I am somewhat of an animal rights activist (if you say anything about PETA I will kick your fucking face in – I hate those assholes). Perusing my favorite forum, there was a discussion about how puppy mills and back yard breeders are not giving you better pets than you can get from the humane society (even if it says AKC registered – more on that later). In reality, they are more often than not 100% worse in quality.

Here is the first hand experience from someone who worked in the Chicagoland Petland. Keep in mind that Petland has recently started opening stores in Indiana, and there is a new one right on 146th and Meridian (US 31) near my house… and right across the street from Petsmart, that actually ADOPTS OUT PETS FROM THE HUMANE SOCIETY like a responsible business would.

This is long, but please read it.

I worked at Petland in 2002 and I know people who worked at Happiness is Pets (at some stores ‘Puppies’ or ‘Chicagolands Best Puppies’ is all you’ll see on the signage). Local breeders is a lie. Petland puppies come from the Hunte Corporation(most Hunte puppies come from mills in Missouri and surrounding states), a google search or a visit to Salival’s puppy mill thread will tell you many awful things about them. Happiness is Pets gets a large number of their puppies from a place in Iowa called Kennel Technique – a place which according to USDA records had something like 90 dogs last time I looked it up. They have other sources for puppies, but I don’t know names.

I was at the Happiness is Pets store in Arlington Heights when they got a puppy delivery and this is what I saw: A shoddy old conversion van with the sliding door wide open. I could smell feces and urine before I even saw what was in the truck. Plastic dog crates were stacked from floor to ceiling along the sides and strapped together with bungee cords. Inside the store I was scanning over the puppies and I stopped to look at a pair of siberian husky puppies that were just brought in. They didn’t look even CLOSE to being 8 weeks – very small and their legs were matted with feces halfway up to the elbows. I was immediately offered to play with one of them by an employee and she brought one out to the playpen right away. This pup had no muscle tone and it flopped and slid clumsily on the floor like it was the first time she ever had more than 9 cubic feet to move around in – this was exaggerated by the fact that the puppy had never seen a nail trimmer in it’s life. The nails were curled around into sharp hooks and prevented her from putting her paws flat on the floor. She got one hooked on me and scratched me up pretty badly. She smelled awful. This specific pup came from the above mentioned Kennel Technique, I knew because they hadn’t even taken her neckband off yet. This place claims they use local breeders. Bumfuck, IA is hardly local in my book.

At Petland, puppies come in on a huge truck. A store manager approves every puppy they pull off the truck. If there’s any sign of goopy eyes, runny nose or a cough they get put back on the truck to be sold at a discount price to the next store on the route. Any that aren’t sold get taken back to Hunte and are sold as Class B. Any puppy that has a defect after it’s brought into the store gets sent back to Hunte and meets the same fate as well.

Examples of this were a beagle with a spine so twisted it couldn’t keep all 4 feet on the ground at the same time (this pup was supposedly declared 100% healthy by 3 vets according to Hunte), a Newfoundland puppy with a fractured growth plate in it’s femur that had been allowed to heal without medical attention and would be lame for life, a pug who had seizures, a yorkie with some sort of kidney problem that made it pee flourscent yellow syrup, and a border collie so fucked up by confinement in her first 4 months of life that when someone bought her she flipped out and turned aggressive when she was taken out into an open space.

That brings me to the next thing: Petland’s warranty. The warranty sounds great but there’s a catch. If you want your money back, you have to give the dog back. That’s right. After you’ve had a few days, weeks, or months to get attached to your puppy and you find out he has some horrible congenital defect that will be too expensive to fix and painful for the dog you aren’t going to see one cent from Petland until you fork over the dog so that they can ship him back to Hunte where God only knows what will happen to him. If your puppy dies from a covered disease you’d better not dispose of the body either. Petland can (and probably will) deny your claim for a refund if they can’t make you haul your puppy’s remains to the vet THEY choose for a necropsy.

In the case of the Newfoundland, the manager told the buyers that Hunte had a wonderful place for him where they rehabilitated large breed dogs – the reality is that the dog either was sold to the highest bidder or if he was lucky he got the blue juice. It was really sad when they brought him back, the kids cried. They had named him Dozer. The border collie was also sent back to Hunte with instructions from the vet to have them euthanize her because she was unpredictable and aggressive, my bet is that she was sent back to a mill to be bred. She was really sweet in the store and we taught her all kinds of tricks, poor Emma.

The next issue is in regards to communicable diseases. I only worked at Petland for 4 months. In that time I saw more puppies with parvo than I can remember. Only one lived – a soft coated wheaten terrier. The rest – a great dane, a chihuahua, a second soft coated wheaten, and a golden retriever were the ones I remember. There was a ringworm outbreak (but it mostly affected the cats) and it seemed like about 1 in 4 customers came back demanding reimbursement for kennel cough treatment. Pretty much every puppy showed signs of kennel cough and at least half had worms. Rinsing out 40 cage trays full of wormy shit is the worst job you can imagine.

I’ve volunteered at a shelter for a year and a half and in that time I’ve seen less than HALF the disease I saw at Petland – and Petland employees will tell you not to adopt at the shelter because all those dogs are sick and ill behaved and imply that they’re homeless because they’re defective. Petland’s corporate morons come to the store and present statements like this as if it’s FACT. They actually used to have a page on their website that could be summed up as saying they couldn’t possibly be responsible for pet overpopulation because pets that end up in shelters are bad pets and they’re all mutts anyways – it’s gone or buried now, I wish I had a screen shot.

I also had access to the fax machine when I worked there and I got to see all the paperwork faxed in from Hunte, including the prices that Petland pays for the dogs. Would you believe that the $750 Rat Terrier only cost the store $90? The markups are insane and I couldn’t even begin to figure out how it was calculated.

There’s more, I haven’t even gotten to the pet store employees. That’s a whole long story in and of itself. Unless someone wants to hear about it I’ll just sum it up by saying that most of them are lying, back-stabbing idiots who will tell you anything so that they can make a commission.