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Don’t support puppy farms!
Pets are for life, not just for xmas!
Don’t give cute puppies as xmas gifts!
Puppy farm puppies lead to impulse buys and ‘overpopulation’
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It’s a wonderful time of year for deflection. All the while we-the-public are clutching pearls over the evils of profit-motivated, bulk breeding, we’re not looking at pound’s kill rates for the year to date. Or for the months surrounding Christmas.
Shelters and pounds are busy. Often they’ve designed it that way. If your business is providing kennels to local council, keeping demand high means less infrastructure costs to you, while allowing you to charge the maximum amount for use of your facilities. Taking in multiple council tenders, means other new facilities aren’t built, new competitors are kept out of the industry, and councils are unable to ‘shop around’ because alternatives simply don’t exist. In short, the more pets you can cram into a single facility, the more money you make.
When pounds and shelters hold the tenders for multiple cities, they calculate capacity based on the day-to-day running of the shelter. However, by running at capacity for the rest of the year, the facility is then running at overcapacity through the busy holiday months.
Fireworks and other noisy events, pets being moved away from home for family holidays, people staying out uncharacteristically late for parties, ‘kitten season’ and a lack of pet-friendly holiday accommodation all come together for a perfect storm of christmas impoundment.
While at the same time more pets are coming in than any time a year, a full week is lost during the xmas/new year break and staff holidays. Many pounds who want to close simply cull pets until their facilities are empty on 24th December. Pets who lose their lives during this time are considered unavoidable collateral damage to a maximum revenue pound.
But of course, explaining away this mismanagement takes effort. For as long as pounds have existed, they’ve positioned themselves as simply ‘cleaning up’ after puppy farmers. Those greedy puppy farmers, making cash hand over fist on gift purchases, while the poor pound struggles with capacity.
Except – ‘pound capacity’ is a completely fluid number. A pound’s management know every year there is a spike around Christmas. They could bring in extra staff, extra transportable kennels, pull in a team of volunteers to foster care.
‘Pound intakes’ is another completely fluid number. Pound management could prepare for the busy season (which they know is coming, as it comes Every. Single. Freaking. Year.) by taking lost pets straight home rather than impounding them, coaching surrendering owners to delay handing over their pets by a few weeks, and by not seizing cats and lending traps during the busy months.
‘Demand’ for adoptable pets is also a figure that can be manipulated; working with rescue groups, extending opening hours, and offering a few ‘free’ pet adoption days between now and xmas can place all pets whom need rehoming.
But largely, the major strategy at Christmas will be… killing and placing the blame firmly on puppy farmers.
Note: there are a LOT of good reasons to ban puppy farms. There are a LOT of good reasons why pet lovers should avoid supporting the retail model. But we neither need to ban, nor eliminate puppy farms to make pounds a safe place for pets.
