This one is huge. We are seeing more media coverage on puppy mills, but the national media needs to step up to the plate. The Today Show’s Jeff Rossen is one of the best right now at exposing all sorts of important news – all sorts of important wrongs.

Early today, his Rossen Reports segment focused on the American Kennel Club and how puppy mill breeders are being uncovered, who are AKC registered and inspected.

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During an interview, HSUS president Wayne Pacelle called an AKC registration, “Really just a piece of paper without any practical value to dog welfare.”

Rossen interviewed an AKC representative who said she does not know how many breeders are registered with the AKC. She couldn’t answer a question about the percentage of breeders who are inspected each year. She claims the AKC has conducted 55,000 inspections since the year 2000. That’s about 350 inspections per month for 13 years – with nine inspectors total for the entire country. Using the current claims and numbers, that comes to about 38 inspections per inspector per month.

So rounding down, that’s about one inspection per day, every day for nine inspectors.
The AKC promotes its inspection system as great. But the AKC is inspecting breeders who have a vested interest in not being shut down by the very organization the registration money for its puppies goes to.

And Rossen also notes animal-welfare groups’ concerns about the AKC’s effort to stop new breeding regulations from being enacted. The AKC does not want a system of inspections and it now continues go after legislation that limits the regulations to breeders with a minimum number of breeding dogs.
But these minimum numbers placed in the bills and laws are typically included by compromise, due to the concerns of others who oppose breeding regulations. So this argument is a catch-22 from the AKC.

Sure, animal lovers would love for the regulations to cover all breeders. But for example, the effort in North Carolina is a compromise measure. We have to take what we can get and we can’t NOT protect dogs in breeding operations with 10 or more females merely due to number crunching.
We need to protect as many dogs as possible as soon as possible.

This is why I am supporting the NC bill.

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