News
Puppy-Store-Free-OC to Launch March 7
February 25, 2009, 8:55PM MT
By Sandi Cain
New Campaign Aims to End Puppy Mill Animal Sales at Barkworks
New Campaign Aims to End Puppy Mill Animal Sales at Barkworks
By Sandi Cain, Best Friends Network Volunteer
Eight months after the launch of the Puppy-Store-Free-LA campaign, the Best Friends effort to end the sale of puppy mill dogs at area retailers is about to expand to Orange County.
Beginning March 7, Best Friends volunteers will stage protests each Saturday from noon to 5:00 p.m. at Barkworks at The Shops at Mission Viejo. The goal of the weekly protest is to persuade Barkworks to stop selling puppy mill dogs at its seven Southern California stores. Best Friends also stages protests at its Westside Pavilion store in Los Angeles.
The Puppy-Store-Free-OC campaign is an outgrowth of the successful campaign in Los Angeles that already has resulted in the closure of five stores in less than a year. The former Pets of Bel Air, which closed last fall, this month reopened as Woof Worx under new ownership. Woof Worx sells only rescue dogs and is the first humane pet store in the area.
Protestors in Orange County will encourage shoppers to boycott Barkworks and adopt a dog from a shelter or rescue group instead. The volunteers, under the direction of longtime Best Friends volunteer Barb Holcomb, will provide shoppers with adoption resources and information about puppy mills. Holcomb said mall owners Simon Properties have been easy to work with in arranging the protest.
Holcomb already has recruited 54 volunteers to help staff the event every week. Thirty showed up at a training meeting where Los Angeles Programs Manager Elizabeth Oreck and staffer Jen Krause gave the new recruits a crash course on puppy mill statistics and tips for successful peaceful protests.
“Our goal is to have no puppy mill dogs sold in Orange County,” Holcomb said. She hopes to expand the campaign to other Orange County stores as the volunteer crew grows.
Puppy mills are legal breeding facilities where conditions are often unsanitary and the treatment of breeding dogs is no better than the treatment of the egg-laying chickens in California that was the focus of Proposition 2, which passed last November. About four million dogs are bred in such facilities each year—roughly the same number as the number of animals euthanized in U.S. shelters.
The problem, Oreck says, is that consumers instinctively don’t connect inhumane conditions with the cute puppies they see in pet store windows. “We want to bridge that disconnect,” she says. Doing so is more than just a humane issue, she says. “It’s also a consumer fraud issue.” Puppy mill animals frequently become ill, are susceptible to deformities and disease resulting from inbreeding, or even die within a short time of being adopted. Few customers get their money back. Many have their hearts broken.
About 30% of the dogs in public shelters are pure-bred—many products of puppy mills. California spends about $300 million each year to support shelters.
For more information:
• Go to A puppy-store-free-LA
• To learn more about puppy mills and how you can stop them, go to Puppy mill resources
How you can help: To join in the Puppy-store-free-LA campaign, contact Jennifer Krause at Jennifer Krause or Barb Holcomb at Barb Holcomb
Photo from Best Friends files