PUPPY FACTORIES

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (15:54): I rise to speak about puppy factories, which are also known as puppy farms. They are the hidden industry behind the pet shop window of commercial dog breeding facilities that mass produce puppies for profit. They can have between 200 and 300 female dogs and approximately 50 male dogs in them, although some puppy factories have over 1,000 dogs on site. Others may indeed be small backyard operations.

Behind your local friendly pet shop, the rolling hills on the breeder's website, or the newspaper or online ad, there can lie a puppy factory. Puppy factories exist to fuel the commercial pet industry with constant supplies of puppies. They sell to pet shops, through the internet, through print media, through classifieds and through markets, and they also export puppies overseas. Even if that puppy in the pet shop window or on a breeder's website looks happy and healthy, there is no guarantee that it has not come from a mother imprisoned on a puppy factory thousands of miles away, where dogs can be trapped in tiny wire cages, in wooden kennels, or in dirt floor pens in a small cage, 24 hours a day, in cramped, filthy and overcrowded conditions.

Those unfortunate puppy farm dogs are sometimes fed only two to three times a week, receiving only the bare minimum amount of food and water to keep them alive. They are also afforded little to no veterinary treatment.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Hon. J.S.L. Dawkins): Order! Ms Franks is competing with a number of conversations in the chamber and she has the call.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS: They are afforded little to no veterinary treatment and are frequently living, sleeping and eating in their own faeces and urine. Puppy factory breeding dogs often live a life completely devoid of human contact. They are not walked, they are not cuddled, they are not loved. The mother dogs come into their first season at approximately four to six months of age, and this is when they can be bred for their first litter, while they are just puppies themselves. Used purely as breeding machines, they will be kept in an almost continual state of pregnancy, having two to three litters a year, nursing and giving birth in unhygienic and squalid conditions.

As a mother dog's body is worn out from producing litter after litter of puppies, her fertility wanes and she is spent by the time she is only five to seven years old. She is then left to die, either abandoned or, in fact, killed. The father dogs similarly spend their whole lives locked in pens and cages and exist only to perpetuate the mothers' breeding cycles. The fathers, like the mothers, will probably never leave the puppy factory. Endlessly exploited to produce family pets, these dogs have no hope of ever joining a loving family.

The puppies produced by these unfortunate creatures are taken from their mothers between four and five weeks of age and packed into crates for transport. Frightened and confused, puppies that are shipped from the puppy factory to the puppy broker, the pet store or unsuspecting buyer can have travelled thousands of miles in the back of utes or trucks or on aeroplanes, where they suffer long periods of time in transit without adequate food, water or shelter.

Puppy factory puppies will typically spend all the early vital moments of their life in a cage. The constant confinement, lack of veterinary care and complete lack of socialisation results in unhealthy puppies, usually plagued with physiological, behavioural and psychological problems not visible from the pet shop window. As puppy factory dogs are bred for quantity, not quality, hereditary defects are also common, often leaving owners with no recourse other than expensive vet bills or euthanasia as the only options. Many puppies are abandoned within weeks or months of their adoption by their new owners, who are faced with the dilemma of adding to the companion animal overpopulation crisis. In fact, in this country we see one dog killed in a puppy shelter every single four minutes. This is not acceptable.

South Australian dog lovers can actually take action and do our bit to eliminate the scourge of puppy factories. We can choose never to buy an animal from a pet shop. When I first heard that, I thought that was quite a controversial thing, but the more I have looked into it the more I have seen that if we choose to buy an animal from a pet shop, a classified ad, over the internet or give somebody a puppy as a present from any of these sources, we are potentially contributing to the promotion of puppy factories. Puppy lovers should adopt from an animal shelter. They should not shop; they should adopt. Every dog bought or bred means that a shelter dog is dead—as I say, one every four minutes.

If members would like more information, I refer them to the RSPCA's authoritative website, which echoes the points I have made today: www.closepuppyfactories.org. I would also like to acknowledge that many organisations across the country are raising this issue, including Animal Liberation, and, of course, the RSPCA. The Lush chain of toiletry stores is to be commended for their recent promotion in store.