November 25, 2008Comments are closed.pet shops/puppy farming
Sometimes a question rolls around and around in your head and you just can’t seem to crack it. This is how I’ve felt about pet shop purchases; why on earth in today’s information age, with all the recommendations from dog behaviour experts and more dog behaviour experts and even more dog behaviour experts do people still fall prey to the ‘puppy in the window’?
But then someone just comes along and spells it out.
An absolutely brilliant post by Raised by Wolves profiles the customers keeping the wheels turning and the puppies churning.
The retail puppymill industry depends on two rather different kinds of consumers to keep the misery factory’s gears greased. Without both, it will not survive. Without understanding both, advocates for animals — shelter and rescue workers, ethical breeders, trainers, vets, and other professionals — can’t combat the retail puppymill’s marketing strategies.
She goes on to say that there are two types of pet shop buyers; the impulse control poor, ‘see – want – buy consumer’ and the self-indulgent ‘puppy saviour’. Both types of purchaser lag behind, but for very different reasons; and the article is absolutely essential reading for anyone working to combat pet shop sales.
The ‘see – want – buy consumer’ is unaware that he is paying way more than market price for the animal, is easily duped by claims of ‘rare’ and ‘great family breed’ and knows little about dog genetics, health or behaviour. He purchases based on breed generalisations or popular opinion.
One wrinkle on this kind of buyer is the customer who has been conditioned by relentless consumptionist propaganda to equate breed with brand. After all — if I buy a new Honda-brand model of automobile, it’s going to be cosmetically and functionally identical to any other new Honda-brand same-model automobile.
This is not true of dogs. There is no German shepherd brand dog. There is no poodle brand dog.
These are lazy, unconsidered decisions. And the customer relies heavily on cues from the complicit pet store to help them feel secure in their purchasing decision.
The traditional storefront impulse buyer is ignorant about the puppymill industry. He may have vaguely heard of such things and even remember them being associated with pet stores just like the one he’s standing in now. But the sign says that the puppies come from “USDA-licensed breeders.” That’s good, right? This puppy has a government stamp of approval, like a steak. And Tammi and Cindee, the super-kyoot clerks, seem to just looove the puppies, and it’s all clean glass and chrome, with this thing on the wall that squirts cinnamon scent into the air every two minutes.
So how do we keep these people from making bad decisions? We simply share the truth;
we combat the traditional pet-shop purchaser’s big mistake by filling the gaps in his knowledge, in the not-unreasonable hopes that it will lead to impulse control when he’s confronted by the puppy in the window — and possibly the wails of the children. I don’t care whether he’s moved by an appeal to his humanity, or because he takes umbrage at being robbed, or because he (rightly) fears that the shivering little pup in the back corner of the cage will become a Big Liability in terms of vet bills, a decade of carpet-cleaning, or emergency room visits for the kiddies. I just wanna keep the Mastercard under wraps and stop the production line back in Missouri (Iowa, Holmes County, Lancaster, basement in Brooklyn).
Next, ‘the saviour’…
An asinine and repeat purchaser ‘the saviour’ gets suckered by emotion and the feeling that ‘if she doesn’t rescue the poor puppy, no one will’. The more messed up the resulting dog the better, as it confirms her feeling that she is needed and the only one who cares.
Because she is going to walk into Petland (“Just to get goldfish food.”), see the most miserable, wretched, defective little product in the deli case, and ask to hold her.
And then she’s going to start the rationalization process that she will later present to her incensed husband, her eye-rolling vet, her disapproving sister, the trainer whose head is cracking repeatedly against the wall, the neighbor who volunteers fifteen hours a week at the shelter: “I had to save her from that place. I couldn’t leave her there. We bonded instantly.”
Indeed, in the past five years or so, this category of puppymill customer may have become the dominant one, and further, they have become perversely empowered; while previously a woman would answer my question about “Where did you get the puppy?” with a simpering “I know it was wrong, but …” preface to the story about the impulse buy at the mall, now it is more and more common to get a self-congratulatory “We rescued her from Petland!”
Pet shops prey on these people’s need to act as an animal saviours and worse – play on their emotions to keep buying time after time.
And the final thing that Petland marketers know about these Martyr Mommies: They are recidivist buyers. While an ignorant buyer will only return for a second pet-store puppy if he is extremely lucky (gets that really good ‘un the first time – and they do exist) and/or exceedingly dull, callous, and incurious (Paris Hilton, say), the buyer with the well-developed Savior Complex will do it again, no matter how much heartbreak she bought the first (second, third) time. It’s not the dog she’s buying — it’s her self-perception as a wonderful human who helps poor little animals (and just happens to help poor little animals that are currently trendy and exactly the color she likes best).
No more excuses
Because we bite our tongues and allow friends and family the excuse of ignorance, or the cover of being ‘too compassionate for their own good’, puppies continue to be churned through the system. These people are enablers and it has to stop.
Dogs Victoria chief executive Elizabeth White;
“We need to do more in educating people that there are social implications in the choice of dog and where they buy them,” she said. “I relate it to the Fairtrade coffee movement or the anti-sweatshop campaign.
As soon as the community says no, and it becomes morally repugnant and socially unacceptable to buy pets from stores, the market will dry up. But we don’t have to take to the streets in protest; we don’t have to campaign for new laws, and we don’t even have to have an organisation lobbying on our behalf.
All we have to do is have a quiet word to the people we know and love who purchase pets from stores;
You’re a sucker. I will never support your decision.
And you are absolutely to blame.
