Animal Law Podcast #11: Is That Puppy from A Puppy Mill? with Lindsay Larris

Episode #11 of the Animal Law Podcast has hit the airwaves! This episode features the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s Lindsay Larris, who will tell us about the lawsuit, brought by a bunch of people who say they got bamboozled by Barkworks, a California pet store chain that is telling people they don’t get their puppies from puppy mills. ALDF asserts that’s not entirely (or even a little bit!) true. Since the laws protecting consumers from being deceived are a whole lot stronger than the laws protecting the puppies themselves, that’s the way to get them into court and, hopefully, save lots of puppies (as well as their doggie parents, not to mention their human guardians) from mistreatment. Next steps in this important lawsuit — let’s make this a class action!

I will, as always, also be shooting my mouth off. I’ll take the opportunity to discuss some articles that David Wolfson and I wrote years ago about farmed animals and the law. “Foxes in the Henhouse: Animals Agribusiness and the Law, A Modern American Fable” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions; “What’s Good for the Goose… The Supreme Court of Israel, Foie Gras, and the Future of Farmed Animals in the United States,” in the 2007 volume of the Duke Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems; and “If it Looks Like a Duck: New Jersey, The Regulation of Common Farming Practices, and the Meaning of ‘Humane,’” in Animal Law and the Courts. Then I’ll discuss some of the new developments in regulations regarding farmed animals — from the recent retraction by the German government of its proposed regulation banning the grinding up of male chicks to the new proposed regulations from the Obama administration regarding the treatment of farmed animals in organic production — and I’ll discuss why the industry is never going to be regulated, or persuaded, to treat animals any better because they simply can’t afford to do so. It’s just too expensive.

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