Except it doesn't actually do any of that. It doesn't single out puppy mills and badly bred animals, it just says *NO* commercial breeders, meaning anyone who breeds for money, can sell to pet stores in LA. That includes perfectly responsible breeders who produce the best animals. That includes professionals who breed for show and only keep, at best, one animal out of each litter and may sell the rest to pet stores. These are perfectly good pure-bred dogs and cats with no problems at all, yet they are now banned. Do you think they're going to stop breeding? Of course not. Now they're just going to sell directly to the consumer, they're going to make more money cutting out the middle man, and the problem will continue unabated.
Yeah, I know. And all commercial breeding is ethically questionable in a society where we have such a glut of domestic animals, bred purely for the pleasure of humans, that we kill them in vast numbers because we have nowhere else to put them. There's no such thing as a responsible breeder in a situation like that. People who breed for show are actually some of the worst, in terms of inbreeding and crippling their animals. The monstrosities they create are appalling; animals whose brains don't fit inside their skulls, animals who can't breathe, can't birth, can't even
walk, purely because that's what the judges want to see.
Fine, some of them will sell directly. But no, it doesn't help their profit. Again, we know this because it's been done in dozens of places. People want easy, and easy is going to the nearest pet shop or shelter and perusing.
The entire reason breeders sell to pet stores is because they are more likely to be able to sell their animals through a big box company than they are on their own.
If it were easy for them to sell direct, they would, because then they wouldn't have to compete as hard on pricing. But they don't, because they know people aren't going to sit there and comb through postings if they can just show up somewhere they're already familiar with and look at a dozen different animals in one go. They don't, because if they try to sell them on their own, they're one tiny voice in a sea of other breeders all using the same channels to try to sell. It's like selling in Target versus selling on Etsy. Who tends to make more money?
Eliminating breeders' ability to sell them to pet stores cuts deeply into their profit margins. They to have to do all that advertising themselves through smaller channels against more competitors, fighting an uphill battle against the consumer's laziness, and they have to pay to raise the animals themselves (when they sell to the pet store, the pet store assumes the cost of a highly dependent little animal, and they can re-breed their stock sooner). Thus it will reduce how many breeders there are, thus it will reduce how many animals are bred, thus it will reduce how many are abandoned, thus it will reduce how many we kill for no reason. Again, this has been done in many places very successfully. When I say "very successfully," I mean these places have been able to abandon kill shelters entirely.
In actuality, lots of places have been doing this for decades and we have lots of successful proofs of concept. LA has been debating it for years. Glad to see they finally passed it.
