Saving Gracie (19 page)

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The enactment of the new dog law wasn’t the end of the story. The same week Rendell signed the new law, the Pennsylvania SPCA raided the Almost Heaven kennel in Upper Milford Township, home to more than 800 neglected animals, including 400 dogs found crammed into cages, many of them injured, dehydrated, and ill. The SPCA removed dozens of the dogs and filed cruelty charges against a repeat offender, breeder Derbe “Skip” Eckhart. The state revoked his kennel license almost immediately.

It frustrated advocates that two months earlier, Almost Heaven had passed a state inspection conducted by two dog wardens, their supervisor, and Sue West, the director of the Dog Law Bureau. The conditions discovered in October weren’t present the day of the August 7 inspection, bureau spokesman Chris Ryder said. But Pennsylvania SPCA head Howard Nelson said the animals suffered from chronic problems that could not have flared up in as quickly as a couple of months. Undercover investigators for his organization were buying sick and grimy dogs from the kennel months before state officials paid their visit.

Pattie Fontana, a longtime former sales manager for Almost Heaven, was one of the whistleblowers. She told the Allentown
Morning Call
that Eckhart used to feed his dogs raw, frozen chicken he threw onto the ground—a free-for-all that triggered vicious fights and left weaker dogs injured and starving. In rescue circles, the dogs taken from Almost Heaven were long known for their extraordinarily atrocious smell.

In late October, state dog wardens teamed up with the Humane League of Lancaster County to close an unlicensed kennel and seize twenty dogs. And in December, the state shut down the kennel operated by Ervin Zimmerman, the breeder who had remained in business even after his license was revoked. Ninety-six dogs were removed.

By year’s end, the newly formed Canine Health Board had approved new standards governing temperature, humidity, ammonia levels, and lighting in large kennels. The regulations weren’t perfect, but they were far superior to standards required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Baker said. After thirty years of tracking puppy mills, he was finally seeing progress.

Chapter 19: Elsewhere, Suffering

The website of the Pine Bluff Kennel in Lyles, Tennessee, suggested a veritable dog heaven. It was filled with bucolic photographs of rolling farmland and descriptions of how the dogs kept there were free to romp about on all ninety-two acres. When local law enforcement raided the kennel in June 2008, they documented a much harsher reality: Pomeranians, Chihuahuas, German Shepherds, Great Danes, and other breeds were crowded two and three to a hutch—nearly 700 dogs in all—and exposed to summer temperatures and humidity so unrelenting they were at risk of suffering heat stroke. Newborn puppies were kept in a whelping trailer that was even more suffocating.

Stephanie Shain encounters that sort of deception all too frequently in the dog breeding world. She aches for the dogs bred in substandard kennels and the people who buy them. “At the end of this pipeline,” she said, “there’s a chance they’ll end up with a big bill and a dead puppy.”

Shain, 38, is the driving force behind a puppy mill offensive being waged by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Launched in 2006, the HSUS says it’s the most comprehensive effort undertaken by an animal welfare organization in the sixty-year history of large-volume dog breeding.

“With Stephanie at the helm, for the first time we have the prospect of addressing this issue in a fundamental way and stopping the abuse of dogs in puppy mills,” HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle said.

An army brat, Shain always had pets growing up. The family’s cats slept in her and her sister’s beds, and there was always a Labrador Retriever or Lab mix in the house. During visits to her grandfather’s farm in Iowa, she would point to a particularly cute animal and beg, “Please, Grandpa, don’t kill calf number 257.”

The family moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, when she was in high school. After college, she got a job at the Bucks County SPCA, where she cleaned kennels, took in stray animals, and adopted out dogs and cats. The shelter work made her realize how often mixed breeds—many of them smart, affectionate animals—wound up on a shelter’s death row simply because they were neither puppies nor purebreds, which were the types of dogs most families were looking to adopt.

Shain spent five years working at a veterinary hospital and at the American Anti-Vivisection Society in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, which lobbied against the use of animals in testing and research. In 2000, she landed her job at the HSUS in Washington, D.C. For the first few years, she helped pet owners solve behavior problems and find housing that permitted dogs or cats—anything to help pets remain in the homes they already had. She promoted adoption and spay/neutering. Her time in Pennsylvania, though, had piqued her awareness about a more urgent issue: Unbeknown to the public, hundreds of thousands of dogs were spending their lives in grimy crates, producing puppies. Puppy mills were a hidden scandal in America, and the problem was getting worse.

She began pestering Pacelle to get involved.

