Beginnings, pt I

Up until two years ago my wife was terrified of dogs.

We both think it was my friend's English Cocker Spaniel that started the change in her. We'd had my buddy and his wife over to our place for dinner a few weeks prior and he was returning the favor. After we'd had dinner we went down to his newly finish home theatre and the puppy followed. As he and I rocked out on Guitar Hero the puppy was busy worming her way into my wife's heart. It wasn't long after that she suggested we get a pup of our own.

Our first dog was a "Cockalier", though we both refuse to call him that. After a great deal of reading my wife settled on a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel as her ideal first dog. Their temperament and loving disposition both resonated with Hol. Unfortunately their price didn't resonate so well with me.

I'm a graduate student. I'm working on earning my PhD in chemistry, but at the moment my only source of income is a part time job working for my former advisor. At this point in our lives my wife and I couldn't afford the twelve hundred dollars most pure bred cav puppies cost. Instead we went to PetFinder.com and started looking for cavs there.

Hol and I knew we didn't want to get a dog from a puppy mill. We'd both seen the programs on TV about the conditions in which these dogs were raised and were morally opposed to perpetuating the cycle. On petfinder we located a breeder in Pennsylvania who had half cav, half cocker spaniel puppies for sale. They said they were an Amish breeder so Hol and I figured they must be respectable people.

What Holly and I didn't know was that the Amish of Pennsylvania are some of the worst puppy mill breeders in the country. I think they try to trade on their Amish heritage to get people to buy, but make no mistake, these people are puppy millers. Later on Hol and I saw an episode of 20/20 which highlighted Amish puppy mill breeders in which it showed how the breeders simply treat the dogs as livestock. The dogs are given minimal space in which to live and the females are bred near constantly. These were the conditions into which our Charlie was born.