The Danger of Puppy Mills

Speech Outline

Specific Purpose: To persuade the audience to adopt from a shelter rather than buy from a pet shop.

Thesis/Central Idea: People who want to buy a puppy should adopt from a shelter or buy one from a respectable breeder.

Organizational Pattern: Monroe's Motivated sequence

I. Introduction

A. Attention Getter: Domestic animals are a part of our day to day life. Whether you own a pet or not that odds are 100% that you know someone that owns a pet or more specifically a dog.

B. Relevance: Many people feel that the best way to go about attaining a dog is to buy one from a pet store.

C. Thesis: I believe that people who want to buy a puppy should adopt from a shelter or buy from a respectable owner.

D. Preview: Today I would like to discuss what exactly a puppy mill is, present the facts and living conditions of these puppies, and lastly encourage and inform this class how they can get involved and put an end to puppy mills.

Transition: To begin, let's discuss what exactly a puppy mill is.

II. Body

A. First, defining a puppy mill will be discussed.

1. A puppy mill is any high volume commercial breeder that sells dogs for profit without providing public access to the breeding site, and breeds female dogs every time they come into warm weather conditions, which is stressful to the animal's system.

2. Puppy mills began after World War II, when desperate farm workers looked for other ways to make profit in the face of widespread farm failures. In response to these failures, the US Department of Agriculture encouraged the raising of puppies as a crop. The puppy farmers, with very little knowledge of caring for canines, housed puppies in chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Many times these farmers could not afford veterinary care.

a. One example is the Amish country in Lancaster Pennsylvania. Lancaster is home to 100's of puppy mills where over 200,000 puppies are bred and sold each year. The puppy industry is worth 4 million dollars each year in Lancaster County. According to Anita Hamilton in her 2004 article titled Curbing the puppy trade, no pet store owner will tell you that their puppies come from puppy mills. 500,000 puppies are sold to pet stores each year and 90% of all puppies sold are from puppy mills. However these animals are commercially exploited to generate the highest amount of profit for the lowest possible cost.

Transition: Now that we are informed a little more about what a puppy mill is, I'd like to discuss the living conditions for the these so called "house pets".

B. Living conditions for these animals cannot get much worse.

1. Puppy mills usually house dogs in overcrowded and often unsanitary conditions, without adequate health care, food, water or human company. According to Brian Murray in his 2004 article titled, puppy farms under fire, somewhere around 60 dogs, big or small are tucked away in rabbit hutches stacked a story high and several dozen feet across. Some dogs can't even walk normally again after living in these conditions.

a. The breeding dogs are bred as often as possible to increase profits and probably will never see life outside of the puppy mill. The owners rarely pay attention to the health or happiness of the dogs.

b. Catherine Sheeter describes one female dog in a puppy mill in her article titled the truth behind puppy mills, as having raw sores covering her body with cracked pads underneath her paws, ribs that protrude far outside her body, lack of response to anything moving, and barely being able to support her own body. That was just one out of the million that suffer from these conditions yearly.

http://stoppuppymills.org/inside_a_puppy_mill.htmlc