Maybe the answer here is that I should mind my business, but I have what feels like a real moral dilemma: One of my relatives is hoarding animals and illegally breeding dogs. Without even touching whether breeding in itself is wrong, this specific person is not a good caretaker of animals. There are now seven adult dogs, 14 puppies, and several cats living in her small backyard and she can’t seem to go more than three or four months without getting a new animal. She also had rabbits and chickens at some point, but the dogs killed them.
She has confirmed that none of the animals has ever been to the vet, and she feeds them cheap food just dumped into a pile in the backyard. She doesn’t walk them or provide enrichment activities, they all just live in the backyard and never leave. Two of her dogs are a breed that are supposed to be groomed regularly but they haven’t been groomed in over five years. I’m sick to think that she’s continuously bringing more animals into this situation.
A neighbor called animal control to come investigate the situation, and my relative claimed that animal control said they don’t have too many animals and that they all seem well taken care of. (Our city has a limit on no more than four dogs per household, so I’m not sure what happened there.) She was issued a citation for having unregistered pets and was warned not to breed them. Well, now she has two litters, with another on the way that she’s selling on Facebook.
I’ve wondered if I should give animal control a call to report the breeding. She has a Facebook page for her new breeding business, so there’s no question about whether it was a mistake or not. I know I can’t control the outcome of what happens when the authorities get involved, but it’s not that I want to see her getting punished—I just want her to stop getting and creating new animals that she can barely care for. Her family doesn’t make a lot of money, but she does have a wealthy dad who bails her out of true emergencies, so if she does lose her “investment” dogs they’re going to be OK. She has a pattern of lying and shutting people out when they try to confront her about basically anything, so I’ve held my tongue for now. We do live in an area where a lot of people think of animals as property, so feeding them and not chaining them up all day is the bare minimum of care as far as the rest of our family thinks. What do you think?
—TOO Many Dogs