Our Oprah Billboard is now up on the Kennedy Expressway
We thought and we thought. Who could touch more people than any other person on the planet? Who could help us spread the word about puppy mills to a fan base of millions? Then as we were driving back from Lancaster County with a carload of retired breeding dogs, it came to us. Oprah Winfrey. Oprah would help us. She is, after all, not only a huge animal lover, she also happens to be the most admired and best loved celebrity in the world right now. With this in mind, we set about sponsoring another billboard, this one in Chicago, only blocks from Oprah's famed Harpo Studios, at the intersection of the Kennedy Expressway and Randolph Boulevard, asking Miss Winfrey to discuss the topic of puppy mills on her popular talk show.
No sooner did the board go up, did we hear from the producer of her show. And within weeks, we were traveling the highways of Pennsylvania searching out substandard kennels and filming undercover footage inside some of the worst puppy mills in Pennsylvania with Special Investigator Lisa Ling and a film crew of five. The goal was to link puppies for sale in numerous pet stores with their mothers and fathers imprisoned in our state's puppy mills. We were extremely successful in our efforts. Cock-a-poo puppies in a pet store in Chester County were linked to breeding dogs housed in tiny rabbit hutches in Lancaster County. A Yellow Lab puppy on sale in a pet store near Allentown was bred on a dairy farm over an hour away. The puppy's mother, over bred and standing in deep mud in the pouring rain, shared a filthy pen with several other breeding dogs.
By focusing an entire program on puppy mills, and featuring segments on euthanasia and the importance of spaying or neutering your pet, Oprah will help millions of animals and educate millions of people, including those who may unknowingly purchase a dog from a pet store not realizing the often deplorable conditions and unseen misery facing breeding dogs housed in our nation’s puppy mills. More grateful to Oprah, Lisa Ling, her producers and crew, than we can express on a web site, Main Line Animal Rescue hopes people across the country will stop and think before purchasing a puppy from a pet store, or from the many misleading web sites online. We also hope that people will contact the governors and legislators of their states and tell them that the factory farming of man's best friend and the resulting widespread cruelty in our country's puppy mills must stop now.