Prevention through education

PetsInDanger and Youth4Animals.org promote PREVENTION over Cure. That means that all the animals shelter, pounds, rescue and fosters groups worldwide cannot come close to handling the epidemic of pet overpopulation. The answer can only be to put puppy mills, illegal breeders and resellers out of business completely. Our personal experience: Over the past 25 years we've adopted 23 dogs & cats from legitimate shelters in Palm Beach County and the Greater Toronto area. However, our tipping point between being adopters and pedal-to-the-metal animal welfare advocates came on the day we rescued a tiny "deer" chi hua hua from a shelter only to pass a fraudulent pet adoption fair being conducted by P_____d, the globe's largest brick and mortar pet store. That was our "spitting in a headwind" epiphany. What did we see? Dozens of well intentioned middle school kids and their parents and a staggering number of dogs in cages in the parking lot. The kids were dutifully wearing bright red t shirts emblazoned with the P_____d logo. Everyone attending thought they were doing the "right thing". They couldn't have been more wrong. The dogs being adopted were not from local shelters but part of the direct pipeline between P_____d and local puppy mills...and all were less than the legal 8 week adoption age. What did we learn? For every pet we adopt, dozens are pumped out by backyard breeders and illegal puppy mills like candy from a Pez dispenser and over 5 MILLION companion animals are euthanized across North America every year as a result. Consider this crystal-clear parable that explains the value of PREVENTION over Cure: You’re walking next to a river and you see a kitten floating past. You jump in and save the kitten. Then another one floats by, so you save that one, too. Then another and another and another float by, and you soon realize that you can’t save them all. So you run upstream to see who’s throwing kittens into the water—and you stop that person. That person is the "Pets" ad category on Craigslist and Kijiji Steve & Krystal Hughes