Who doesn 't love adding an adorable puppy to the family? It’s always so exciting when getting a new dog. In Hawaii, you can buy your new furry friend a couple different ways. People can go to pet stores that sell dogs, the animals there are usually pure bred and come from puppy mills. Or you can go to the Humane Society, where there is a large selection of different dogs from different backgrounds that are looking for a safe home . Both have so many cute dogs, but there is so much people don 't know about the truth behind buying from a pet store rather than adopting from a shelter. In my opinion, everybody should adopt from the shelter because you are saving a life, you aren’t financially contributing …show more content…
To start off, each year, 2.7 million animals are euthanized in shelters, that 's 36% of the animals that come into the shelters. Unlike pet stores, who carry a very small amount of animals and do not need to eliminate their population. This happens in shelters because of three big reasons, illness, aggression, and overpopulation. Illness is sometimes inevitable in shelters, no matter how clean the place is it won 't help avoid outbreaks of diseases. Most shelters will say to not put your hands in the cages, this is to prevent upper respiratory infection and kennel cough, because not every dog there will have the greatest immune system. Other diseases like feline panleukopenia, canine parvovirus, Lyme disease, and heartworm are all factors and extremely expensive to treat. Pet store animals don’t carry these diseases which is an upside, but that is because they only sell new puppies that weren 't saved from the streets. Shelters do their best but if the chance of recovery is low most of the time the animals are euthanized. The next reason is aggression, pets from all over with differing backgrounds come in to shelters every day, and some can be highly …show more content…
Selling animals in pet stores is a business, however at a shelter the cost you pay to adopt is only in place to prove that you’re a dedicated owner and to help keep the shelter running. A puppy mill is a unkempt and insidious place that breeds more than three female dogs and sells to research, animal brokers, and pet shops. Although a USDA breeding license is required to legally breed your own dogs, and the USDA is supposed to inspect kennels to be sure that the cleanliness of the kennels and the hospitality at these mills are up to minimum standards, yet there are so many mills that are the exact opposite. Many puppy mills have animals kept in incredibly scary low conditions, no medical care, and many of the dogs are sick or have behavioral troubles. From being kept in cages for years, with no human contact, constantly being bred, many are killed, abandoned, or sold at an auction. It is so cruel and sad how these people just abuse these animals. Most of the time when they are abandoned from puppy mills, it is the animal shelter that warily picks up these animals, and does everything in their power to save them or find them a new home. So, once the mills breed the animals, they ship them off to pet stores, where the puppies are sold at high prices, and the mills make money off of them. If people stop buying from pet stores, then the puppy mill would begin