The Doggie in the Window

by Rory Kress

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  Copyright © 2018 by Rory Kress

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Jennifer K. Beal Davis

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Race, who was with me all along.

  INTRODUCTION

  My Favorite Mistake

  I love my dog Izzie. But I hate that she exists.

  Izzie is the gangly, self-possessed wheaten terrier who shares my home. Barely twenty-eight pounds soaking wet with a saliva-heavy tennis ball in her mouth, she’s embarrassingly quick to lock eyes and spread her legs to solicit a belly rub from a stranger. She’s imperious and strong-willed, marching all four paws to the beat of her own drum whether it’s convenient for us or not. While her independence is unrivaled, she knows when to soften her moxie, when to comfort and keep company. On sleepless nights when I pace the halls of our home, she waits for me by my bedroom door before I even set a foot to the floor. When mired in stress at my laptop, I’ll find her jet-black nose on my thigh before I can even think to call her to me.

  Izzie is the first and only dog I’ve ever had. And like every dog owner, I’ve always assumed that Izzie is special and unique among the rest of the canine rabble. When I walk down the street, other dogs are just dogs. They’re cute and lovable, but Izzie is set apart. To me, she’s more than a dog. And much the way most people feel about their human soul mates, I’m grateful that somehow I found her and she found me, certain that no other animal could ever take her place. And yet, by bringing Izzie into my home, I thoughtlessly supported an industry that ruthlessly harms animals just like her.

  Izzie might be a puppy mill dog.

  So where my world seems simple through Izzie’s eyes—Is it a bed? Can it be a bed? Is it food? Can it be food?—her world is dizzyingly complicated through mine.

  It all started out so innocently. I wanted a dog. My husband—then just my boyfriend—was bullied into wanting a dog. We asked around where we could find one. We were living in Brooklyn at the time, and a few family members recommended a pet shop on Long Island. I resisted. I thought I knew about puppy mills, and I was aware that pet shop dogs supposedly come from these horrifying places. But our relatives insisted that this shop was different and that they’d been buying long-lived, healthy dogs there for years.

  “But aren’t those puppy mill dogs?” I’d asked at the time, not even sure what puppy mills were exactly, but knowing that I must oppose them.

  “No way. They’re all from licensed breeders,” we were assured.

  I pulled up the shop’s website. There, in big, bold letters: “We do not support puppy mills, backyard, or hobby breeders.” Then, below, in bigger letters still: “Licensed breeders only” with three logos: the American Kennel Club, the USDA, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service arm of the USDA (APHIS). I was impressed. Until that moment, I hadn’t even known that the USDA regulates dog breeding in this country. The USDA’s stamp of approval tells me what meat is safe to eat, which eggs are fresh, which milk I can drink. We all put a lot of faith in this government agency every single day without a second thought. So if these were dogs coming from USDA-licensed facilities, I reasoned, they could not be coming from puppy mills. It all seemed very official to me. But it’s that very faith in the government that puppy dealers take advantage of, hiding behind the imprimatur of the USDA to give their work the appearance of legitimacy. And I was a perfect mark: I wanted to fall in love with a dog so badly, I just accepted that the agency in charge of so much dead meat governs the way living dogs are treated.

  When I pictured puppy mills, like most people, I pictured something illegal. I imagined seedy, underground operations where dogs are tortured and bred to death in secret, canine sweatshops so far from the eye of the law that no one can know. That’s what most of us have been trained to envision, so used to the horrific images on the late-night infomercials or the grainy, undercover videos aired on the evening news magazines. We see these facilities and assume they must be illegal. How couldn’t they be?

  But many of them aren’t. Sure, those places we’ve seen on TV are puppy mills. And sure, as in any industry, there are bad actors, and some of them are illegal. But many of the commercial breeding operations that we’ve come to call puppy mills are, in fact, 100 percent legal. Thousands of them. Yes, even the horrifying ones we’ve seen on TV. Federal employees inspect them at least once a year. The owners are licensed by the USDA. The agriculture agency evaluates these facilities based on requirements set forth in a federal law signed in 1966 called the Animal Welfare Act. But even if these facilities pass government inspections with no violations every year, many are still unquestionably abusing their dogs.

  Because, trouble is, if you’re a dog, the lax standards of care laid out in the Animal Welfare Act don’t do you much good.

