Cold weather, low turnout muzzle puppy mill protest

Strong subzero temperatures earlier last Saturday caused only a handful of people to show up at a planned protest in a parking lot off Brunswick Boulevard behind Nature pet store in Complexe Pointe Claire, holding banners urging people adopt their pets from shelters rather than buy them at stores, and asking them to sign a petition to the provincial government demanding tougher laws on puppy mills.

“Pet stores are basically the middle man between puppy mills and the owner,” said the protest’s organizer Corinne Waheed, a volunteer with the fledgling Society for Protection of Animals.

Waheed, a former employee of Nature, said the store does not have enough measures set in place to ensure the puppies they buy are not from puppy mills.

In other words, she said, the puppies may be bought from breeders who grow the animals in unhealthy conditions, forcing them to live in small cages, breeding females to the point of exhaustion, and leaving them unprotected from disease and sickness.

Supported by her mother and other family members during the protest, Waheed managed to gather between 20 and 30 signatures in the parking lot, often gathering the sympathy of passersby moments before they stepped in or out of the pet store.

“I’m not here to get a dog, just buying dog food,” said one woman who scribbled her signature on the yellow sheet before disappearing through Nature’s doors.

Some chose to ignore the protesters, with one customer stepping out of the store commenting she would not boycott Nature.

Lowering her mini-van window, one supporter of the protesters told The Chronicle she had once requested to see documentation showing where a Chihuahua she had been interested in purchasing at Nature was originally from. “We don’t know where the papers are,” Karen Thompson said she was told. She wound up adopting a puppy from a shelter and has not looked back since.

Inside Nature, however, the store’s manager Bev, who did not want to give out her last name, said those interested in purchasing animals can always see documentation showing the animal’s origin. “We don’t show them to just anybody,” she said when The Chronicle asked to see them, but they are available upon request for those intending to buy.

“It’s purely grasping at straws what (the protesters) are claiming, because they have no knowledge whatsoever,” Bev added.

She said the store demands any potential breeder to give them a one-year guarantee on congenital diseases, and a two-week viral guarantee.

“Everybody who is here is here because they love animals,” Bev said, stating she and her co-workers would not support puppy mills under any circumstances.

Bev said she would welcome any government initiative against puppy mills. “These places should be regulated,” she added.