After reading this, please share your thoughts.  We all know people who insist on owning purebred dogs with papers and all the hoopla.  Is that okay (to each his own) or should we be slapping them around?

Francis Battista, co-founder of Best Friends Animal Society shares his thoughts. 

The only truly guilt-free purebred dog is one acquired from a shelter or breed rescue group. (About 25 percent of the dogs in shelters are pure breeds, according to estimates in recent years, and much higher if you count mixes of pure breed parents.)

Anyone who breeds as a business rather than for the love of the breed is exploitive.

Once outside the “guilt-free zone” of adoption, there’s plenty of guilt to go around if your dog comes from an exploitive breeder.

What’s an exploitive breeder? Any breeder that can’t provide a loving, in-home environment for a pregnant bitch, and a safe home environment surrounded by loving people for new born puppies, is exploitive. Anyone who breeds as a business rather than for the love of the breed is exploitive.

Those who do breed their dog for the love of the breed do so infrequently. They probably have homes for their babies before they are born and usually wind up in the red because they put so much into the care of mama and pups.

Puppy mills are not only exploitive, they are cruel and abusive and about 90 percent of puppies sold in pet stores come from high volume production breeders, or puppy mills. As the name implies, these are factories that turn out dogs. The breeding parents are kept in perpetual servitude and inhumane conditions.

Volume isn’t the only mark of exploitation. Many pure breeds have genetic defects associated with them as a result of inbreeding over generations for a particular look.

Breeders are exploitive when they don’t test for these genetic flaws before mating their animals and perpetuate defects like deafness, crippling hip problems, blindness, etc. Also, anyone who breeds dogs that can’t give birth without a C-section, as is the case with some pug lines, is exploitive.

The real guilt in all this, however, belongs with the pet trade that perpetuates these and other practices that cause so much suffering to animals and contribute to the national shame of millions of homeless pets dying in shelters each year.

Please let us hear your thoughts…