Saving Gracie (14 page)

It was love at first sight for Laura Hewitt and her two new Cavaliers, Duffy and Baxter. (
Mike Hewitt
)

Eventually the Hewitts got the mange under control, but their dogs went on to experience a succession of other ailments. Duffy’s biggest problem was worms. He had every kind imaginable. His immune system was so fragile that two days after he went home with the Hewitts, he collapsed. That’s what happens with puppy mill survivors, the couple’s veterinarian told them. In crowded and stressful circumstances, their adrenaline races at such a high pitch that when the dogs finally start to settle down, they fall apart.

Both Cavaliers suffered from gastrointestinal problems. In a matter of months, constant eruptions of blood, vomit, and diarrhea ruined the white carpet in the couple’s spacious home. It wasn’t uncommon for Laura to take one or both dogs to the vet three times a day. In the first year alone, the Hewitts spent nearly $10,000 fighting an array of health problems in their dogs.

•  •  •

Had she foreseen the ordeal she would undergo—not to mention the troubles the Hewitts would experience with their dogs—Susan Krewatch never would have recommended Wolf.

She first visited him in 2004. She’d located him online and liked the fact that Wolf lived only about twenty minutes from her house in Hockessin, Delaware. His place was a little dirty and smelly, but not enough to sound any alarms. That first visit, Susan purchased a tricolor female she named Lily. Lily seemed healthy, so six months later Susan returned to buy a second Cavalier, another tricolor she named Bella.

Bella had problems immediately. Susan’s vet found a corneal abrasion on one of Bella’s eyes, dead ear mites in her ears, and patches of missing hair. A few days later the puppy developed bronchitis. Her body wouldn’t tolerate antibiotics, so Susan had to hold an inhaler over the dog’s nose to clear out her lungs. She confronted Wolf about the problems over the phone. He agreed not to cash the $200 deposit check Susan had left him, and she was satisfied. Two hundred dollars covered the vet bill.

Bella eventually regained her health. But three years later, Lily developed a heart murmur and painful urinary tract infections that wouldn’t go away. The infections made her so sick that her eyes glazed over and she could hardly walk or lift her head. She turned out to also have
E.coli
and
Pseudomonas
, serious bacterial infections. Exploratory surgery revealed worse problems. Lily had just one kidney and, on top of that, a recessed vulva, a condition that could enable urine to pool in the folds of her skin, triggering bacterial growth. A surgeon operated on her vulva, but problems continued. Then Lily’s vet determined that she had subluxation, a partial dislocation of the bones in her hind legs. “But don’t worry about that now. That’s the least of your worries,” the vet told Susan.

Too late she realized she’d been dealing with a puppy mill. The signs were all there: Wolf’s house was filthier and smelled worse every time she visited. He kept trying to sell her male puppies—presumably so he could keep the females for breeding purposes. The last time Susan visited him, she brought along Lily and Bella, and Wolf proudly showed her his kennel: a building filled with dogs in stacked crates. He seemed not to notice that the floors of the building were awash with urine. Susan’s own dogs were skating about on the slippery floors, and Lily began drooling uncontrollably, a sign of acute stress.

Susan was horrified by the rank conditions, and told Wolf so. “I said, ‘Michael, this is terrible. There are too many dogs to a cage. They aren’t even able to walk around and turn around.’ He said ‘Oh, no no. We’re cleaning. They’re not usually like this.’” Susan bathed her dogs when she got home that day and vowed never to go back. A year later, though, despite what she’d seen, she recommended Wolf to the Hewitts.

“He just kind of sucked me in,” Susan recalled years later. “He said, ‘You know I love dogs more than people’—that kind of stuff. And he made a big fuss over the dogs—the ones I saw.”

Chapter 16: Tackling the Puppy Mills

Robert
o. b
aker understood better than anyone how widespread the hidden world of puppy mills had become.

A former stockbroker from St. Louis, Baker, 59, began chronicling abuses in horse and dog racing and dog theft rings in the late 1970s. He wrote the book
The Misuse of Drugs in Horse Racing.
In 1980,
after
60 Minutes
featured his work,
the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) hired him to look into puppy mills.

His assignment was straightforward: Find out whether the federal Animal Welfare Act was making any headway in improving conditions at commercial kennels. The U.S. Congress had passed the law in 1966 and expanded it four years later to establish minimal standards for the care, housing, sale, and transport of dogs, cats, and other animals held by dealers or laboratories. Large-scale breeding kennels were now required to be licensed, and federal inspectors were supposed to inspect the kennels once a year. But the HSUS kept hearing anecdotal evidence that, ten years after taking effect, the law wasn’t making much of a difference. Dogs were still being inadequately housed, poorly bred dogs were still winding up in pet stores, and customers were still being victimized.

Baker got a job selling kennel supplies and equipment to brokers and breeders, which provided a crash course in the how-to’s of large-scale dog breeding. From time to time he also approached kennel operators on the pretext of buying a dog. Breeders weren’t always fooled; in Missouri, he was shot at by a kennel owner who discovered him on her property with a television camera crew. But most breeders had no problem letting him view their operations up close.

