The Doggie in the Window

by Rory Kress

  He’s right, unfortunately. As we’ve seen, there is nothing in the Animal Welfare Act mandating the mental stimulation of breeding dogs. Pete raises an essential point: these dogs are animals we are breeding to be pets, not food. They are prized and bred because of their value as companion animals whose mental well-being enriches our lives by their sides. So why is this vital part of their makeup not being accounted for in how they’re bred? I believe it’s largely because the breeding stock are so rarely seen on the other end of the transaction. As long as the puppies seem well enough, who’s to know the difference?

  After speaking with Pete, I take Izzie on a walk to clear my head and process the ugliness revealed in our conversation. It’s a brisk October day, and Izzie prances ahead on the leash. She seems happy and blissfully unaware in the afternoon sun. It strikes me that she’s a perfect example for why the well-being of dogs in breeding facilities is ignored: she seems mostly fine to my eye. I wonder what damage could possibly be done if I was able to get her so early in her life—maybe twelve weeks old at the most. As we walk, a snippet of my conversation with animal neurobehavioral scientist Overall pops into my head. As we’d analyzed the regulations in the Animal Welfare Act, I’d mentioned, in passing, that the puppies shipped off for sale are too young to be fully scarred by their experience in the breeding operation.

  “Maybe the breeding facility hasn’t left enough of a mental impression on the puppies by the time they’re shipped off,” I’d said.

  “Oh yes, it has,” she’d said. “That is what the data are now showing us.”

  I stop in my tracks. Izzie looks back at me, confused by the sudden halt. I turn around and jog back to my desk, Izzie galloping in tow. She high-steps beside me eagerly, certain my change of speed and direction is a game. I reach out immediately to Overall, asking if she’d be willing to actually meet Izzie and demonstrate if she—happy as she seems to me—was somehow permanently scarred by her experience at the USDA-licensed breeding facility where she was born. To my surprise, Overall kindly agrees. I book a flight for Izzie and me to head to her lab in the Philadelphia suburbs within a few weeks. Until then, I stare at this dog, perched on my couch, and helplessly wonder: What will Overall find? Has the damage really been done?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When a Dog Is Livestock

  In the weeks ahead of our trip to Dr. Overall’s lab, I begin the challenging process of unpacking my assumptions about dogs. My only experience with dogs to date has been with Izzie, my pet. But that relationship does not reflect the entire spectrum of how dogs are owned in this country.

  No one would ever question that Izzie, splayed across my bed, flat on her belly, laying waste to a tennis ball, is a pet. And yet in the context of a breeding operation, Izzie would not be considered a pet at all—she’d be livestock. As much as the notion of my Izzie being anything but a pet chills me, it’s a question I have to ask in order to understand this industry: Is a dog livestock? After all, dog-breeding facilities are inspected by the United States Department of Agriculture. So, emotions aside, maybe there isn’t much difference between a dog, a cow, or a pig? Or perhaps the more precise question would be when is a dog a pet and when is a dog livestock? As it turns out, that depends.

  Before I launch into this point, I do want to say that mistreatment of any animal—whether pet or livestock—is a terrible thing in my opinion. The thought of inflicting pain or stress on any animal upsets me, whether that animal is destined for the dinner table, the doghouse, or the foot of the bed. But I feel it is important to emphasize that you do not need to be a vegetarian or a vegan to appreciate the profound harm specifically being done to dogs when they are treated as farm animals or livestock. And while the conditions in our nation’s factory farms for our food are abhorrent, there are many excellent books and documentaries on this topic already available. So in this book, I will focus exclusively on the farming of dogs for the purpose of becoming pets while remaining transparent in my belief that factory farming of any kind should be a national concern.

  Most dictionaries define livestock as a farm animal that is viewed as an asset. It’s easy to see how a breeder’s dogs fit into that category. But it’s not so easy to see how a dog kept as a pet could be viewed that way. After all, any assessor of my family’s meager net worth would be more likely to classify Izzie as a loss leader rather than as an asset of any monetary value—even if, to me, she might be the most precious thing I own.

  And there it is again: I do own her, don’t I?

  For as much as we come to love the dogs who take up residence with us, they lack the rights that many of us assume they have—which is to say, they actually have no rights at all. In every single state in this country, animals are property. In the context of most commercial breeding operations, dogs are considered livestock. In some states, a dog in a breeding facility is, in fact, legally designated as livestock. As an agricultural commodity, a breeder’s dog is expected to put forth a healthy enough litter at least once every six months or on every heat until the animal can breed no more. Then, in most cases, the animal is euphemistically retired. For some breeders, as we know, the word retired is synonymous with shot.

  More often than not, we treat our companion animals well because it brings us joy and because we love them. But when our relationship is not based on love and mutual enrichment and instead becomes about mass production and profit margins, things change. These animals are very much at our mercy to provide and care for them, to go above and beyond what the law demands. So why are dogs vulnerable to the will of their humans—whether breeder or pet owner—to treat them with kindness, indifference, or neglect? Precisely because we are their owners, not their family.

