Pet Love Closes its Doors in Beverly Hills

This is awesome. (Pet Love is a business that sells animals from puppy mills.)

The Beverly Center, an upscale shopping mall in Beverly Hills, California, has announced it will terminate Pet Love’s lease sometime in the next few months. Best Friends made the announcement at a news conference Tuesday.

“Our work here in Los Angeles sends the strongest possible message everywhere that pet shops are supplied by puppy millers,” said Paul Berry, Best Friends chief executive officer. “If a pet store can be closed down in the iconic Beverly Center, it can happen anywhere in the country – New York, Chicago, Boston and other large metro areas.”

Pet Love isn’t just your average little neighborhood pet shop. It has been a fixture at the high-end, celebrity-filled mall for more than 15 years. Pet Love is to pet stores what FAO Schwarz is to toy stores, says Julie Castle, director of Best Friends’ Community Programs and Services.

Best Friends is an amazing organization. Please do support their work. Not only do they advocate, but they train advocates as well. And this Pet Love is only one of several stores that have closed as a result of Best Friends' Puppy-Store-Free L.A. campaign started last summer.

Birds Dyed for Sale in India

Ugh!

Ordinary wild black headed munias are dyed fluorescent green, red and yellow to enhance their value. Hill mynahs, in great demand internationally, are frequently substituted by common mynah bathed in lamp black and mustard oil. With a touch of orange on the head, the ordinary rose-ringed parakeet turns into the more expensive Alexandrine parakeet. The unsuspecting buyer often with little knowledge about birds is thrilled to have got a ‘bargain’ price for a rare bird, readily buys the bird. It is a win-win situation for everyone, except of course, the hapless bird. The only silver lining is that in most cases, only vegetable dyes are used. As otherwise, the bird would die even before the sale is made! An estimated 50,000 traders in the various towns and cities of India earn their living doing this.

The practice of dyeing animals is not restricted to just birds. In the 1970s, authorities discovered that the poachers were dying the rare golden langur, grey, for the purpose of smuggling!