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Scourge-wise, it may not be up there with drunk driving, but drunk puppy buying is percieved as a serious enough problem to lead at least two Manhattan pet stores to ban the sales of canines to the inebriated.

“I feel like they always come in drunk,” Fernanda Moritz, the manager of Le Petite Puppy, explained to the website DNA Info.

The shop, surrounded by bars, has implemented a policy prohibiting people who appear to have been drinking heavily from buying animals. or even holding them.

Moritz said many of her would-be customers stop in after happy hour around 6 p.m.

“They come from there and say ‘let’s stop by to see the puppies,’” said Moritz.

Another pet store in the neighborhood, Citipups, has instituted a similar ban.

Moritz recalled selling a Chihuahua once to a woman she thought might have been drunk. The dog was returned the next day, near death. Since then, she said, they’ve been on the lookout for intoxicated customers.

Leandro Jacoby, the 28-year-old manager of nearby Citipups, say he has come up with a way to determine whether a puppy buyer is serious, or acting on drunken impulse.

“We have to tell them to come back the next day and most of the time they never come back,” Jacoby said.

“Most of the time it happens around holidays — St. Patrick’s Day or Gay Pride,” he added.

Even though turning down drunken customers might seem bad for business, Moritz and Jacoby both say they’d prefer to lose the sale.

“We make sure they can take care of the dog. We make sure they go to a good home,” Jacoby said.

There are those — including many readers of this website — who’d question whether shops should be selling puppies at all, due to the puppy mill connections often involved. West Hollywood and South Lake Tahoe in California have both banned the sale of dogs and cats in stores, as has Albuquerque, N.M.

Between 2 million and 4 million dogs are born in U.S. puppy mills every year, according to the Humane Society of the United States, many of which end up in pet stores and being sold through the Internet and newspaper classified ads.

MSNBC had an in-depth story last year about cities banning the sales of dogs and cats in pet stores — in which one of the same New York shops is mentioned.

(Video: New York Daily News)