We have a double-winner this week. The Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council (PIJAC) gets both a Wacky Mentality Award and a Pack of Putrid Punditry Award for calling the movement to end the sale of puppy mill puppies – an “anti-pet movement.”

The reference is actually to the banning of the sale of puppies in pet stores, which is really, basically the same thing.

The statement and others were highlighted in an article posted on PetProductNews.com.

I thought I’d heard it all in watching political debates over the past decades. But this one has to take a special place in the annals of idiocy. It would be like calling laws to protect kids from child abuse – an “anti-child-birth movement.”

So let’s get this straight. Some people think that an effort to ensure that breeders take proper care of their breeding dogs and cats means people who love dogs and cats don’t want people to include dogs and cats in their families? – Huuh?

But the article does shine the light on why some in the “pet industry” don’t want to shut down the sale of puppy mill dogs. Michael Maddox, PIJAC’s vice president of governmental affairs was quoted as saying – “Clearly, if we have fewer pets, you’re going to see the industry adversely affected because we’re going to see less demand for pet products and see less sales.”

So some industry insiders equate fewer puppy mill puppies being sold with fewer sales of pet products. That’s an important admission. What these people don’t understand or don’t have the capacity to understand is the fact that millions of dogs and cats are dying EVERY YEAR in shelters across the nation.

Millions of available pets – from pure bred dogs and cats of all varieties to the great and wonderful mutt and standard stray cat – never find homes each year. We are VERY far from having a supply problem for pets in this economic equation.

What we do have is suffering problem and anyone fighting against legislation to ease this suffering is either completely uninformed, guided only by profit or is lacking in a compassion gene.

In the article noted about, Maddox was also quoted as saying – “There is no single best place to get an animal.”

Wow. Unbelievable. To call this one-dimensional and out of touch would be an understatement. The top two places “to get” a pet are shelters and rescue organizations.