Why dropkick dogs are nuts

There's another puppy mill bust in the news this week -- law enforcement and U.S. Humane Society representatives raided a place in Tennessee that was cranking out the little, yipping ankle biters that are popular as fashion accessories: Yorkies, chihuahuas, Pomeranians, and others that I usually don't have much use for. Old lady dogs, Paris Hilton wannabe dogs, the annoying little rats on a string that those of us who prefer "real" dogs kind of look at and shudder. (A real dog being, of course, any beast large enough to make Jehovah's Witnesses think twice about stepping into the yard.) The S.O. refers to them as dropkick dogs because it usually doesn't take long around one to have even the most ardent dog lover thinking someone needs to punt the wee beastie into someone else's neighborhood.

Stories like this one, though, make me want to go running to the Humane Society to put down the adoption money ASAP. Not even the world's most obnoxious breed (Pomeranians -- a designation they acquired back when I delivered newspapers in junior high) deserves this:

"Three-quarters of a mile before you got to the property, you could smell the urine, the feces and the death," said Scotlund Haisley,
emergency services director for the U.S. Humane Society.

Video on the national organization's Web site http://www.hsus.org/ showed dogs packed as many as 20 each into dog crates, or running loose throughout the building.

"There was a great deal of suffering," Haisley said. "Starvation. Dead animals. Animals that were shot. Bullets in the animals. Animals living in tiny cages on top of their own feces, and burns on their skin from urine and feces."

The Humane Society removed over 700 dogs from the property. 150 came to Atlanta; the others are going to other shelters around the country.

No wonder so many of those irritating yippers are incredibly obnoxious and impossible to housebreak -- the poor little bastards are insane from having been born and raised in the canine equivalents of concentration camps.