  This legal understanding of animals as property cuts to the very complicated core of our relationship with them. And dogs, more than any other animal, have become commodities. We buy a golden retriever because it is loyal, dependable, and is expected to live a long, healthy life by our side. Our consumer behavior is in many ways similar to the way we buy an American-made pickup truck because it is strong, dependable, and expected to run for many years to come. We buy an English bulldog for its unique and unusual looks and because its high price tag denotes exclusivity—even if its lifespan will be curtailed and it will struggle to breathe from the day it’s born. It’s the same way we might buy a vintage sports car: it may not last long on the road, and it’s certainly not practical, but we love the way it looks and what it says about us.

  Breeds are brands; dogs are goods for sale. And just like any other commodity that we mass-produce in this country, dogs are being subjected to factory conditions. That is, however, until they’re living in our homes and are sleeping in our beds. Then, as if by magic, they become family. The dog hasn’t changed. The context has.

  “All animals are property in every state. They don’t have legal rights,” animal law expert Tischler explains to me. “State anticruelty laws are protections, not rights. A legal right would be something the animal could have initiated on his or her behalf, and we can’t do that. I can’t sue on behalf of an animal, because they are property. That’s the rule in every single state in the United States. When you’re dealing with puppy mills, you have a commercial breeding operation, where all the animals are property.”1

  It is worth noting that the United States lags behind much of the rest of the Western world in our protections of animals. Most European countries began rejecting factory-farming practices decades ago and have upgraded the protections afforded to their animals. In 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon, which amended the constitution of the European Union, was updated to include a reference to animals as “sentient beings” who, going forward, would have their welfare considered in continental lawmaking.2

  But even in the EU, animals do not have rights. India, however, includes actual rights for animals in its constitution, the top of the list being that it is “the fundamental duty of every citizen of India to have compassion for all living creatures.”3


  So back here in the United States, Izzie is my property, just like my TV, my dining room table, and my couch. But if my husband and I were to divorce, the TV, dining room table, and couch would be divvied up by equitable distribution. Both my husband and I may wish to keep our couch in the event of a divorce, but no court will consider that battle a custody dispute. Izzie, on the other hand, might join the growing ranks of other dogs and cats around the nation who are increasingly involved in legal custody disputes. Then a court might treat her as something more than simply property.

  But the law bears out contradictions. If Izzie had died in my arms as a result of irresponsible breeding, I could only sue for the price I paid for her. In some states, I might even be able to recoup some of her medical costs. But emotional damages would not be awarded; she would be treated in this instance, by the court, as property.

  For most dog owners, the contradictions inherent in the legal status of our four-legged friends are a non-issue. By and large, most domestic dog owners are not breeding their pets. With any luck, most of us will not get entangled in a bitter divorce that sparks a custody battle over the dog. Hopefully, most of us will not watch our dogs die prematurely due to bad breeding. And for the most part, dog owners are not making money off of their pooches—reality TV talent competition winners and Instagram celebrity pups notwithstanding. But as consumers of the dog-breeding industry, it is clear we are buying into a business that manufactures the pets we love by turning their species into an agricultural commodity or livestock.

  And as any farmer will tell you, with livestock comes dead stock.

  Regardless of what I may think or what Joe Breeder might think about whether a dog is livestock, what does the law say? The answer depends on what state you’re in. Sometimes statutes within the same state contradict each other. Over the years, state and even federal courts have occasionally waded into the morass—is a dog livestock or isn’t it?

  UNITED STATES V. PARK (2008)4

  Perhaps the most famous instance of a court’s struggle to define whether a dog is livestock got its start in Idaho. In the late 1980s, Ron and Mary Park purchased a parcel of land along the Clearwater River that was subject to a scenic easement. The easement allowed them to live on the land and engage in livestock farming, but it prohibited all other commercial activities. The term livestock farming within the easement was not defined. When the Parks purchased the land, there was already a chicken coop on the property, and later, the Forest Service gave them the go-ahead to add horse stalls.

  All went without incident for about a decade until, in 1997, the Parks opened up Wild River Kennels on their property. They began advertising their new enterprise that offered dog training, boarding, breeding, and a German Shorthaired breed-specific rescue. Within a year, the Forest Service told the Parks that Wild River Kennels was in violation of the scenic easement on their land, as the new business was a commercial enterprise and did not qualify as livestock farming. The Parks, as you might expect, disagreed; as far as they were concerned, dogs are livestock.

  This disagreement continued until 2005 when the federal government filed suit. The Parks argued that their dog-breeding and kennel business was, in fact, an instance of livestock farming—which would be permissible under the terms of the easement. The government shot back that under Idaho law, dogs are not livestock. The district court granted summary judgment siding with the government, agreeing that dogs are not livestock, but it did not dive into the process of defining what exactly constitutes livestock farming. The Parks were ordered to shut down the kennel, seemingly a victory for the dogs-are-not-livestock camp.

  But the case escalated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which set out to dig down into what exactly constitutes livestock. Ultimately, the court concluded that the term livestock—in this case—was ambiguous and could potentially include dogs. The Ninth Circuit reversed the prior ruling that the Parks shut down Wild River Kennels and sent the case back to the district court to sort out.

