Members of No More Pet Store Puppies 805 gathered at Animal Kingdom’s Santa Maria location on Dec. 18 to protest the Central Coast-based pet store chain. The business has met recent pushback from animal rights activists for allegedly obtaining and selling dogs from Midwest “puppy mills”—an allegation the Santa Maria storeowner flatly denied.
According to a press release from the animal activist group, the protest was “to grieve for the millions of companion animals who died this year in our nation’s shelters because there are not enough homes for them.”
Adam Tipton, co-owner of Animal Kingdom in Santa Maria, told the Sun that 10 people showed up on Sunday for the protest. They handed out fliers depicting a photo of a dead bulldog, and after two hours of protest, police asked them to leave because they failed to obtain permission from the mall to distribute fliers.
“My customers and the general public was really offended by that,” Tipton said of the fliers. “I thought it was pretty tactless. This is the group that we’re dealing with, unfortunately.”
Tipton added that the puppies currently for sale at Animal Kingdom are all from family breeders in California, and that the chain has never sourced its animals from puppy mills because the standard of care at those mills is so low.
“We’re choosing pets based on them going into the family, so we’re going to choose a better pet than that,” he said. “We have regulations that require that they have basic needs that are met, basic standards.”
Tipton said puppy mills find most of their customers online, not at pet stores.
This isn’t the first time Animal Kingdom has run into the anti-puppy-mill movement—Tipton said he remembers dealing with protests eight years ago. More recently, the subject came up at the Santa Maria City Council meeting on Nov. 15, where representatives from local animal shelters proposed a ban on pet stores sourcing from commercial breeders.
“It’s a trend now that’s really sweeping across the nation to try to adopt more from shelters, rather than have so many animals put to sleep because there’s not enough homes for them,” Jeannine Wade, president of the Central Coast Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said at the meeting. “And to have these pet stores that are just selling puppy after puppy after puppy, and as a rescue organization we’re trying, trying, trying to help them, and unfortunately we’re not getting ahead of the game.”
Tipton also spoke at the meeting, where he acknowledged that puppy mills are a “horrible situation” but again claimed that Animal Kingdom does not work with them.
He told the Sun that the recent protest came from an animal rights group attempting and failing to localize a national problem.
“These people don’t know anything about us,” he said. “It’s one of those situations that they’re basing their information on a national agenda that doesn’t really apply to us.”
This article appears in Dec 22-29, 2016.