Mr Grima, breeding dogs for profit in a country with an unwanted pet problem isn’t entrepreneurial. It borders uncomfortably on the cruel.

Keeping 60 females on rotation, producing puppies like products to be sold out of glass cabinets in your store, isn’t the pristine business model you believe it to be. 

Mr Grima, your sparkling new puppy farm doesn’t belong in the 21st century.

Every year, tens of thousands of dogs are received by shelters across the country. Of those, thousands are euthanased. Many more die cold and alone.

Each year, literally thousands of dogs will die simply because their owners don’t want them anymore or there’s just not enough shelter space to keep them alive any longer. Many, many more await uncertain futures in cramped cages.

Yet, because there’s no national system monitoring dogs entering or exiting pounds or shelters in Australia, we don’t know the true number. Mr Grima, you would have us believe that your (proposed) facility fills a much-needed niche in our lives. Maybe it’s a hole the size and shape of a poodle or a spaniel. It’s also a hole any homeless mutt could fill 10 times over.

Mr Grima, I have a simple and authentic suggestion. Build your facility. Deck it out just as your DA describes.

But instead of interring a breeding squad to produce puppies for your three-decade-old pet store, fill it with abandoned animals.

Fill it with those sleeping tonight on cold concrete, behind cages, not knowing what will come tomorrow.

Fill it with those shaking on death's door, waiting only for an act of kindness.

Yes, if you really want to be as reliable and ethical as your open letter to the readers of the Western Advocate claims, populate it not with puppies borne of breeding, but with death-row dogs. 

Be the facility you dream of, and you might change more lives than you realise.