3 Gen Gap
Puppy Mills - what's all the fuss about?
The young adults of the 1960s hippy era were generally softer towards pets - but part of the hippy movement including going back to nature, and having your own little farm - which meant raising animals from their birth and then slaughtering them when they matured, and then eating them.
The parents (from the 1950s era), did NOT want to go back to the farm. Not because they cared about animals, but because it was so unsophisticated, so bumpkin, so rural.
There was also, at this same time, among the hippies, a vegetarian movement - which shocked some adults, because "Why would people not eat meat?"
It is NOT that some of the hippies thought up or imported vegetarianism, it is more of a flux between what was very rare to what was, "not unheard of". I did have a relative who was a vegetarian - and that was starting back in the 1930s.
Today, while there are more vegetarians, the big push is in treating animals better, and in recognising the bond that people have with their pets.
There still are unsolved consumer issues with how puppies are produced, marketed, sold, and controlled. There are issues with monopolising an industry and the brute force needed to do so, as well as the slyness often involved in sells.
There are also issues where the use of pets, influences of the consumer, without the consumer being aware of it - like deliberately breeding dogs to have health problems or temperament problems, and selling puppies with "a string attached" (a return to sender clause) and then selling the returned pet for research.
The whole issue of animals being used in painful experiments, or kept cruelly, really separates the young crowd from their grandparents era, but it not wholly one way, there are always people who are cruel, like young guys who make their dogs fight, and there are always lots of older people who love their pets, but still a trend can be seen.
In the 1950s, parents and teacher sometimes spoke well of using animals for experiments simply because that helped "progress" - never mind that that progress produces cancer causing chemicals, and toxic chemical waste, progress itself was some people's holy grail.
The 1960s saw many hippies against using animals for research, but that was sometimes in keeping with the ideal of returning to a simpler life, not always just for the animals themselves.
Like the 1950s, the 1960s still had a thing against "Dr. Frankensteins", who people feared were taking society to a bad end, making chemical & toxic pollution, and waste products that were not contained.
Big industry laughed at the idea that toxic waste would hurt people. Big industry mostly won - but time has shown the environmentalists were right.
Of course, there always have been some people who cared about the animals. But today, if you read between the lines, you can see the difference between people under 30 and people over 65.
Americans who were adults during the wars of WW2, Korea, or Vietnam, tend to have been raised with a harder attitude towards animals - most of them have softened and changed with the times.
But the people who are still doing what they have always done, using animals for fun and profit, are sometimes really baffled by the animal rights movement.
To them, it is some weird idea that comes out of left field somewhere.
