in the state of missouri that we know huge financial contributions from agricultural industry groups those are the groups that oppose proposition b. and there is no doubt in our minds that those same groups pressured lawmakers to overturn proposition and before the session even started there were bills that were pretty filed to do just that you feel bad because it was repealed but you know. as. for this i mean just the fact that almost half the business who could have been . proved with many of the worst operations you still have. who are operating you still have. still have. some folks believe they can do whatever they want there are so many issues on so many porton issues and everybody is struggling in their own way that we don't

necessarily want to pick up the. eventually i have to go back. and face this neighbor and face the other neighbors and i will meet them at church at the grocery store at the restroom at the sale barn and i'm responsible. and i think this is where the buck ends we individually have to take responsibility as producers and as consumers i think for the public very clearly you know you have a choice in the product that you at the store. backyard if you're going to try to fix it. i felt more like

a hypocrite where you can't defend the rights of all dogs if you're going to ignore the problem down the street. have 1st there was i wanted to educate people who had no idea like i did and so i knew that if somehow i was educated by one story that other people would be. the protests started black friday of 2011 and the reason we did that is because that's when people start buying christmas copies start placing orders for christmas copies and we wanted that to stop so when they 1st started we were there to close every single saturday that was a very very long and cold winter. we always protest peacefully we always hold our signs are we always have our back up i keep a folder with all the information i have handouts for people that are very factual and we don't tell anyone that's the biggest thing.

a few friends and i started going around to the males in iowa experiencing it firsthand so our local store is diabetics pet shop and we went in there and we saw the puppies and asked them and our 1st they were like from a breeder and they were very open about it and so we asked if we could contact them and so they gave us their card and we made an appointment and we went and we visited the mill and there was it was also all. in general we have the negative temperatures and the very very high temperature is that the dogs are forced to live in the 247 and so our protests are every single week and no matter what the weather today we are very successful to positive temperatures when i left my house this morning with the wind chill it was negative for t.v. this is cold as. one of our coldest it is average winds here are

a low but usually air protests are between 2 people in town really just depends on the weather and what we all have going on it is a priority to everybody and we have several people who travel from out of town to get here 2 years is a long time to think that we've been in front of here this is where we hang our young people hang out in front of 5 stars on saturday it's. real hard to be out here for 2 hours the dogs are going to be out here the top. dogs in the shelter and. there are a. lot of us were different. and i think it's going to be interesting to become more aware of what what a puppy mill means and what the dogs in the store actually do or i like to say that it's a ripple effect if i educate one person who knows how many other people they will town and so if we can all educate our little corner of the earth that someday we

will not have these problems because once the public really knows what's going on they will not support any. matter how upset i am i know the dogs have it at work so i'd never even consider giving up it's never been an option and i will use my voice because we don't. get intel there and. until recent changes the only federal regulations governing commercial dog breeding date back to the passing of the animal welfare act or a w. a in 1966 the a.w.a. defined a commercial dog breeder as one who maintains 4 or more breeding female dogs and sells the offspring into wholesale channels any breeder or retail pet store in gauged in the direct sale of dogs to the public was exempt from the a.w.a.

. let me clarify that a little bit the animal welfare act only requires that we do annual inspections on research facilities so there is no requirement for the other entities that we regulate. but every facility that's either licensed or registered with us is assigned a minimum inspection frequency we have a risk based inspection system so based on the risk of finding noncompliance risk of animal welfare concerns the facility may be assigned a frequency of once a year twice a year 3 times a year whatever that system a science to it the a.w.a. does not require a yearly vet check ups access to exercise socialization or protections against extreme heat or cold and allows both wire flooring and stackable cages. for the animal welfare act is passed and it requires humane standards of care for dogs raised in commercial breeding establishment and they require as of the

department of agriculture go out and inspect these facilities and make sure that they're complying with these regulations i always refer to the regulations that we have today with the u.s.d.a. is survival standards if you comply with the centers and here the dogs will probably. visit humane no right now and u.s.d.a. regulations a dog requires 6 inches of living space bigger than the dog itself and you're talking about a dog that's living in that space for its entire lives and that are part of agriculture really is there promote american agriculture it's not an impartial sort of entity that is neutral you overseeing the laws and for years u.s.d.a. was allied with the very interests that it was supposed to regulate including these folks within the agriculture sector who you know started raising puppies and started operating puppy mills never in the state of ohio has any breeder been

forced out of this. long. standing violations of the animal welfare act if they choose to no longer pay u.s.d.a. license it's because they chose not to renew their license not because inspectors came out to actually revoke that license i never heard of a regulator coming to pennsylvania no one was getting shut down the feeling of the industry was very we don't have to worry about it so frankly their doors are pretty open the so often if a breeder some violation of the animal welfare act they get a slap on the hands and when they get the slap on the hands. off and it is months following the violation and they're given an opportunity to correct the violation and sometimes it may be days. before that inspector returns to ensure that the violations been corrected on it's very rare that they will be given a fine that is truly impactful to their bottom line so they factor it in as a cost of doing business in the animal world for it has been horrendous in the end

