Hi Everybody,
Over this 2 months+ since the inception of PetFinder.my, I have had the great opportunity of meeting lots of kind hearted animal lovers and pet rescuers that have dedicated a huge amount of time and effort in rescuing homeless animals. During this period, I've also encountered numerous people that are strongly against pet selling and portray pet merchants as heartless, evil creatures. Please allow me to share my 2 cents' worth on this as well.
What I observed is that there often lies a prejudice against the pet sellers, stereotyping all of them as evil breeders that deserve to rot in hell. On the contrary, I believe that
many pet sellers are equally kind hearted animal lovers like us, and they are neither committing a sin by breeding animals nor making a profit out of them.
First of all, I have seen pet shops that handle the animals with such love and care, and I have many friends that work in small and large pet shops that are as much an animal lover as any of us. It often takes genuine interest and passion for someone to go into their desired business, and I believe that they do care about animal welfare as well.
Secondly, let's not forget how much joy and comfort they have brought to the families that bought the pets. These pets often lead good lives thereafter, and provide strong emotional support to the owners. Yes, the same can be said for pets that are adopted, but the hard cold fact of a free market economy is that supply follows demand, and when there is strong demand for pets, only commercial, for-profit businesses can move fast enough to cater to the demand. The fault is not in the business itself, but the lack of convenient, effective channels for the public seeking pets. If adoption booths are omnipresent in each neighbourhood, I'm sure the adoption rate would be tremendous, and many pet sellers would go out of business. Then again, to generate such effective reach, a lot of cost and human resources would be involved, and that would ultimately boil down to commercialization to generate profits to achieve such growth and reach. The same can be said of vets - they are noble people treating sick animals, but without proper profits, there is no way they can properly establish their services to help the pets.
Third, there are always people that prefer to buy puppies than adopt larger dogs, or those that prefer to spend money on getting a pure breed as opposed to adopting mongrels. An analogy to this is that there are always people that prefer to buy branded Dell or HP computers, paying more for their reputation and perceived quality, as opposed to buying cheaper DIY computers from neighbourhood shops, which often have superior specifications for the same price. People have their freedom of choice, and neither side should classify the other as bad or incorrect. Again, pet sellers are merely filling this vacuum, or window of opportunity.
Fourth, to put it into perspective, breeding animals to KILL would definitely be crueler than breeding animals to sell to loving families, right? In that case, we would unfortunately also have to label all the restaurants, hawkers and mamaks as cruel, evil beasts, since they are directly or indirectly involved in the breeding and killing of sentient, intelligent animals for food. Such poor animals would never, ever experience any love in their lifetime, and their sole purpose of living is to die for us. Again, this is a result of market demand; and until and unless we all turn vegetarians, we should not condemn such acts without thinking of our own role in it.
With these points said, I
do strongly oppose those breeders and sellers that inhumanely treat the animals - be it during breeding, housing or selling the pets. In fact, I equally oppose those that subject poultry / farm animals to inhumane breeding, living and slaughtering conditions. These selfish people deserve to be punished, and I give my utmost support to those people that succesfully prosecute them. We have specially created a Hall of Shame here for you to expose any such heinous deeds, with sufficient supporting evidence. Unfortunately, there are bound to be such black sheeps, and if you look around, similar if not greater injustices exist in our own human world, where inhumane living and work conditions are applied to workers, especially low-skilled labour from poorer countries. This exists even in first world nations like United States where many Mexicans are employed at minimal wages with extremely bad living conditions. Then again, that does not mean all employers are evil either (but most of us would love to think so about our bosses)
What we need to do, is not to have a blanket boycott of all pet sellers. Instead, we should keep our eyes open, establishing communications and dialogues with them. When they know that the public and animal lovers are constantly looking over their shoulders, they will definitely buck up and try to improve themselves. For example, look at the consumers that are more environment-aware now - they demand not just for greener products, but that the entire supply-chain and processing of products be as low in carbon-emission as possible. The manufacturers have no choice but to follow market pressure and reinvent themselves.
So, what we should do is to properly educate the sellers, breeders and public, and work closely with relevant authorities and NGOs to weed out the evil ones. Proper legislations on animal welfare and rights need to be enacted and enforced as well.
The path towards a better future definitely warrants a lot of work and effort from all parties. And I believe that this can only be achieved when we all work closely together towards the same goal, and not in harbouring ill-feelings or prejudice towards each other.
I would like to invite different parties - animal lovers, rescuers, pet sellers and breeders to voice their opinions on this issue. Let's hear different sides of the story, and only then can we make a more informed, unbiased judgement.