Puppy Mill Playhouse

There is a pet store in my hometown that has a giant puppy playpen - it's a puppy orgy, really. You enter a gate and stand around a slightly smaller area where the dogs are running around, and then just lean over a short wall and scoop up the one you want to hold. It's pretty amazing if you're into that sort of thing. Yesterday I stopped by and saw a golden retriever, a long-haired daschund, a beagle, a chihuahua and a couple of terriers.

It made me really happy until I started thinking about the puppy mills the dogs probably came from, and how there are hundreds of dogs in shelters waiting for good homes and whose only alternative to adoption is a death sentence. That brought me down pretty fast.

If we'd shopped the pet stores, we never would've found Arthur.