He quickly discovered that far from being hampered by the Animal Welfare Act, puppy mills were flourishing. Breeders routinely flouted the law’s minimum standards. In kennel after kennel—sometimes old chicken coops—he saw dogs confined to cages so small they could barely turn around, visibly hungry, and diseased. Pennsylvania’s farmers didn’t have chicken coops, so they housed their dogs in old washing machines and refrigerators or tied them to oil drums or abandoned cars, unprotected from the elements.

The lengths to which breeders were allowed to skirt already lenient regulations astounded Baker. For example, even though excrement was supposed to be removed regularly from a dog’s cage, federal inspectors were told not to issue a citation unless the fecal buildup was more than two weeks old. Inspectors typically let matters go three to four weeks before they cited a breeder. And left on their own, breeders tended to let the excrement build up even longer. Not until piles of fecal matter rose so high off the ground that they brushed the wire bottoms of the rabbit hutch-style cages was anything done, and then breeders remedied the problem by simply moving the hutches. It wasn’t unusual to see heaps of excrement dotting area farms; the heaps were never removed.

Worn-out dogs were killed and thrown away like garbage. In Missouri, Baker stumbled onto a kennel owner in a back field who was shooting to death about thirty American Eskimo Dogs and Samoyeds. The breeds weren’t as popular as they’d once been, and they’d stopped selling. Baker identified himself as a supplier, so the breeder didn’t think to cover up his actions. He assumed Baker would regard the killings the same way he did—business as usual.

Gradually, Baker pieced together the rise of puppy mills: how large-volume commercial dog breeding surfaced in the Midwest after World War II as mom-and-pop pet stores began to give way to corporate franchises; how marketing experts hired by the corporations had concocted an easy way to lure customers by putting adorable puppies in shop windows.

Americans’ rising prosperity escalated demand for purebred dogs, and the advent of shopping malls multiplied foot traffic past pet stores. Having a pet shop in a town meant families no longer had to search the want ads or drive out to a farm to examine a litter. At a pet store, they could choose from a variety of breeds, and once they picked out a dog, the supplies they needed—collar and leash, food, toys—were right there, too. Moreover, buyers could charge their purchases on a credit card, something amateur breeders weren’t set up to handle. Pet stores made it so easy to acquire a dog that many families found themselves buying one on impulse. Roughly half of the consumers who later complained to the HSUS about buying a sick dog admitted that they had left home that day with no intention of getting a pet.

The AKC registered these pet shop dogs by the tens of thousands. Between the mid-1940s and 1970, the number of registrations jumped from 77,000 a year to 1 million.

To meet the demand, brokers who supplied puppies to the stores needed a steady supply of dogs. They zeroed in on Missouri and Kansas, centrally located states that were home to hundreds of small, isolated farms. Breeding puppies was a boon to Midwestern egg farmers who’d been edged out by large corporations. Farmers could put their empty chicken coops to use by housing dogs in them instead. The U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged raising puppies as a way for farmers to supplement their income.

In the 1950s, department store chains such as Sears Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward were selling Poodles and Dalmatians alongside tool chests and bicycles, and puppy mills spread into Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. By the late 1970s, they were migrating east into Pennsylvania, putting them hundreds of miles closer to pet stores along the eastern seaboard. In 1981, a puppy broker from the Midwest held a demonstration in Lancaster County to show Amish and Mennonite farmers how, with little experience or investment, they could raise puppies for profit; several hundred farmers attended the workshop.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, dog brokers and pet stores dealt only with puppies that were registered with the AKC. Amish and Mennonite farmers didn’t understand how to fill out the AKC’s paperwork, however; their registration applications were filled with errors and, as a result, were frequently denied. To remedy the problem, the AKC sent field agents to Lancaster County to teach these breeders the proper way to register their dogs.

“Without the active assistance of the AKC, Pennsylvania puppy mills would have never been established,” Baker maintains. In fact, the Pennsylvania Federation of Dog Clubs, composed of member clubs of the AKC, was so livid over the AKC’s involvement that its president, Dotsie Keith, met with Baker and the Federation of Humane Societies to help draft the state’s original Dog Law. The legislature passed it in 1982.

By now, though, the industry was mushrooming. Across the country, breeders used the cachet of AKC registration papers to sell purebred puppies, and the AKC collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in registration fees. While nobody was looking, dog breeding exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry, profitable for operators but at the expense of millions of mistreated dogs.

Throughout the 1980s, the HSUS worked to rein in reckless breeders. With a camera in his pocket, Baker trespassed onto many properties to document abuse. By calling ahead and asking when a breeder was going to be home, he was also able to find out when they were going to be away. He steeled himself to avoid eye contact with the animals and focus instead on recording as many grim details as he could. “You’re just there to obtain evidence and get out,” he recalled. In a matter of several grueling months, he visited 284 kennels.