  There, U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge filed a new ruling in 2009 that further clarified whether dogs are livestock—or, perhaps more accurately, which dogs constituted livestock.

  “The court finds that the dogs being used on the easement property for breeding, hunting, and boarding are dogs being used for work and/or profit and can be considered livestock,” Judge Lodge wrote. “A family dog that does not work on the farm, is not bred, or is not used to help produce food when a person hunts is just a family pet and is not livestock.”5

  The distinction in this ruling highlights a very strange but critical legal conundrum: if a farmer has two dogs on the same property, the one used for breeding may be considered livestock, while the other dog living in the house may be considered a pet or companion animal. As such, these two dogs have different legal protections.

  “Same dog, different places, different protections, different classifications. The dog hasn’t changed, the dog’s threshold for pain hasn’t changed, the dog’s needs haven’t changed,” animal law expert Tischler tells me of this odd legal discrepancy.

  While this may seem like yet another battle of semantics, it most certainly is not. Legal distinctions and definitions have significant implications governing how these two animals are treated—and the differences are stark. In some states, only the abuse of a companion animal can be tried as a felony. Livestock—not so much.

  By way of example, let’s go back to Kathy Jo Bauck, the breeder that Pete, my undercover investigator source, helped to bring down in court. She is the most famous example of how classifying dogs as livestock can have major legal implications.

  When Bauck unwittingly hired Pete to work at her breeding facility back in 2008, he was operating undercover for the Companion Animal Protection Society (CAPS). His hidden camera bore witness to the nonstop parade of horrors at her facility, and his footage was shown in court at her trial. The images show seriously wounded dogs at her facility who were malnourished and, in some cases, actively undergoing seizures or being submerged in pesticides. With Pete’s footage and testimony revealing the full extent of her crimes, a jury convicted Bauck of three counts of torture and one count of animal cruelty in a Minnesota courtroom in March 2009. However, she was acquitted of felony charges, and these acts could only be punished as misdemeanors. Why? Because the court considered her dogs livestock, not companion animals.

  The judge proved to be even more lenient than the jury, sentencing Bauck on only one of these convictions. A $1,000 fine was slashed in half, and she was required to pay only $500. A ninety-day jail sentence became twenty days of work release plus eighty hours of community service and a year of probation. Shockingly, Bauck was allowed to keep her USDA license and required only to submit her kennel housing around nine hundred dogs and four hundred puppies to unannounced inspections from the Humane Society.6

  But old habits die hard, and a year later in 2010, the USDA declared Bauck “unfit” to retain her license and pulled it for two years, after which time she could reapply.7

  Even though Bauck’s livestock defense got her off the hook on far more serious felony charges, she was initially allowed to keep her dogs because they were considered to be her own private property. But a year later, in September 2011, Bauck was permanently banned from ever obtaining a USDA license again.8 The decision also fined and barred several of her family members from obtaining licenses, given their involvement in her prior operation. She and her husband, Allen, also agreed to disperse their operation, selling off hundreds of dogs. Any dogs they could not sell off were ordered to be donated to rescues or shelters. However, in spite of everything, the Baucks were still allowed to keep six of their dogs, three of which were allowed to be females who had not been spayed.

  In effect, this decision barred the Baucks from ever breeding or selling another dog for commercial purposes again but not from ever owning a dog again or becoming small-scale hobby breeders.

  The Baucks’ case is, unfortunately, not unique. Every state carri
es different legal penalties for cruelty to animals—many of which change depending on whether that animal is considered livestock or a pet. Again, the dog doesn’t change when it crosses state lines. But its protections do.

  Hal Herzog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, a book that examines our inability to think rationally about animals. When I spoke with him, he highlighted the contradictions in how we treat animals with his observations on the treatment of lab mice.

  Back in 1988, he observed that within the same medical research facility at the University of Tennessee, there were three types of mice: the good, the bad, and the feeders. Each of the three had different protections under the law.

  The good mice were the ones the lab was built for: the ones that were dedicated to unearthing the secrets of medical science through experiments. These mice were covered under the Surgeon General’s U.S. Public Health Service animal care regulations, granting them prized moral status. These mice, it’s worth reiterating, today would not be covered under the Animal Welfare Act and would not be inspected by the USDA because of the 2002 amendment to exempt rodents. But under the watchful eye of the U.S. Public Health Service, every experiment employing one of these mice had to be approved. By the same token, special regulations for humane treatment had to be followed in order to euthanize them.

  The bad mice were the pests who scurried the hallways of the lab as illicit mooches. Unlike their protected counterparts, these mice were to be executed as swiftly as possible—often using sticky glue traps that are considered to be a particularly inhumane form of extermination. But the lab feared using poisons and toxins that, while swifter and more humane to the doomed mouse, could potentially disrupt the health of the good mice and their experiments in progress. The paradox is, these “bad mice” were almost universally “good mice” that had escaped. Once that good mouse leapt from lab table to the floor, its moral status irrevocably plummeted.