Best Friend

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When Dogs Die: Resources

Thank you all for your messages of sympathy and support. 

We decided to compile some resources to help you, or a friend, prepare for and cope with this difficult (and inevitable) part of sharing our lives with dogs.

Understanding Grief: The Australian centre for grief and bereavement offer excellent information on their website. We have included some key excerpts and links.

About Grief Suggestions to help you get through this difficult time: 

• Create a memorial - do or make something to honour your loved one.
• Develop your own rituals - light a candle, listen to special music, make a special place to think.
• Allowing yourself to express your thoughts and feelings privately can help. Write a letter or a poem (or a blog post!), draw, collect photos, cry.
• Exercise - do something to use pent-up energy, walk, swim, garden, chop wood.
• Draw on religious and spiritual beliefs, if this is helpful.
• Read about other peoples experience - find books and articles.
• Do things that are relaxing and soothing.
• Some holistic or self care ideas that may assist include meditation, distractions, relaxation, massage, aromatherapy and warmth.
• To help with sleeplessness: exercise, limit alcohol, eat well before sleeping, and try to have a routine.

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For at least four decades puppy mills have been one of the most shameful embarrassments of the dog world. Many AKC critics are particularly voiced that the organization hasn't done more to attack the problem, arguably one of the most cruel and pervasive examples of animal abuse in the nation's history � yet the average pet shopping consumer does not realize this.

By Humane Society estimates, puppy mills are almost the exclusive suppliers of the approximately half-million puppies sold annually through America's pet stores. There are an estimated 5000 puppy mills in the country. They are concentrated mostly in six midwestern states - Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Arkansas - referred to as "the puppy mill archipelago" by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). California is cracking down on puppy mills. Kansas, on the other hand, has made it a felony to sneak into a puppy mill and photograph or otherwise document its activities.

Pet store operators will tell you their dogs don't come from puppy mills. The ASPCA estimates that only about ten percent of all pet store dogs are non-puppy-mill animals. Numerous investigations have documented the often barbaric conditions of these operations. Puppy mill dogs are found being raised on wire, like chickens, or in cramped quarters, like veal. Dams and sires live their entire lives in cages and are bred nonstop from the time they are six months old until five or six years of age. When females have mothered themselves to exhaustion and their litter sizes drop, they are often killed. ASPCA reports that the mothers' bodies are sometimes fed to the surviving puppy mill dogs. American Humane, another animal-welfare organization, reports that one puppy mill breeder fed dogs "the heads of slaughtered animals." There are puppy millers who breed hundreds and even thousands of puppies a year.

Puppies born in these operations are often shipped during infancy - at four weeks of age - in containers so tightly packed that suffocation is not uncommon; they are frequently poorly nourished and rarely given appropriate veterinary care. It is estimated that about a half-million puppy mill pups perish each year before they reach the pet store. Forget about such niceties as socialization and breeding away from hereditary disease. A May 1990 study by the California Assembly concluded that forty-eight percent of the puppies sold in the state's pet stores were ill or carrying disease at the time they were purchased. The study also found that puppies imported from puppy mills outside California were three times more likely to have problems than puppies raised locally.