My name is Harmony-PUPPYMILL RESCUE!

Harmony is an adorable 4 year old Havanese recently rescued from a puppy mill. She is skittish but inquisitive exploring the world outside of a cage and sits up like a little groundhog to look around. The tip of her little tongue always sticks out, really adding to that deer in the headlights look as she gets used to the idea that people can be nice. She loves and cuddles with her doggie friends and needs a calmer home with at least one other dog in the household.

We hate puppy mills, but we love our puppy mill survivors ❤️
Most of our dogs come from local animal control facilities and homes that can’t keep them, but saving puppy mill dogs has always been a big part of our rescue’s mission over the past 20+ years. Since long before it was cool and every rescue and fake scam rescue around started buying up and selling supposed reject tiny mill puppies and flipping them for high adoption fees to make a profit, we have been rescuing and rehabilitating the sad scared semi-feral medically needy retired moms and dads. Our major life goal is to get dogs out of bad situations and into better ones, and few things are worse than puppy mill life, exploited in a cage for years on end with minimal human contact or medical care, just being used as breeding machines. It sounds like some type of dystopian horror story, but puppy mills are very real and common, kept alive by the selfish desire of consumers to be able to get a puppy of any breed or mix they want immediately shipped to them without caring about the consequences for the parents left behind.
Some puppy mill rescues might have been treated slightly better than others and come to us in better shape emotionally and medically. But the vast majority of them (and the most challenging yet rewarding to help) come to us semi-feral and scared out of their minds of human touch, clinging to any doggie friend they can find as their only source of joy and security. They all have some challenges to overcome as they learn how to live in homes for the first time. Leash-walks, housebreaking, playing with toys, and cuddling are all foreign and scary concepts, but with time, patience, doggy role models, and the right caring patient people they learn at their own speed.
We currently have 7 little non-shedding puppy mill survivors available, all 3-5 years old and varying levels of shyness. All REQUIRE another dog in the household to help them feel safe and have a role model and to look up to and copy (good habits and bad).
Email njwoof@cs.com to meet any of our little survivors in northern NJ.
If a puppy mill survivor isn’t the right match for you, we have lots of locally rescued dogs who have lived in homes, so please reach out to find a match

Since COVID-19, we are no longer holding our Sunday adoption events until further notice, but we are scheduling meet and greet appointments with a specific dog or dogs at our meeting spots in Northern NJ. To streamline adoptions, all communication before, during, and after the adoption process is done through email only: we have limited volunteers able to return phone calls. Submit an application from our website www.secondchance.petfinder.com to speed up the adoption process and email any questions to us at njwoof@cs.com. Please check your email regularly for next steps. All our dogs reside in foster care in Northern NJ until adoption and we do not have a central shelter location. We are a small all-volunteer organization focused on rescuing local dogs from area shelters, as well as accepting some surrenders and puppy mill rescues.