This is Scoops, an Amish puppy mill reject named after my journalism habit.
First, some back story: I come from Mount Vernon, Ohio, a small clustering of mostly conservative, mostly older folks that boasts its status as the geographical center, or “heart,” of the Buckeye State. Mount Vernon also draws heaps of tourists because of its proximity to Amish country, which is filled with hand-churned butter, whole-grain bread and picturesque pastoral scenes.
Some of central Ohio’s Amish folks have been supplementing their income by breeding designer-type dogs on their farms. In April 2007, reporter Holly Zachariah of the Columbus Dispatch wrote this story about Amish puppy mills. (As an aside, I am fabulously envious of Zachariah’s skillful execution of the subject matter, and I hope she won ten million awards for this.)
Now for Scoops’s back story: I have a family friend, Dawn, who lives in Butler, Ohio, in close proximity to some Amish breeders. In response to seeing the bad things that happen to puppy mill dogs — especially the overworked “breeders” and those ill-fated babies who don’t get bought by pet stores — Dawn started a grassroots operation, Maple Hill Farm Toy Breed Rescue. (Dawn, by the way, totally f’ing rocks.)
She has managed to form relationships with Amish breeders and dog “brokers,” who seem to serve as secular intermediaries between the dog sellers and buyers, in which she takes over the dogs the Amish folks no longer want.
According to Dawn, many of the dogs she takes on, like sweet Lil’ Scoops, didn’t get sold to pet stores. (Generally, pet stores want small young girl dogs, she said.) So these dogs turn into liabilities for the farmers, for whom it makes more sense to kill the unsalable pups than to keep feeding them.
So enter Scoops into my life. I guess he was being billed by the breeder as a straight-up Bichon Frise, but Dawn believes he has some poodle in him. Whatever. I just think he’s awesome no matter what.
I did have a teeny bit of ambivalence, however, about acquiring Scoops in the manner in which I did. See, Dawn does pay the farmers/brokers for the dogs she takes to her rescue. She said these reject dogs command a much smaller sum than the ones sold to pet stores, but they command a sum nonetheless.
So, I wondered if I was helping perpetuate puppy mills by adopting Scoops, and I decided that yes, by putting some money into the farmers’ pockets for their fulsome trade, I am. But I also think that Dawn, who has seen the conditions in which these dogs are kept, believes that she is truly rescuing them, and that Scoops — sweet, awesome Scoops! — could’ve just been suffocated, or shot, or drowned, or whatever is done to the dogs when Dawn doesn’t enter the picture.
Interestingly, I think Scoops may have some health problems related to what I assume was careless, profit-minded breeding. Bichons are known for having patellar luxation, or kneecaps that slip out of joint. Scoopies is always hopping on his left leg, leading me and his veterinarian to speculate he has some developmental problems along these lines.
Scoops is a very affable dog and generally downright friendly to everyone. But oddly, he runs from one of my closest friends and fellow dog-lover Rick. But with his beard, doesn’t Rick look a little Amish?
1 Comment
June 25, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Puppy Mills: It’s a sad story that is endlessly repeated, and not just by the Amish, by the way, whose ethic is strongly opposed to cruelty in any form, especially to animals, who they rely on for their very livelyhood. There are good dog breeders, and there are the rotten apples. I don’t suppose, human nature being what it is, that their way of life makes the Amish particularly immune from their own bad actors. Education is an important means of bringing this particular abuse out in the open, as a precursor to eliminating it. Good job.
R.