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Breeders KILL! Please feel free to copy this and post it anywhere you like. The more who read, the less who breed!

There is no excuse for breeding or for supporting breeders. If you love animals and are ready to care for a cat or a dog for the rest of the animal's life, please adopt from your local animal shelter, where there are dogs and cats galore—tails wagging and hearts filled with hope, looking out through the cage bars, just waiting to find someone to love. Shelters receive new animals every day, so if you don't find the perfect companion to match your lifestyle on your first visit, keep checking back. When you find your new best friend, you'll be glad that you chose to save a life—and made a new best friend as well.

Most people know to avoid puppy mills and "backyard" breeders. But many kind individuals fall prey to the picket-fence appeal of so-called "responsible" breeders and fail to recognize that no matter how kindly a breeder treats his or her animals, as long as dogs and cats are dying in animal shelters and pounds because of a lack of homes, no breeding can be considered "responsible."

Producing animals for sale is a greedy and callous business in a world where there is a critical and chronic shortage of good homes for dogs, cats, and other animals, and the only "responsible breeders" are ones who, upon learning about their contribution to the overpopulation crisis, spay or neuter their animals, and get out of the business altogether.

Those who breed millions of dogs and cats each year for profit are contributing to the companion animal overpopulation crisis. Every newborn puppy or kitten means one home fewer for a dog or cat desperately waiting in a shelter or roaming the streets.

Producing more animals—either to make money or to obtain a certain "look" or characteristic—is also harmful to the animals who are produced by breeding. Dogs and cats don't care whether their physical appearance conforms to a judge's standards, yet they are the ones who suffer the consequences of humans' manipulation. Inbreeding causes painful and life-threatening genetic defects in "purebred" dogs and cats, including crippling hip dysplasia, blindness, deafness, heart defects, skin problems, and epilepsy. Distorting animals for specific physical features also causes severe health problems. The short, pushed-up noses of bulldogs and pugs, for example, can make exercise and even normal breathing difficult for these animals. Dachshunds' long spinal columns often cause back problems, including disk disease.

All breeders fuel the companion animal overpopulation crisis, and every time someone purchases a puppy or a kitten instead of adopting from an animal shelter, homeless animals lose their chance of finding a home—and will be euthanized. Many breeders don't require every puppy or kitten to be spayed or neutered prior to purchase, so the animals they sell can soon have litters of their own, creating even more animals to fill homes that could have gone to shelter animals—or who will end up in animal shelters or so-called "no-kill" animal warehouses themselves. Simply put, for every puppy or kitten who is deliberately produced by any breeder, a shelter animal dies.

Breeders KILL! Please feel free to copy this and post it anywhere you like. The more who read, the less who breed!

I totally agree with you! I work at a rabbit shelter and I should know better than anyone the workings of breeders. We are overflowing in capacity of rabbits! Most of our rabbits come from busted breeders. Not to mention we are in a tiny warehouse with hardly enough room. We are no kill and we have a hard time turning people away because we know that if we don't take the bunnies from the humane society, then they will be euthanized. People buy "the perfect rabbit" from a breeder, and a year later when it has grown up and is big, they bring the bunny to us. It is an endless cycle. The best part is that at my shelter, we spay and neuter all of our bunnies before they leave the shelter! So we are helping to end the overpopulation. It only takes one to start change.

I understand that my comment was very vauge but you realize that I didn't say that I support breeders. In fact, I despise them. I did a report on puppy mills in middle school and I fully understand the horrors of it all. I did say that I love reading about the different breeds as a child. If you really read my comment then you would have realized this. I usually just bought the magazines for the dog posters. I love animals very much, and all of my animals are from shelters not breeders.

I also understand why you wrote this anonymously. You don't want to be bashed. I get it! But instead of writing this comment here, you could have wrote a journal where more people would read it. Its easier to get your point across that way.

POWER TO SHELTER ANIMALS! ;)