On September 20th, animal welfare advocates, volunteers, animal-lovers and pet charities alike are supporting organizers from the state of Ohio who are partaking in a very important national event: Puppy Mill Awareness Day.

Puppy Mill Awareness Day makes it easy and fun to help raise awareness with downloadable flyers, lawn signs, sample letters to newspaper editors, t-shirts, buttons and more! On PMAD, you can meet up with event organizers and volunteers to hand out flyers and information to people who need to know the truth about puppy mills and the pet trade. You’ll give out information about pet adoption options (so people don’t go to the pet store!) and basic information about puppy mills. (All the materials are positive and educational.)

The PMAD website also recommends the following activities leading up to Puppy Mill Awareness Day:

- Join a meetup group in your area (or start one). Meet and join others who want to educate the community about puppy mills by handing out flyers, tabling at PetSmart, PetCo and other animal-friendly businesses that don’t sell puppies. If you live in Ohio and want to join the campaign, click here. Visit the PMAD website for a list of currently participating cities.

- Send a Letter to the Editor at your local newspaper about Puppy Mill Awareness Day. You can download a guide and sample letter, as I said above, on the PMAD website.

- Hang a flyer at work, the grocery store, the dog park, veterinarian’s office, groomer etc. There are flyers available for download on the PMAD website.

- Organize a pet store protest in your area. Click here to learn how.

For all kinds of other information and more details, visit the Puppy Mill Awareness Day website.

PLEASE CROSS POST!

This is perhaps one of the most important petitions we can all sign. It calls for a boycott of all Amish products until they stop their inhumane and disturbing practices of running puppy mills.

Thanks so much to Dogster’s For the Love of Dog Blog for this information.

Here’s more information from the Boycott Amish products until puppy mills are discontinued petition.

“To: Amish & Mennonite puppy mills
I will boycott all Amish products until puppy mills are stopped. This is greed in its worst form and this is how consumers make their demands known. I simply will not buy Amish products while this practice continues.”

And before you start saying that boycotting Amish products will affect people who aren’t participating in puppy mills, think again. Amish communities are very closed to and extremely disinterested in what they call the “English.” That’s all of us, btw. Unless their leadership declares puppy mills are off limits, the Amish puppy millers will keep up their dirty work. The only way to convince these puppy millers to quit is to make the whole practice very expensive to the WHOLE community.