Everytime I go to the mall to buy another packet of cancer sticks, I pass this little pet shop. Along one wall, in rows of cages are tiny dogs, puppies mostly, waiting to be sold. In front of the opening of the store is a birdcage overstuffed with cockateals. In an island of plexiglass boxes are a few rabbits. I'm sure in the back are tanks full of feeder goldfish, frogs, and iguanas. But I wouldn't no for sure because I've never stepped foot inside the store.

I can't bring myself to. I'd really like to buy a puppy someday, but I'd been told to not buy them from pet stores, that the puppies sold there are the results of cruel and inhumane breeding by pet suppliers. Not only were they overbred, but I'd been told they were also interbred within litters. I don't have validation for these claims, but my cynicism about markets such as these allows me to assume there is truth to them, numbers notwithstanding.

But then I thought about the warnings: don't buy pets from pet stores. Well, someone needs to liberate these animals. Someone needs to love them and take care of them. Just because they're mutants (or could be) doesn't mean they don't deserve a chance. I only wish could do away with the practice, sitck to private owners if you want a pure-breed or with the SPCA if you don't care either way. This seems to me to be another way corporate America has fucked up a need many of us has as humans, the need to care for something, to love it and forge a bond with it. And, like most things I'm finding these days, it's just sad.

My stepfather used to work in an office building adjoined to downtown Charlottetown's major mall. In the basement level of this mall, there was a pet store, and when my stepdad had a few minutes to kill, he would sometimes go and look at the puppies and kittens.

One evening, five minutes before the store closed, he was doing just such a thing. Then he left.

The very next morning, he had a couple of minutes to kill again, so again he went to see the pets. This time, there were no puppies or kittens.

My stepfather asked the clerk what had happened to all the animals that had been there the previous evening. The clerk responded, "They were all sold."

My stepfather decided to go into the PEI Humane Society to file a complaint. When he got there, he recognised the owner of the pet store in question, speaking with the manager of the Humane Society.

Sadly, the only theory we could feasibly endorse is that Mary's Pet Emporium, which has not carried puppies or kittens since this happening, had a big discount burlap sack sale to the Old Man of the Sea. This is all the worse because Mary's was not a corporation, it was a single shop. But the corporate mentality had so infected it, that when the dogs and cats had ceased to be a potential profit and started being a liability, they killed them — even before they would give them away for free, they killed them.

If you want a cat or dog, don't buy it from a pet store or a mill. You might liberate one or two puppies or kittens, but only by doing exactly what the store set out to do — generate profit, with which they will buy more puppies and kittens. You can't save all the puppies and kittens in the world, but you can boycott pet stores. Buy from farms or friends. Please.