Journey to Safety

cute,adorable puppies XD

Pup My Ride collaborative rescue effort saves more than 150 puppy mill dogs from certain death

When two puppy mill dogs Beatrice and Beauty arrived together at Best Friends’ temporary care center on a Midwestern farm, the pair hung out in their new kennel as if they were long-lost cousins, sleeping and resting against each other. But Beatrice, who had pyometra and a hernia—common afflictions in overbred females—was rushed to a local veterinary hospital for emergency surgery.

Best Friends’ volunteer caregivers, in the meantime, took Beauty under their wing, spending time with her in Beatrice’s absence. Beauty is missing most of her lower jaw, but because she’s able to eat and drink with no signs of discomfort, she’ll move on to foster care and then into a forever home.

Beatrice and Beauty are poster-dog examples of the throw-aways—the ones brokers and breeders can’t sell, the ones scheduled to die. “They’re the ‘scraps’ they can’t sell at auction that get killed afterward,” says rescuer Lisa, who requested that her last name not be used. “No one wants to buy them.”

More than 150 mostly overbred dogs, along with the left-over “scraps” of miscellaneous puppies and adults, are now on the first leg of their journey to new lives as companion animals, all because of Best Friends’ partnership program with rescuers to pull canines large and small, young and old, from puppy mills where they were about to be euthanized.

Dogs like Beatrice and Beauty suffer as breeding dogs, all so they can produce puppies who are eventually sold online and from pet stores. Consumers are led to believe that pet-store puppies come from nice environments, but this rarely—if ever— is the case, says Kelli Ohrtman, a specialist for Best Friends’ Puppies Aren’t Products campaign, which, through its Pup My Ride program, is rescuing puppy-mill canines on a continuing basis as part of Best Friends’ No More Homeless Pets mission.

Dogs like Beatrice, because of her looks and partially missing jaw, aren’t necessarily the type people are drawn to. But that doesn’t matter at Best Friends. “Even if the breeder didn’t feel that Beauty was perfect, we do,” Ohrtman says.

Another prime example of those rejected by breeders—recently saved from certain death through Pup My Ride— are a litter of 9-week-old cocker spaniel/poodle mix puppies.

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