With 11 million members and $120 million in annual revenue, the HSUS was the country’s largest animal welfare group, capable of generating headlines with the issues it chose to showcase. Among the hot-button topics on its plate were cockfighting, factory farms, canned hunts of captive exotic animals, and the commercial fur trade.

Pacelle was open to Shain’s arguments. He knew that puppy mills affected untold numbers of animals. More than 4,000 large-volume kennels were licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and many more operated off the radar. Second, while other organizations had addressed large-volume breeding, none had the resources of HSUS.

The biggest question was whether the HSUS could make a difference in curtailing puppy mills by persuading the public not to do business with puppy mills. Shain was confident they could make headway. If dog lovers really knew how many puppies were sold by these unsavory operations, they would do the right thing and not buy dogs who came from puppy mills, she argued. But someone needed to inform them of the terrible truth. “People were supporting this horribly cruel industry and they didn’t even know it,” she said.

Pacelle agreed to launch the anti-puppy-mill campaign. Shain’s first step was to hire Kathleen Summers, a staff person dedicated exclusively to the cause of puppy mill reform. By then, raids of problem kennels had started to escalate. The same month authorities dismantled Michael Wolf’s kennel in Pennsylvania, the owners of Pearlie’s House of Pomeranians in Orange County, California, pleaded guilty to selling sick and neglected puppies—thirty-nine of their dogs were found stuffed in a closet in their attic. At a kennel near Searcy, Arkansas, officials seized seventy-seven Pugs and Terriers, some of them with chewed ears and missing toes. In Oklahoma, 130 dogs were taken from a breeder who had let the water in their bowls become black and the food moldy. Rescuers found a newly dead puppy being eaten by a rat.

The Dog Law Governor Ed Rendell was working to revamp in Pennsylvania was already more rigorous than the federal law regulating large-volume commercial dog breeding. The USDA’s Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service had about 100 inspectors—barely twice as many as Pennsylvania alone—responsible for inspecting 10,000 kennels, zoos, and research labs nationwide. The standards set for high-volume dog kennels were minimal, and pet stores weren’t inspected at all; they were exempted on the theory that customers could see for themselves whether the animals were being treated humanely. The USDA’s own inspector general concluded in 1992 that federal inspectors could not ensure the humane care and treatment of animals as required by the Animal Welfare Act.

In 2005, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican from Pennsylvania, introduced the federal Pet Animal Welfare Statute, which would have required anyone selling more than twenty-five dogs a year to meet the same standards as large-volume wholesalers. The HSUS and the American Veterinary Medical Association supported the legislation, as did the American Kennel Club. Many of the AKC’s member clubs fought the bill, however, on the grounds that the extra paperwork and inspections would be too cumbersome. The bill died.

Over the past forty years, the number of dogs in the United States had more than quadrupled, to 77 million. Nearly two-thirds of all American households now had a dog, a cat, a bird, or other companion animal, and nearly half of pet owners considered their pets to be members of the family, according to a 2007 survey by the American Veterinary Medical Association. By 2008, the country’s love for animals had exploded into a $43 billion industry, the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association said.

The growing interest in dogs fueled an increase in large-volume breeding. Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were the biggest dog-breeding states. By far, Missouri had the most: It was home to 4,000 kennels, many of them not licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In Oklahoma, the number of registered breeders had doubled to 702 between 1996 and 2006. A 2007 investigation by the
Tulsa World
estimated that from 2003 to 2006, federal inspectors found 20,000 dogs in Oklahoma living in filthy conditions or suffering health problems—and those were just at the licensed kennels. Meanwhile, Amish and Mennonite breeders unwilling to abide by Pennsylvania’s tougher scrutiny had begun moving to Wisconsin and the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where they could buy cheap farmland and resume business under much more lax regulations.

The dog industry was booming. In 2005, the Hunte Corporation, the country’s largest puppy broker, bought more than 88,000 dogs from breeders of all types and sold them to pet stores. Thousands more breeders sold directly on the Internet, advertising puppies for sale on sites such as nextdaypets.com, puppyfind.com, and terrificpets.com. Thanks to a sizable loophole in the federal law, breeders who sold directly to the public didn’t have to be licensed or inspected by the federal government. Despite the existence of puppy lemon laws in several states, on-line buyers who wound up with diseased or injured pets were largely out of luck.

By 2007, the HSUS estimated that anywhere from 2 to 4 million puppy mill dogs were being sold each year in the United States, and that the number of puppy mills had swelled to 10,000. The organization defined puppy mills broadly—as any operation that confined dogs to cages, regardless of how clean or well fed the dogs were. “Dogs being bred should be part of the family. They shouldn’t be sitting out there in cages and kennels,” Shain said.