for many many years and just 2000 to use their own office of inspector general issued a very doable report on how terrible their inspections were they documented inspectors walking by dogs and just leaving of there you know that right enough these people and putting them out of business suspend really really bad the inspector general found several major problems with them foresman of the a.w.a. including finding a massive loophole that allowed breeders to sell puppies over the internet without a license and delaying confiscation of suffering animals to give violators a final opportunity to take corrective action before confiscation can occur even in extreme cases where animals are dying it's called the animal welfare or you know it's not the the kennel really well for it it's the animals and yet even some of the good inspectors were there inspectors in made sure that the building was clean

and they had good shelter from the extreme. temperatures but the dogs would be the photo a lot of the focus of that was on inconsistency in some of the things our inspectors were citing and the length of time it took to get to enforcement so we put. some an intensified training in place for our inspectors some a different oversight of our inspection process and work with our branch to find different ways to expedite the enforcement process since and we've also worked on some nontraditional or non regulatory solutions if we can help somebody come into compliance without having to resort to enforcement action and get those animals in a better welfare situation quicker that's what we're going to do. since being elected in 1907 senator dick durbin has introduced legislation in every session that would dramatically improve the lives of dogs in commercial kennels and would close the internet loophole. the way people sold dogs changed it has it

changed it was no longer going to the individual breeder a longer just going to the store now it was online sales and they were exempt from the kind of regular inspection that would protect the puppies in their mothers so we had to make sure that our bill really filled the scale up and provided the protection for those online sales and the pups that were part of it even in the midst of the hyper partisanship of the u.s. senate on the issue of puppy mills senator durbin found willing partners on the republican side of the aisle my 1st co-sponsor was rick santorum one of the most conservative republicans from pennsylvania he was on the spot with me and then after he left the senate i had senator vitter from louisiana another very conservative senator so it turns out that when it comes to humane treatment of animals and dogs in particular this is very bipartisan if

a bill like pups went to the floor of the house of the senate it would be an overwhelming yea vote for the measure it would be $9095.00 yes votes in the senate you know be $400.00 or so yes votes in the house out of $430.00 but the problem is on an a wall for legislation the congress is that many of the bills get tracked to the house and senate committees on agriculture and those committees are populated by the most rural lawmakers aligned with the biggest agribusiness interests in the united states. based on i've been arguing for the last decade or so. crisis is both a structural crisis and it is also a crisis of state we'll get in to see in our capitalist edge money and this and damaging did not cause that crisis it only made it their ass. and made and revealed so the hole where out and it's going to. aggravate all of the rents and dimensions

of the crisis and the health emergency lam's good we're still going to be left with this dual crisis of structural the structural crisis of the economy and the political crisis of state legitimacy and you're more. than that it's just every small cycle don't pull with. the linux p.c. on fire and you can be c.c.d. who wouldn't believe. you to defend if you will show walk next you don't. give us an emotional safety feature and you move on to the sort of the.

throughout the years members of the senate agriculture committee have received enormous campaign contributions from agriculture giant including months sento tyson smithfield and cargill the site's these direct contributions each of these corporations spent millions of dollars each year lobbying congress. seemingly afraid of how a theoretical slippery slope protecting dogs in puppy mills could hurt their operations corporate agriculture sided with commercial breeders they get loads of campaign cash from these agribusiness groups because that's the funnel for the legislation that these agribusiness groups want who doesn't want to protect docs and yet somehow interest to find a way to twist it around and make you scared into voting against those commonsense

positive public policy is they typically oppose any animal welfare legislation because they think they're going to be next and they think that if you have a society of it is incrementally building animal welfare standards it's eventually going to lead society to examine their thought even with strong public support for common sense changes to the animal welfare act none of these bills were allowed out of committee recognizing the original intentions of the a.w.a. and the advent of commercial breeders selling exclusively over the internet the u.s.d.a. moved on their own to update the regulations. so the administration seeing the enormous number of senators and u.s. representatives backing of legislation and getting hundreds of thousands of comments from h.s. u.s. members and other animal welfare advocates they finally passed a rule to bring these internet sellers under the regulatory authority of us to

before the change in regulations nearly $7500.00 facilities across the united states were subject to inspection besides commercial breeding facilities this includes research facilities zoos circuses marine parks transport vehicles television and film productions involving animals state fairs camel right petting zoos elephant right and traveling and or roadside. in 201-3115 u.s.d.a. inspectors conducted between 101-1000 inspections on these various facilities approximately 3000 of those inspections were conducted on commercial dog breeding facilities since this change in policy will now also require commercial breeders selling on the internet to obtain a license the u.s.d.a. estimates that there will be up to $4600.00 additional new facilities under their

