CHICAGO (CBS) — Some Western suburbs are continuing their four-year fight to make sure pet stores get their puppies from humane breeders and not puppy mills.
CBS 2’s Audrina Bigos reports many residents who showed up at Tuesday night’s city council meeting in Naperville are fighting for a measure Chicago and Cook County already have in place – a complete ban on the sale of puppy mill dogs at pet stores.
Advocates of the cause say the proposal Tuesday night does not do enough to protect animals.
Kerin Thomas Smith, the founder of Go Humane Naperville, spoke at the city council meeting.
“It is absolutely not addressing the problem,” she stated. “It does nothing to address what is going on in the mills and these puppies being taken from their mothers, too young, and put in 18 wheelers, and trucked across state lines to be sold in pet stores, sometimes sick and often times dying.”
Some residents showed up to the meeting with their dogs, claiming they unknowingly bought the sick pets from two Naperville stores, including Petland and Happiness Is Puppies.
The city council may pass an ordinance aimed at those stores, giving pet owners a four-year warranty when buying pets, but a decision has not yet been made.
Animal welfare advocates want the stores to stop selling dogs from large-scale commercial breeders and only sell dogs and cats from government pounds, humane societies, and rescue shelters.
One Naperville pet store, Dog Patch, already made that change.
Greg Gordon, the owner of Dog Patch, spoke to CBS 2.
“Requiring a store to add two years to a warranty, that is pretty negligible to begin with, just extends a bad warranty for another couple of years,” he said. “It doesn’t address the issue of where the animals are coming from, how healthy they are, and it all rolls back to money. There’s a lot of money at stake and that’s what drives all this.”
Naperville City Council is currently in session. A vote has not yet been made.
Will and DuPage County Animal Care and Control say they are supporting a bill currently stalled in Springfield, which would trump the local decision and ban the sale of puppy mill dogs at pet stores statewide.
Maryland and California have already passed similar bans.
