@Caiter92
I'm just going to go through point by point.
First, we buy from 50 different breeders on average. That comes out to 16 dogs per year per breeder. Depending on the breed, that can be a single liter of puppies from a single breeding pair. So it isn't us buying from one breeder with 200 breeding pairs. 16 dogs a year is pretty doable for a lot of professional dog breeders. Dog breeders are also starting to get twitchy in this part of the country. The dog breeder my boyfriend's mom went to does background checks among other things because two animal rights activists came into her facility wear clothes contaminated with parvo and killed half her puppies one spring, which came out to 18 pups, I think. Thankfully her lawyer got those two jail time. But breeders are getting more and more sketchy about clients and customers in general and some we work with prefer for us to take that risk. It's harder to wipe out our kennel than a breeding kennel due to our regulations and our own personal rules. They trust us to make the best decision for the animals at that point.
Second, as far as the site unseen situation, isn't that something that shelters regularly engage in as well? Out of the 236 shelters in Colorado (sorry for mistaking the number in the original post), not even half do home inspections simply because they don't have the funds to do so. And yet, according to our department of ag, their return rate isn't significantly higher than the shelters that do. So why is it okay for shelters to adopt out, sight unseen, but yet breeders (through pet stores) doing it is inhumane? (Just being Devil's advocate here; not trying to be a b****) Our return rate is better than that of the most well funded shelters in Colorado. 92% of our puppies placed remain in their first home and that number jumps up to 98% when you add in the second home (so original customer gives dog to friend; dies so family inherits; etc.).
Now for the overpopulation: I have the best data for Colorado, so I'm going to talk Colorado specific since that's where our stores are. I'm willing to discuss national as I do have some points on that. But I know Colorado best. All my stats will be dogs, also, since that's definitely the chunk of what we do.
According to PACFA (pet animal care facilities act, which is the overriding guidelines for breeders, stores, and shelters in Colorado), approximately 101,911 dogs were taken into shelters through all the shelters in Colorado in 2013. 76,242 dogs were either returned to owners (23,678) or adopted (52,564). 1,999 dogs were dead on arrival, 439 died while in care of the shelter, and 6,968 were purposely euthanized. So while 9.2% of dogs that entered shelters left it dead, only 6.8% of those were purposely euthanized and over half of those were euthanized due to health or behavioral issues (that last bit was said verbally at a PACFA meeting sometime in 2014; unfortunately PACFA does not report in their spread sheets why shelters euthanize, so we had to ask that question specifically). So, 3.4% of dogs in Colorado shelters were euthanized due to space issues.
Now that 3.4% sucks. No dog should have to die because of space. However, there is another point I want to make on that. More than 8 times as many dogs were sold in the newspapers of this state, specifically the Denver Post, as were sold in all 10 pet stores combined. That's over 65,000 dogs sold in newspapers. Now, I did that math for an agriculture seminar class, and the way I did it was by assuming only half the puppies available for sale were sold per week and that 5% died of some reason or another. I also used the top 25 newspapers in the state and only included people who were not registered breeders with the department of ag in Colorado. I honestly don't know if I still have the sheet where I calculated it all out somewhere, as it's been two years since I've seen it. Even if I'm off by 10%, that leeway is still between 58,500 and 71,500. Being off by 20% is 52,000 on the low end and that is still 6 times what pet stores sold.
Pet overpopulation, in Colorado, is significantly more influenced by back yard breeders than anything else.
Now for on the national scale: there are approximately 500 pet stores in this country that gets most profits from the sale of dogs, according to the report that the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association sent my grandpa a in 2013. According to the ASPCA, 1.2 million dogs are euthanized per year and 1.4 million dogs are adopted. That's 2,400 dogs euthanized per open pet store. The average pet store sells less than half that many dogs per year. The current average according to the Pet Industry Distributors Association is around 1,000 dogs per store, per year. Approximately 500,000 dogs per year are sold in pet stores in this country (as far as the statistics that have been reported to us).
So assuming that every single person who bought a dog from a pet store would be willing to adopt a dog from a shelter instead, 41.6666% of dogs in shelters could have gotten homes across the country. Yes, that is totally a legit, significant percentage if every single person who bought dogs from pet stores would have adopted instead. However, it isn't certainly not a majority.
There are other things going on that are driving pet overpopulation, and pet stores are becoming less significant because we're dying. Straight up. Retail pet store numbers have been only decreasing since the 80s. My family alone back in the 80s had 39, I think. Now, since my mom lost her lease, we're down to 4, unless my mom decides to reopen. All of us in the pet industry in Colorado constantly talk about how, "pet stores will cease to exist in 15 years," and that's what we seriously think. So, no, I do not think we are the biggest contributing factor in pet overpopulation. That 42% up there would get smaller when you take out the people who would not want to adopt a dog. You're down to closer to a third of dogs in this country getting adopted instead of bought. And as far as Colorado is concerned, we barely are a pinprick. There are other factors.
Again, all this is from the inside looking out. This is how we see the situation because this comes up all the time in department of ag meetings, PACFA, clients, etc.