A recent New York Post story sounded the alarm for so many dog lovers that their pups likely came from a cruel, large-scale commercial breeder where mother and father dogs are treated like breeding machines, and the living conditions for dogs and puppies could make anyone’s skin crawl: Dogs housed in enclosures with piles of feces instead of toys. Dogs jumping frantically in raised, wire cages. Dogs in dark enclosures with hardly any space to run and play.
These are just a few of the conditions we documented at puppy mills that have sold to pet stores in New Jersey.
Over the summer of 2024, undercover investigators from the Humane Society of the United States filmed 18 puppy breeders in the Midwest that sold to New Jersey stores. We matched the breeders to pet stores via shipping documents and disclosures posted in the stores, and our investigators also visited four pet stores in New Jersey with hidden cameras: Furrylicious in Whitehouse Station, Pet Center NJ (which is owned by Petland) in Old Bridge, Shake a Paw in Greenbrook and Shake a Paw in Union. Now we are releasing our investigation report to the public, marking our third exposé of New Jersey pet stores, confirming that stores continue to source from inhumane commercial breeders that no New Jersian would knowingly support.
In our most recent investigation, we found that, Furrylicious, Puppy Palace and Wayne Puppies had all sourced puppies from a puppy mill licensed by the state of Missouri and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Raymond Lawson. Raymond Lawson/The Silver Spur is a breeder who was on our Horrible Hundred list of problem puppy mills in 2020 and 2024. Our investigator documented many dogs at Lawson’s facility crowded into a dim row of chain-link enclosures, without enough space to run and play. As we reported in our recent Horrible Hundred report, in a single visit last year, state inspectors found 10 violations, including some for unsafe housing and inappropriate veterinary care. While Missouri officials gave Lawson an official warning, the federal inspector didn’t cite him for any violations that same month, September 2023.