  More than two million puppies are sold every year from our nation’s dog breeders. This number includes puppies born to breeders of all stripes: USDA-licensed and unlicensed, illegal puppy mills and meticulous show breeders alike, according to the Humane Society of the United States, the nation’s largest nonprofit organization fighting animal cruelty. Just over
one million of those puppies come from USDA-licensed facilities, born to the more than 165,000 dogs kept for breeding purposes on these properties—again, according to the Humane Society, which often keeps better records than our government on this issue. I wish I could give you official numbers, but the USDA has informed me that it does not keep a record of how many total dogs are produced nationwide at its more than two thousand licensed facilities because the Animal Welfare Act does not require it to do so.

  Because Izzie was one of the million dogs who are born at USDA-licensed breeding facilities every year, I’ve traveled across the country investigating this federally regulated system. I wanted to understand how the government can do a better job of upholding and enforcing the Animal Welfare Act—the role the USDA has been charged with in overseeing our nation’s breeders. Beyond that, I’ve interviewed veterinarians, rescuers, animal welfare advocates, dog breeders, and even a top official at the USDA who all agree that the Animal Welfare Act mandates a minimal standard of care at best. So if, in fact, the regulations do little more than promote basic survival in a breeding operation, even one small misstep could be the difference between life and death for a dog in one of these facilities.

  But beyond Izzie, there’s another reason I’ve focused my investigation on USDA-licensed breeders.

  There will always be illegal operations in any industry. The commercial dog-breeding world is no exception. The government should do everything in its power to find and prosecute these operations, to be sure. However, the bigger lapse in my mind, as a dog owner and as a taxpayer who is bankrolling our country’s agencies in their work, is how our government can be tasked with regulating an industry by holding it to subpar standards that, even when met, harm these dogs. What’s more, how can the government agency tasked with upholding these minimal standards fail to do even that? In this way, the government is complicit in abusing the dogs that unwillingly produce the puppies we so cherish. And when it comes to those puppies, why are we, as a society and as consumers, so quick to lavish money and love on the animals in our homes after purchasing them from places where they are so callously used and even tortured?

  So maybe Izzie, the dog who sleeps in my bed and eagerly snaps up green beans from my fingertips, has a happy ending to her story. Like Izzie, many dogs born in puppy mills for purchase in our nation’s pet stores and on the internet surely go to happy homes where they’re raised lovingly, appearing in family Christmas cards and dutifully serving as ring bearers in their owners’ weddings. But what about these dogs’ mothers whose lives have been commoditized so we could enjoy the luxury of raising their offspring? What if we took the time to imagine the life of the dog we purchased had it been kept behind as breeding stock instead of shipped off for sale?

  The day we took Izzie home, we were satisfied customers of a broken system. Given how happy we are with her, we should have never questioned where our four-legged firstborn came from. For the most part, the people who have purchased from pet shops and now speak out about them are those who have ended up with a sick dog. We have not. That is neither our story nor my motivation in investigating this industry. I am not an animal rights activist but a journalist. Even then, animal issues have never been my beat. But over the years, as I went about my life, producing and reporting stories in my work for NBC’s Today Show and other outlets, Izzie became unquestioningly an integral part of the fabric of my family.

  As a journalist, I approach the world with an unremitting sense of curiosity. I see life through a binary lens: is this a story or not? For those first few years, Izzie fell into my journalistic blind spot. She was not a story as far as I was concerned. I’d toss her a treat and give her a kiss on the nose as I’d head off to work on stories that I thought people needed to hear. She was my pet, and I grew to love her more than I ever thought possible. But with time came a churning suspicion as I couldn’t help but look at her and wonder: Who the hell is this dog, and where did she really come from?

  It’s an ugly thing to question the ones we love. Still, I only knew of one way to handle this nagging curiosity that would not leave me be. I would have much preferred to go about my life ignorantly and guiltlessly adoring my dog. But I couldn’t. So I began researching, investigating, and searching for the truth about Izzie. But by entering into her world—the real world she came from and not the one we chose to construct for her in our home—I found a much more complicated story than the one about my own dog. Just as she does on our walks, Izzie pulled at the leash, leading me—ready or not—to find the truth about how all our dogs come into this world and how our government, time and time again, is willfully failing to ensure their health, sanity, safety, and well-being despite taking up the mantle of their protection.

  So what happens when the Animal Welfare Act provides inadequate regulations for breeding dogs humanely and the USDA, a federal agency, is unable or even unwilling to enforce these regulations appropriately or transparently?

  You get Izzie. And you get an American public wrongfully trusting a broken system to breed for us the animals we call family.

