Puppy mill law long overdue

Really terrific editorial today in a suburban Chicago newspaper about pending state legislation to license dog breeders.

As the Southtown Star explains:

L ess than a year ago, we wrote about Nikima Wright, who was keeping 50 dogs jammed into feces- and urine-coated cages - one on top of another - in a shed outside her Peotone home....

Her story drew headlines, outrage - and more than 1,000 inquiries from people interested in adopting the neglected animals.

As egregious as this situation was, officials for the Illinois Department of Agriculture stunned us by granting Wright a kennel operator's license only a month after her dogs were confiscated. The Will County state's attorney's office had not even finished its investigation, and the woman was already being given the green light to work with dogs again.

If Wright's case was a once-in-a-blue-moon incident, we'd chalk it up as an oddity and move on, but in the Southland such discoveries seem to be biannual events. Which is why we really hope Chloe's Bill sails through the General Assembly unimpeded.

The Southtown Star gets the puppy mills problem. Let's hope Illinois lawmakers do too.