WINDHAM – An animal rights group hoping to restrict the sale of puppies and kittens in Maine pet stores has set its sights on Windham.

Members of Maine Citizens Against Puppy Mills is planning to protest Pawz and Clawz Petz in North Windham on Saturday. The group, headed by Lynne Fracassi, a former animal control officer for the northern Lakes Region, is also petitioning the Windham Town Council to pass an ordinance that would allow stores to only sell rescue and shelter animals.

Fracassi and another member of the group, Carol Reynolds, owner of Bridgton-based Wizard of Paws Pet Supplies & Grooming, were at the Windham council meeting last week aiming to get their proposal on the July 24 agenda.

Windham is just one of many towns the group is targeting. Others include Scarborough, Auburn, Lewiston, Skowhegan, Oxford, West Paris and Arundel. And eventually, Fracassi, who believes aiming her message at town governments will prove an easier sell than at the state level, wants to see an ordinance passed in every Maine town, meaning only shelter and rescued animals could be sold in Maine.

“We are trying to ban sales of puppies and kittens in all Maine pet stores,” Fracassi said. “That’s why we’re doing ordinances in each town, because that’s a start. We’ve just started. Every single town, we’re going to try to get an ordinance passed.”

Fracassi said government oversight and regulation –conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture – of large-scale puppy breeders is lax countrywide due to a lack of inspectors.

“At last count, there were 103 USDA inspectors for the entire United States, and that’s including our food supply, so who comes first?” Fracassi said. “So, just because a pet store says they’re getting their animals from a USDA-approved and inspected facility doesn’t mean anything. It’s pet-store doublespeak.

“Being government inspected doesn’t mean the business is not a puppy mill, any more than having a driver’s license guarantees the holder is a good driver,” she continued. “Unfortunately, most USDA breeders house dozens if not hundreds of dogs in small wire cages for their entire lives.”

In Windham, Fracassi and the owner of Pawz and Clawz, Bryant Tracy, have a long history. Fracassi has protested in front of the store four or five times in the past year and has confronted Tracy about what she says is proof that his supplier, Kansas-based Lambriar, Inc., is a puppy mill with hundreds of breeding pairs.

“I’ve talked with Pawz and Clawz many times, showed them USDA reports on the breeders that they use,” Fracassi said. “They use Lambriar, Inc., one of the largest puppy mill brokers in the United States. It’s 100 percent fact. They’re getting their puppies from a puppy mill.”

Lambriar did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Tracy, who confirms that Lambriar is a major supplier for his store, says Fracassi’s group is passionate in their beliefs but misguided. An animal lover himself, Tracy abhors puppy mills and displays a large anti-puppy-mill sign on the front page of his store’s website.

“All of our puppies are from USDA- and state-approved and licensed breeders. They go to the highest standards of cleanliness and health care. The kennels are subject to surprise visits. If they don’t meet the standards, they get written up. And the guidelines are strict,” Tracy said. “We don’t deal with anyone who is substandard. Puppy mills are substandard care and breeding practices, and that’s not acceptable to us. Our kennels are USDA approved and inspected. They get their inoculations before we get them. They’re microchipped. And we review the USDA reports.”

Tracy suggests if Maine Citizens Against Puppy Mills wants to address the puppy mill problem, it should go after the puppy mills themselves and regulators, not small pet shops that rely on federal and state authorities to keep tabs on breeders.

“They have a cause and this is what they believe in,” Tracy said. “But I believe they should go at different levels of what they’re doing. There are puppy mills in the state of Maine, why aren’t they focusing on them instead of picking on pet shops? Why don’t they go directly after them?

“So I just think she’s misdirected. She’s thinking if you put the store out of business, they won’t be buying puppies from the puppy mills so there will be less dogs to go around and the shelters will have more.”

Fracassi said she is also fighting on behalf of unsuspecting pet owners who buy from stores whose pets come from puppy mills. She said most puppies have large veterinary bills and often come home from the store sick with parasites caused by poor living conditions.

Tracy denies this claim, saying the success of the pet business is purely market-driven. Providing unhealthy animals may have been more common decades ago when large-scale breeders were known for their atrocious living conditions, he said, but dealers have improved their practices in the wake of public outrage.

“A good breeder, they would stop the breeding of a pair because they don’t want health issues,” he said. “They don’t want to supply dogs that have health issues. Period.”

While Tracy is offended at Fracassi’s claims regarding his own business, which he has run locally for seven years, gaining many devout customers in the process, he says Fracassi is relying on old information and photos from the Internet.

“A lot of information and pictures she’s getting are old, from the 1980s,” he said. “Right now, they have some really nice kennel designs out there. The dogs are on runs; they do get outside; they get fresh air. They’re not crammed in a small cage like they believe. They’re nice. They have shade, they have water, they have food, they have toys.

“She just wants everybody to see the bad part, but to be truthful, in the 1980s it kicked people’s awareness in – especially when Oprah did something on puppy mills – so the kennels started becoming more pet-friendly.”

Fracassi, steadfast in her position, was encouraged by her visit to the Windham Town Council and believes her group has a chance of eventually changing state law. They’d rather owners such as Tracy voluntarily give up their business model of selling dogs raised by large-scale breeders, but will push ahead regardless.

“We’re trying to steer him toward having shelter and rescue dogs in his store but he denies even having puppy mill dogs, and I showed him all the breeders that he uses, and he goes, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,” Fracassi said of her latest exchange with Tracy, in the parking lot after last week’s council meeting. “And I said, well, if you don’t start doing the rescue and the shelter pets, we’re just going to keep bombarding you with protests. And we’re doing an ordinance anyway so you’re going to have to stop selling puppies.

“So you know, he’s going to have to [change], one way or the other. So he might as well do it the right way.”

Though the council didn’t comment on Fracassi’s desire to have the town draft an ordinance to ban pet sales, Fracassi was clearly motivated by her trip to the council meeting.

“I was very much encouraged by our visit to council,” she said. “I’ve done so much with working with people over last year and a half and with their body language, I just see it.”

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