  THE

  DOGGIE IN

  THE WINDOW

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Keep ’Em in Business Act

  “She’s gorgeous,” a doe-eyed hipster with two full sleeves of tattoos says to me as Izzie jumps up and plants her muddy paws on the woman’s skin-tight jeans. We’re at the Cipriani of the canine world: McCarren Dog Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But here, the mutt is king, and any distinguishable breed is decidedly uncool. Izzie is just poorly groomed enough to pass. “Where’d you rescue her from?”

  “Long Island?” I try awkwardly.

  It’s a question I hear often when walking Izzie: Where’d you rescue her from? The assumption runs deep. Even when people fail to word it precisely that way, they never ask where we bought her or what pet store she came from. The notion that I could be shamelessly parading around a pet store pup is unthinkable in many parts of the country, particularly in the urban enclaves where we’ve typically lived.

  The other question I field most often with Izzie from passersby or other dog owners is this: What is she?

  Well, she’s a dog. She’s a scavenger in the kitchen. She’s a terror when she’s moody. She’s the light of my life. But yes—you guessed it—she’s not a mutt. In short, she’s a wheaten terrier.

  Then there’s the more subtly phrased What’s she a mix of?

  This question often comes from a more polite subset of the same people who ask where she was rescued from. They mean well, stroking Izzie’s silky ears as she bows and flirts with them. Sometimes they’ll add She’s just so unusual looking! and hazard a few guesses of what breeds might be making up Izzie’s special brew. The conversation quickly chills when I’m forced to break it to them that, to the best of my knowledge, she’s not a mix of anything. Supposedly, she’s all wheaten. I sense in these interactions that this answer creates discomfort with some—if she’s not a mix, she’s probably not a rescue, many will rightly assume. Statistically, they would be right: purebreds only make up about a quarter of dogs found in shelters, according to the Humane Society.

  Over the years, their discomfort has become my discomfort and, to a greater extent, my anxiety. I see their faces when they hear my answers fall short of their expectations, and I know they are judging my compassion and love of animals as inadequate. I watch as Izzie shrinks in their eyes from a lovable, Dickensian orphan, rescued from an unspeakable fate, to just a puppy mill dog, the instrument of heartache for millions of canines nationwide.

  Once it becomes clear that Izzie is neither a mix nor a rescue, a third question sometimes comes from the more intrepid and, admittedly confrontational, few: Well, did you at least get her from a breeder?

  I try to dodge the question when things get this far. I make a joke, something like Well, she’s a wheaten terrier the way that a Coach bag from Canal Street is a real Coach bag. The joke doesn’t play quite as well outside of New York City, so someti
mes I’ll just say She’s a knockoff and hope I’m off the hook.

  My husband, Dan, handles these questions in his own way. Most of the time, he just says Yep, she came from a breeder. He’s a lawyer, so he’s comfortable with the semantics. As far as he sees it, he is telling the truth: Obviously she came from a breeder. Someone had to breed her; she didn’t just fall out of the sky. Fair enough. But I know better: not all breeders are created equal. Or rather, not all breeders are creating dogs equally.

  These questions I encounter while walking Izzie all zero in on a central anxiety that plagues most dog owners in this country: these pups may be our “fur babies” now—but whose babies are they really?

  While Izzie may be one in a million to me, she’s actually one of about ninety million—that’s how many domestic dogs currently share our homes in this country. So where are all these dogs coming from? Only 23 percent of them are being adopted from shelters and rescues.1 That leaves an overwhelming majority of us with an uncomfortable question to answer about the provenance of our pooches.

  As a member of this quiet majority who has to come to terms with the truth of where our dogs came from, I can say that we all handle it quite differently.

  Some of us believe what we want to believe. Take, for example, our friends who purchased a dog online. The puppy was shipped to them from out of state to be picked up in a crate at the nearest airport, sans escort. They would never admit to themselves or anyone else that this dog came from anything other than a reputable source—but without ever laying eyes on anything but pictures of their dog as a puppy posted online, how would they know?

  Then there are the deniers who will rock their purebred, pet shop dogs to sleep in their arms every night while waging wars on social media against pet shops and puppy mills with the ubiquitous hashtag Adopt Don’t Shop.

  Or there are the foolhardy few, like me, who genuinely want to know the truth and are naïve enough to think they can try to understand it. Maybe that’s why there’s no hashtag to represent this curious but ashamed group; perhaps I’m the only one.