TYLER, Texas (KETK) – In this week’s episode of East Texas In Focus KETK News anchor Nolan Hoffman sat down with local animal advocates to help would-be pet owners learn how to avoid getting an animal from an overcrowded or irresponsible puppy mill.

Nolan got to talk with Smith County Animal Shelter coordinator Holli Jones, Pets Fur People executive director Kat Cortelyou and Shelby Bobosky, president of the Lone Star Humane Association. Bobosky said an easy way to avoid an irresponsible, unhealthy puppy mill is to check if the breeder is licensed with state of Texas.

“Try to find the license for the breeder and that means that the breeder at least has been inspected and they hold a license. Also, try to meet the parents of the puppy, look at the facility where it came from so you know that those puppies are being brought in by legitimate breeders,” Bobosky said. “At puppy mills, there’s hundreds of dogs at these locations and our focus is at some point to stop the puppy mill pipeline into Texas.”

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Cortelyou explained that puppy mill animals coming in from the out of the state only add on to the amount of overcrowding that animal shelters have to deal with from animals inside the state.

“We already have plenty of dogs inside of our state. So that’s that’s the first problem is you’re bringing in more animals to an already overburdened system,” Cortelyou said. “Then when you’re bringing in the puppy mill puppies that are sick and and have issues with them, then that’s just causing costing us more money. The people don’t want to keep the dogs and then they’re surrendering them and so then that’s just causing even more of a burden on our shelters and our rescues.”

According to Jones, the Smith County Animal Shelter currently has almost 300 puppies that have been abandoned or surrendered to them. These puppies are just one part of a larger problem that East Texas shelters and rescues are facing; overcrowding from stray dogs, neglected dogs and abandoned dogs.

“It’s never ending and I know all of y’all would agree. I don’t see that we can adopt our way out of this. You can’t. You can’t transport your way out of this. We all want spay and neuter, but it’s going to also come down to responsible pet ownership,” Jones said.

For Bobosky, Jones and Cortelyou, one obvious solution to this problem would be for the State of Texas to pass laws that require spaying and neutering, in order to reduce the state’s dog population. Bobosky explained that even though East Texas was given $13 million for spaying and neutering by the state legislature last year, that amount isn’t enough.

“So last year at the legislature, I can speak to that. There was 13 million that was actually put into the budget and so I know that East Texas got some of that money, but we need to spay and neuter them all. That is the number one solution,” Bobosky stated.

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Cortelyou pointed out that animal abandonment is already a crime but it’s often unenforced or under-prosecuted so many people will simply abandon their animals anyway.

“We love our law enforcement and all our enforcement teams and that kind of thing but we can’t always get those prosecuted and so people will dump them and yes, there’s a law against it but nobody wants to do anything about it,” Cortelyou said. “So it’s it just keeps happening because people are like, ‘well, I’m not going to get in trouble for it. Joe Blow over there. He did it. He didn’t get in trouble. So I’m going to do it’, and so it’s never ending. They just keep dumping dogs and nothing gets done about it.”

To learn more about puppy mills and the challenges faced by East Texas animal shelters and rescues, check out this week’s full episode of East Texas In Focus at the top of this article.

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