The HSUS assumed that 80 percent of U.S. Department of Agriculture Class A-licensed breeders were puppy mills. There were 4,228 breeders licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2009, and the HSUS calculated that 3,382 were puppy mills. Assuming the average kennel had sixty dogs (which was the case in Pennsylvania; national data is unavailable because federal inspectors aren’t required to count dogs), and assuming that 65 percent of the dogs were female (because a smaller number of male dogs can impregnate many more females), that came to 131,914 breeding females. Multiply that number by 4.7 (the average litter size, as provided by the AKC during congressional testimony), and again by two, because the average female dog produces two litters a year, and the total came to 1,239,988 puppies a year. And that was only facilities licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The HSUS’s data suggested that the actual number of breeding kennels in the United States was twice the number of licensed kennels, which meant double the number of puppies. The organization’s “very conservative” figure: 2,479,976 puppies born in puppy mills each year.

“They’re everywhere,” Shain said of puppy mills. “There isn’t a state that can say they are immune to this problem. With the Internet being what it is today, it’s so easy to sell [puppies]. You can put an ad online and stick that puppy on a plane.”

Stephanie Shain of the Humane Society of the United States cradles a Yorkie rescued from a puppy mill in Lyles, Tennessee, in 2008. Nearly 700 dogs were removed from the kennel. (
Michelle Riley
)

She finds it a sad irony that at the same time breeders are cranking out puppies, animal shelters euthanize as many as 4 million dogs and cats a year, according to an HSUS estimate.

The HSUS created a website with facts about puppy mills, and in December 2006 the organization launched a billboard campaign similar to the one Main Line Animal Rescue was waging in Pennsylvania. “Find out the true cost of that puppy—
www.puppymilltruth.org
,” the billboards said. The first signs went up in Columbus, Ohio; Norwalk, Connecticut; and Los Angeles—cities where puppy mill problems had recently come to light.

The following year, state and local law enforcers and humane officers raided dozens of substandard kennels. In Bloomer, Arkansas, 114 dogs were found abandoned in the scorching sun. In Buxton, Maine, 250 Australian Shepherds, French Bulldogs, Brussels Griffons, and Shetland Sheepdogs were removed from squalid conditions. In Houston, fifty starving American Bulldogs were rescued. In Van Buren County, Arkansas, 200 dogs covered in feces and urine were carried to safety. In Burns, Oregon, nearly 200 dogs were seized. In Jackson County, Missouri, sixty Labrador Retrievers were taken from a kennel. And in Dyersburg, Tennessee, more than 130 puppies were removed from cages, including one puppy who had scald marks from lying in its own urine.

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In 2007, after
fielding numerous complaints about negligent kennels in Virginia, the HSUS spent five months investigating that state’s dog-breeding industry. They found that only sixteen of Virginia’s breeders were licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The number of unlicensed commercial kennels was far greater: 900 kennels in all. After watching video footage shot by the HSUS, Carroll County authorities raided the kennel of Hillsville, Virginia, breeder Junior Horton and rescued 980 Yorkshire Terriers, Poodles, Maltese, Shih Tzu, Lhasa Apsos, and other small dogs—nearly twice as many dogs as Horton was licensed to have—from filthy cages. Volunteers from as far away as Florida and New York descended on the tiny town to help care for the dogs. Pacelle called the kennel “an inevitable consequence of an out-of-control and irresponsible industry.”

Horton disputed the use of the term “puppy mill” to describe his operation. He was convicted of animal cruelty and neglect, but his punishment was light. The judge in the case ordered him to pay $4,775 in veterinary costs, suspended his twelve-year prison sentence, and put him on probation, but allowed Horton to continue operating with 250 dogs. An appeals court judge upheld the verdict.

Lenient judgments were all too common. Hoping to minimize the burden of caring for hundreds of rescued dogs, officials frequently cut deals that let breeders off easy so that victimized dogs could be adopted out quickly. The case of Gallatin, Tennessee, breeder Irene Meuser was a good example. In October 2006, acting on a tip, more than 100 local authorities, volunteers, and veterinarians descended on Meuser’s property where, in three outbuildings, they found 36 cats and 246 sick and malnourished Poodles, Shih Tzu, Chihuahuas, and other small dogs in cages so cramped some of them were unable to stand. The animals’ food and water bowls were dirty, and the smell of ammonia was so pungent that rescuers had to strap on ventilation masks. This wasn’t the first time Meuser had been in trouble. Authorities had investigated her eleven years earlier, but hadn’t charged her with any crime. She was given guidelines for housing the dogs, but no one had followed up to see whether she was following them.