Lancaster Co. Dog Brokers Hit With Cease and Desist From PETA Over False ‘Adoption’ Marketing

For Immediate Release:
October 23, 2025

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

This morning, a lawyer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent cease-and-desist letters to locally-based puppy brokers Infinity Pups and Keystone Puppies, demanding that they immediately stop duping unsuspecting customers into thinking they’re rescuing dogs with their rampant and deceptive use of the terms “adopt” and “adoption” to refer to the purchase of a puppy from commercial breeders. The action comes on the heels of PETA’s groundbreaking lawsuit against the American Kennel Club and as part of an escalation of PETA’s campaign against the notorious puppy breeding industry, which fuels the animal overpopulation crisis by churning out litter after litter of puppies into a world bursting at the seams with homeless animals.

PETA notes that the term “adoption” applies to a transfer of guardianship that does not involve a commercial transaction, and that the phrase “Adopt, Don’t Shop” arose as a rallying cry to combat the homeless animal crisis by steering people away from buying dogs from breeders and pet shops and toward adopting from shelters. Yet Infinity Pups and Keystone Puppies, which act as middlemen for commercial breeders across the country, repeatedly use the term “adopt” on their online promotional materials to refer to the purchase of a puppy. Keystone Puppies egregiously bills itself as a “puppy adoption agency” in sponsored search results, while Infinity Pups’ homepage features large, boldface type directing visitors to “adopt” a puppy—directly above links to puppies for sale.

“Peddling purposely bred puppies who swell the ranks of dogs during an overpopulation and homeless dog crisis, and misrepresenting the purchase as an adoption, is like pouring gasoline on a wildfire and calling it an extinguisher,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA is urging the public not to be duped by the breeding industry’s latest Trojan Horse scheme and to adopt an animal in need from their local shelter, which is undoubtedly overwhelmed by the homeless animal crisis that puppy mills helped create.”

With millions of homeless dogs and cats in the U.S., animal shelters across the country have been struggling to keep up for years—and every time someone buys a puppy or a kitten from a breeder or a pet store, an animal in a shelter loses a chance at finding a good home. The solution to this crisis is to hit it at its source by banning breeding and implementing and enforcing spay/neuter requirements—and for everyone to truly adopt animals instead of buying them from pet stores or breeders.

Fill-in-the-Gap Pets, a dog breeding facility operated by Infinity Pups’ owner, Marvin Riehl, previously failed state inspections five times in one year for keeping dogs in unsafe, filthy conditions. According to a report on unlicensed dog breeding operations in Pennsylvania, the owner of an illegal breeding facility in Myerstown—where inspectors found weeks-old puppies shivering outside in 38-degree weather—had sold dogs through Keystone Puppies. Multiple PETA investigations have exposed that at breeding facilities, it’s common for dogs to be intensively confined in cages 24/7, crammed into small, filthy hutch-type structures, denied access to veterinary care, clean drinking water, and nutritious food—and even killed when they are “spent” and can no longer be used for breeding.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.