Satellite Beach dog owner Daniel Wilmer – one of the first to cheer for Brevard County Commissioner Bryan Lober’s initial efforts to eliminate puppy mills – was disappointed last week with the final product.
“I feel like it’s lost its teeth,” Wilmer said. And he wasn’t alone. Indeed, several former supporters expressed similar discouragement April 9 in a public hearing before commissioners gave final approval to the Pet Retail Ordinance in a 3-2 vote.
Commissioners Curt Smith, of Melbourne, and John Tobia, of Grant Valkaria, repeated their opposition during nearly three months of discussion at prior meetings. Smith has said the ordinance would lead outlawed breeders to go underground and still sell puppies.
Tobia has said he doesn’t trust an ordinance with so many versions of wide-ranging impacts.
Chair Kristine Isnardi, or Palm Bay, joined Lober and Commissioner Rita Pritchett in approving the ordinance.
National animal-rights groups use the term “puppy mills” to refer to breeders who produce hundreds of puppies a year, often in unhealthy conditions, rack up scores of citations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and eventually get closed down.
Lober, of Rockledge, proposed his ordinance in January as a way to eliminate puppy mills by making it illegal for local pet stores to buy from them. At the time, he proposed that pet stores only be allowed to use shelters or rescue agencies as sources.
But since then, Pritchett, of Titusville, championed the rights of honest breeders to stay in business. She convinced Lober to allow pet stores to buy from smaller-scale “hobby breeders.” And the two increased such breeders’ allowable limit from 20 puppies a year to 48.
Most recently, Lober deferred to Pritchett and allowed pet stores to buy from USDA-licensed commercial breeders – provided they haven’t had any federal violations in four years or had their license yanked.
“Our breeder had 17 pages of citations before she had her license pulled,” Wilmer said. “This (provision) is unacceptable.”
Lober said the new ordinance carries a one-year grace period so retailers can adjust to it. After that, he said, the law makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine, for retailers to buy from puppy mills.
But in the April 9 meeting, Pritchett said she wanted to see different degrees of gravity and different penalties for the various ways someone could violate the ordinance. Commissioners agreed to revisit the ordinance in six months to work out degrees of gravity, such as first-degree or second-degree misdemeanors.
Lober said he first proposed the ordinance after neighboring Seminole County passed a similar ban on puppy mills, as did West Melbourne and Indian Harbor Beach.
But those governments were just the latest in a wave of others, starting in 2005 in South Florida, to ban puppy mill dealings, Hallandale Beach City Commissioner Michele Lazarow said.
She said she founded the Animal Defense Coalition to push the bans after there had been deaths in Albuquerque, N.M., shelters.
Lazarow said she became interested in Lober’s proposal after first learning of it in January. She said she saw loopholes and knew it wouldn’t work. She said she offered to advise him.
“Every single pet store in Florida was selling dogs from bad breeders,” Lazarow said of the status quo before the ordinances.
Lazarow said she and a friend, Jenna Jensen, the public policy specialist with the Humane Society of the United States’ Stop Puppy Mills campaign, tried to keep Lober from caving into critics and diluting his efforts.
Lazarow said she and Jensen grew concerned when they learned of Pritchet’s proposals. But she said Lober assured them he would resist his colleague.
“I’ll kill the changes she is proposing,” Lober wrote Jensen in a March 25 email. “We will NOT pass an ordinance reading as she proposed.”
He told Jensen he was writing a new version that would be closer to his original and “not this joke of an ordinance now being floated” by Pritchett.
Since then, Lazarow said, she became “more than disappointed” with Lober. Lazarow said the final version actually protects pet businesses she was hoping to close.
And while the final version’s greater allowances for hobby breeders and commercial breeders came from Pritchett, Lazarow said, Lober should have scrapped his proposal instead of pushing a toothless law.
Before the April 9 meeting, Lober wrote Lazarow, admitting the final version was “not hardly” similar to his original.
“But it pushes us in the right direction,” he added.