inspection umbrella based on their own projections a total of between 101-2000 facilities will now fall under the inspection provisions of the animal welfare act this change will increase the workload of their 115 inspectors by newly a 3rd. the u.s.d.a. has no plans to add additional inspectors i think since the real big came into effect the number one way that we've gotten contacts are people's names as people suffer porting we do we have looked at breeder registries to get i did get numbers we watch the internet a look at. marketing promotional things from folks that sell over the internet so this is a good move for dogs that it's now part of the animal welfare act but again our question's going to be how are you going to enforce that because you're having a very difficult time in forcing a law that was already in place and now we've just added

a new dimension to it and we've got 115 people. stationed across the country to do our inspections. their workload is prioritized by risk based system so we get them to those places where they're most needed and at this point in time we do feel like we have resources to be successful in doing this you know i worry about that we're the time we're coming back and spending appropriations in every direction and they say they have enough to get started but i want to keep an eye on it even documented us yea inspectors who had their old puppy mill themselves documented supervisors of inspectors who were out working as roofers during the day they're supposed to be out check you know their inspectors and enforcement was absolutely atrocious and has bad since the inception of the act and it was just recently in the last couple years that u.s.d.a. has really turned around and started to enforce the laws but on the books since 1007 we're seeing a closing of this loophole that allows internet sellers and we just have to

continue now with our effort to educate the public that the best place to get holes is a shelter or rescue group or a responsible breeder who is really treating the other dog like a pet and not a breed. machine. usually have a number so he actually has a tattoo on his ear as he's optioned and that's my bird it's not that my business name once we got him he was shaking a lot because he didn't know what to do he was trapped in this tiny little wired cage. we don't need the crate with him he will just stir freaking out and she won't let us bring him anywhere near.

abi no. let me ask me i am going on well now camarines i'll be known as i guess that's me and i said yeah why no one out there let me know. and i said well so are these really really cute nice these are all you know your body your skull and these 2 in here came from a hoarding situation in philadelphia we took in 39 little blue while our doctor makes this. guy. our our. dog was probably about 9 months old even months old and the dog was so full of joy and just wanted to get out run around and the dog was down in salvos playing in and it was in a rabbit hutch standing on wire but it desperately wanted to get out and. can we take this dog no i just got the dog we're breeding the dog just starting to breed or so this was years ago and then every time we went back i would see this dog and the dog was getting older and older and he did wonder anymore because she was in

a good breeder and i was looking at her and her eyes were dead and within i would say about a month beast she started to come around and i could see the dog that i remembered from before and it's a shame that had to go through all that you know her entire life just consisted of this misery. and we need people to start realizing that these poppy mills exist these puppies and pet stores come from puppy mill us whether you believe it or not that's where your dog came from a puppy. thing that he's really crossed because they're not rescuing are saving a puppy by by buying their dog what they're doing is they're sensing the mother that dog to a lifetime of misery you know you know the general public doesn't stop buying

poppies i stop going to change it's just it's not going to stop i'll be down on us till the day i die and i owe a lot and i hope i hope i don't have to spend my days to save dogs we americans are treating dogs like members of the family we all love them in their beds to sleep at night we spend money on them we give them life saving better a care a society that values dogs is not a design it's going to tolerate this abuse of dogs on puppy mills. until the public is willing to forgo the purchase of a puppy on the internet or in pet stores no regulation will end the suffering of thousands of breeding dogs trapped in commercial mills across the united states and humane societies rescues impounds millions of dogs are awaiting the chance to join a family if the general public decides to adopt and not shop the factory farming of puppies would and. the power really does lie in the people

what we have as a movement is a 1000000 households who care about animals and who are willing to pick up the phone and being able to tap that power that is what should make any puppy miller terrified the other side has a much more difficult task they've got to convince people that keeping dogs in confinement for their entire lot. denying the vector exposing them to obtrude of even cold is an acceptable way to treat go these are elected officials and they work for us and we're going to make sure they work for us we know we're up against a lot of corruption and consumer fraud and animal cruelty but i think it's every time you educate that one person that could be the next person who makes a difference at the state house or at the local level or even at the federal level such a case may gone. home i do think it's really important people they see something

going on especially i mean i mean just as they should bring it to people's attention you know people to know what's going on out there and. they just feel otherwise change is not possible. 20 years from now we'd all like to look back and we know what's going to happen we're going to what back and we're going to say thank god we don't have anymore i can't believe the way we allow people to treat these dogs.

god. god . god.

my god. i have.

my. my. little own little or are. all the earth bertman.

the gone. beyond. belief. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see that. humanity is on the edge of the precipice thanks to continuing destruction of the

natural world. we just seem laid out a lot of bills that's a call to losing much of a later period of. time. let them everything you can hold up. for but. i think that all of the war. or the. dealing in the muslim world as a little boy can sit around and stuff it and ship them see that disables the. human activity has brought us to the brink of the world's 6th major extinction event and the people in this film just come take it anymore.

well and very welcome to worlds apart as you can probably gas some joining us now from our usual studio guys from the comfort of my old almost going to. alter the last couple of weeks isolation has become an overbearing and while most of us can't wait to go bad.