Quote:
Originally Posted by Patt  Thank you for searching the above and posting the info. |
You are welcome! I get kinda worried about jumping to conclusions, when I start getting feelings of intense moral outrage, so I wanted to be sure of the facts before I started jumping up and down and getting red-faced. Why shouldn't I share what I found?
According to the news reports, besides selling overpriced sick dogs, these guys are:
- reselling dogs returned for serious health problems, under new names
- selling dogs with unsigned health certificates
- not providing promised registration papers
- Lying about where they get their dogs (they claim not from puppy mills, which is demonstrated as untrue by reporters, and later by their own admission, on camera).
- Using their celebrity customer's names and images without permission Most of the celebs seem to be as unhappy as the non famous ones about the health of their dogs.
- In one case, a customer who brought a dog in for grooming, says they tried to foist a different dog on her as her own dog. When challenged, they claimed her dog had mysteriously died of a seizure.
I poked around a bit more to try to find out how any of the lawsuits concluded. Besides the ones by the Humane Society Florida Attorney General (Charlie Crist who is now the Governor of Florida), several Florida legislators declared their intention to pass laws that would prevent the owner of the site, or anyone else, from running a business like this again. Doesn't seem to have worked though. There was a site set up by a former customer,
devoted just to stopping them, but it is gone.
I was able to locate a tiny bit of info about three cases naming
Wizard of Claws as a Defendant , but no details, as well as the
complete text of the complaint by the Florida Attorney General's office.
Other stuff: CNN segment about the same topic.
StopPuppyMills.org has a
form for submitting complaints about Wizard of Claws, but no additional info that I can find.
The 'Customer's protest' segment on
NBC page I posted earlier is bad,
here is the correct one. The other segment links on that page seem to all be correct. Overall, while the level of investigation and fact gathering is pretty impressive for local TV, the individual reports are a bit repetitious, since they need to recap what was reported in each prior report.
What I can't figure out is, why is this place still in business? They are not the only ones pulling this kind of ugly crap, but they don't appear to be making even a superficial effort to candycoat their operation as legitimate, just business as usual, and have been on the receiving end of massive negative publicity and legal challenges from powerful people in Florida Politics. Wtf is up with that?
