they paid them not to, is nothing but WIN!

And for the record the PIAA are absolutely right – the program does ‘work really well’…

… at taking the PIAA from animal welfare adversary, to income stream for major animal welfare groups.

… at allowing pounds to ‘triple dip’ on their saves, potentially seeing a shelter be paid under their local council pound contract, a PIAA partnership and a donor’s gift, all to save a single pet.

… at isolating some of the more vocal ‘activists’ who want to see an end to the retail pet shop model – and who also probably criticise unnecessary pound killing – painting them as unreasonable and irrelevant, when the pet shop and sheltering industry is seen to be is ‘working together’.

… and at quelling any pesky facts and figures coming out of the major animal welfare groups which potentially show concerning rates of impoundment for pet shop sourced pets (leading to speculation about increasing PIAA financial contributions).

Not dissimilar to a cigarette company paying a cancer charity for every individual patient who gets sick, the PIAA has shown a stroke of genius in engaging and co-opting their loudest critics – the animal welfare groups who are cleaning up the mess.

Sure, Bandit may have found a home. But only after he was failed by the pet shop who placed him, and then by the shelter who took money, rather than speak out for him. Animals like Bandit will continue to be bred in large scale facilities, shipped around the country, be sold in shopping centres and then sometimes land at the pound, and all of it now has the stamp of approval under a ‘national partnership’.

The news here isn’t a profit driven pet shop industry – that’s never, ever been a secret. The real conspiracy is a profit driven animal sheltering industry, happy to sell their reputation for quick dollar regardless of the cost to the pets.