COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The Colorado Springs City Council will make its first vote on Tuesday that would mandate all pet stores in the city to source their dogs and cats from non-profit animal rescues and public animal control shelters.
If passed, the ordinance would mean banning the sale of animals from breeders and puppy mills.
“The concern is that some of the animals that are being brought in today maybe from what is known as puppy mills,” City Council President Tom Strand said.
Puppy mills are breeding facilities that operate in conditions that are considered inhumane. Sometimes animals are bred several times per year.
Strand does not believe that there would be a shortage of dogs in the city, saying that there are pure-bred specific rescues and there are numerous dogs in rescues and shelters that don’t become adopted, often leaving them to be euthanized.
“I think the supply will be there, I think the demand needs to be there. I think a lot of dogs don’t survive because people don’t adopt them,” Strand said. “I believe this ordinance that we’re going to propose is on that will protect animals.”
Two pet stores in Colorado Springs–Pet City at Chapel Hills Mall and Pet City at the Citadel Mall–oppose the measure, claiming that it will put them out of business.
Strand says it has been a three-year process to work with the owners of the stores, but he “hasn’t seen a lot of change.”
The owners are hoping for more conversation.
“Working on transparency and reasonable restrictions for the pet stores as opposed to an outright ban,” Dustin Haworth, owner of the Pet City at Chapel Hills, said is what he hopes for.
Bree Maestas owns and operates the Pet City and the Citadel. The two say that breeders are where all their animals come from, and they did a video tour with Strand at one of their breeder facilities in another state earlier this year.
Maestas worries about the profitability of taking in dogs from rescues and shelters, in part because she says her facility is not designed for dogs larger than puppies, and she doesn’t feel comfortable working with dogs with behavioral issues. It’s not clear that those would be the animals transferred to the stores.
“I don’t know that I morally agree with obtaining my animals from unknown places and unknown backgrounds. Let the humane society specialize in that, that’s what they do,” she said.
Maestas and Haworth say that a better solution would be to require breeders to adhere to certain standards, specifically the Canine Care Standards from Purdue University.
Canine Care is a voluntary certification program for breeders that include random check-ins on facilities to ensure compliance.
Haworth admits that not all of the breeders he works with adhere to those standards, but he thinks pet stores have pull over facilities over standards of care.
“We are large customers for the breeders, so we can hold them to more standards than an individual may be able to,” he said.
Part of the length of the debate between Strand and the store owners was waiting on the Colorado General Assembly to pass a bill to address breeder standards, among other things.
Instead what passed was a bill that requires pet stores to list prices and information on breeders where the animals come.
“In my opinion, this three-page act does little or nothing to protect animals,” Strand said.
The City Council will vote on the ordinance on Tuesday, Nov. 9, regular meeting with dozens of people signed up to comment.