Armed with Baker’s research, the HSUS was able to push through some improvements. Pennsylvania and a few other states passed laws of their own to monitor large-volume dog breeding. Local humane societies frequently followed up on Baker’s investigations by filing animal cruelty charges against breeders.

In Kansas in the late 1980s, Baker led state attorney general Robert Stephan on a tour of licensed kennels. Stephan was so sickened by them that he prosecuted some of the breeders himself. He called the worst offenders the Dirty Thirty. Breeders across the state shut down their operations rather than risk finding themselves in Stephan’s crosshairs. The number of puppy mills in Kansas plummeted from nearly 1,200 to fewer than 300.

Meanwhile, the HSUS launched a campaign against Docktors Pet Center, the largest pet store chain in the United States, after discovering the stores were routinely selling sick dogs to customers. All 300 Docktors stores wound up closing as a result.

In 1993, Baker left his position as chief investigator for the HSUS to become a field investigator first for the Companion Animal Protection Society, and then for the Humane Farming Association. By 2005, he had visited more than 800 puppy mills and helped bring charges against dozens of breeders. He had done all he thought he could do and was ready to turn his attention elsewhere. He shipped a quarter-century’s worth of archives, including some 800 photos, to fellow advocate Libby Williams, the cofounder of New Jersey Consumers Against Pet Shop Abuse, or NJCAPSA for short.

A year later, though, Baker was pulled back into the fray. Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell was getting ready to crack down on puppy mills, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) asked Baker to step in and help.

Elected to office in 2002, Rendell had spent his first term trying to reverse the state’s high unemployment rate and jump-start its stagnant economy. He injected money into tourism and agriculture and launched a series of green initiatives to clean up rivers and streams and reclaim polluted industrial sites. The rumpled, self-confident officeholder had an ambitious agenda and was running for reelection in the fall. His schedule was on overload.

But Rendell was also a dog lover. He and his wife, Marjorie, a federal judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Third Circuit, had two Golden Retrievers adopted from rescue groups. No one needed to remind the governor that Pennsylvania was one of the top puppy-producing states in the country—infamous for the nickname Baker had bestowed upon it as the Puppy Mill Capital of the East. Roughly 2,500 kennels were licensed by the state to house anywhere from 26 to 500 dogs apiece, and hundreds more unlicensed kennels festered under the radar. In Lancaster County alone, Amish and Mennonite families operated 300 kennels, the largest concentration of puppy mills in the United States.

The proliferation of large-volume dog breeding was already a prickly subject with the governor. When a certain billboard surfaced along the Pennsylvania Turnpike one morning in February 2005, Rendell was downright mortified. The billboard showed a family of tourists decked out in Hawaiian shirts, riding gaily in a convertible, and in nostalgic, 1950s-era typography, the words, “Welcome to Scenic Lancaster County.” Below that it said, “Home to hundreds of puppy mills. Learn more about Pennsylvania’s notorious puppy mills. Visit these websites: mainlinerescue.com; stoppuppymills.org.”

Rendell decided to form an ad hoc committee to study the success of the state’s dog law. In January 2006, Baker met with the governor and agreed to serve on the panel. He was intimately familiar with Pennsylvania’s statutes; four years after helping push through passage of the Dog Law, he’d promoted a state puppy lemon law designed to compensate buyers who unwittingly purchased sick puppies.

The ad hoc committee consisted of representatives from the attorney general’s office, the ASPCA, a veterinarian, and several ordinary citizens. To Baker’s surprise, not everyone on the committee favored revamping the dog law. Several members blamed the problem on a few bad apples and overblown media coverage. “Even the person representing the governor’s office was terrible,” Baker said. “She made the comment that as long as there were poor people without health insurance, why were we worrying about dogs.”

To convince them otherwise, fellow committee member Marsha Perelman, a businesswoman from Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line and an ardent animal lover, hired an undercover investigator to document conditions at puppy mills. Baker followed up with more detective work of his own. He also turned to his friend Williams of NJCAPSA.

Williams, 55, had plenty of evidence to share. A passionate dog lover, she’d spent the last half-dozen years collecting and disseminating every iota of information she could find about Pennsylvania’s puppy mills. She attended conventions for breeders, stayed abreast of Dog Law Advisory Board doings, and kept track of problem breeders who ran afoul of the state Dog Law Bureau. She focused on Pennsylvania because, of the seventy-plus pet stores in New Jersey that sold puppies, as many as half sold dogs brought in from the Keystone State. The rest were trucked in by brokers from the Midwest.

From her ground-floor office in her home in southwestern New Jersey, operating mostly on her own dime, Williams helped seek recourse for consumers who’d purchased ill or dying puppies from breeders or pet stores. She dug up kennel inspection records and passed along to consumers the information necessary to file a complaint. Every once in a while she wrote the complaint herself.

Posing as an uninformed buyer, Williams wangled her way into more than a dozen Pennsylvania puppy mills. She wanted to see for herself if the appalling rumors she’d heard about these outfits were true. Not one of the dogs she saw in intensive confinement behaved normally; the animals either barked furiously or crouched in their cages, shell-shocked.