"Nightline" Goes Inside a Puppy Mill

Now for another follow-up.

"Nightline" last night aired a story about puppy mills in Lancaster County, a heavily Amish area in Pennsylvania. It's a seven-minute piece that you can watch here.

In the piece we learn that puppy millers sometimes "debark" their dogs by shoving a sharp instrument down their throats to scar their vocal cords. This way they don't have 500 dogs barking all the time.

The "Nightline" reporter interviews one Mennonite puppy miller who says he doesn't "believe in animal rights, but I highly believe in animal welfare." When asked the difference, he says, "In animal welfare is you treat the dog like you want to be treated and animal rights activist, they just have a very different mind-set."

It's true that there is a difference between animal welfare and animal rights. To put it simply, animal welfarists believe animals should be treated humanely, but they support the killing of them. Animal-rights advocates believe that animals exist for their own reasons, should be respected and are not people's to use food, entertainment or testing.

Bill Smith with Main Line Animal Rescue tells the reporter that "dogs in this community are viewed as livestock. Nothing more. Like chickens or pigs or goats. They laugh at us. They think that we're fools ... for the way we treat our animals. ... They just can't imagine that we love them as members of our family."

While I support those in animal rescue, I wish more of these volunteers would think about the similarities between dogs in puppy mills and pigs (and chickens and cows) in factory farms. Their situations are similar -- only most of the puppies will go to homes, while most of the farmed animals will be slaughtered.

As an aside, I was pleasantly surprised this week to see that Tails magazine -- which supports adoption for dogs and cats -- featured a story about going vegetarian in its latest issue.

(Billboard image courtesy of Main Line Animal Rescue.)