The Doggie in the Window

by Rory Kress

  Melissa sucks back her tears and asks to have her picture taken with Corn-Husk. She smiles for the flip-phone camera and then bursts into tears as she finally hands him over—a clumsy exchange as the chubby corgi goes stiff amid the commotion.

  “This one’s never missed a meal,” Theresa says, grunting to lift him. “That’s okay, Corn-Husk. Neither have I.”

  Melissa hiccups out a laugh through her tears.

  Theresa’s team scans the corgi’s microchip, gives him a paper collar with a number, and stows him in a large crate in one of the vans. Within twenty-four hours, they’ll give him a new name, erasing Corn-Husk from the record so that a new family can make him theirs.

  We hit the road, heading for the next stop on Theresa’s rescue itinerary.

  “You see that corgi?” Theresa asks me.

  “Of course,” I say. “I didn’t think she was going to give him up. She seemed to really love him.”

  “For as much as you can love a dog that lives in a cage, they do,” Theresa says. “Did you see his feet, though?”

  “No,” I admit. I was just so struck by the breeder’s grief that I didn’t notice anything else. Typical—I’m always looking at the human; Theresa is always looking at the dog. “He seemed healthier than most of the other dogs you’ve gotten today.”

  “He had splayed feet and interdigital cysts,” Theresa says of the painful red sores and welts that are almost universally found on the dogs she rescues. “That means he’s likely lived his entire life on either pea gravel or in a wire mesh cage.”

  So much for being Melissa’s lapdog.

  After months of research into the Animal Welfare Act and the USDA, this is my first time being up close and in direct contact with commercial breeders and their facilities. On the ground, it’s a very different scene than anything I was able to learn from inspection reports and in interviews with either side of the dog-breeding debate. Moments like this, where a breeder weeps to give one of her dogs up to a rescue, were not at all what I had expected to find.

  “People see these breeders crying to give up the dog, and they think it’s bullshit,” Theresa says. “It’s not. They really feel it. But they live out here where the life of a dog is not very revered.”

  It’s true. Melissa might have let Corn-Husk live out his days and escape the gunshot that so often accompanies the retirement of a breeding dog. But the scars he bears demonstrate that he did not live the kind of existence most of us would bestow on our pets.

  Theresa’s organization is unique for its inside access to commercial breeding operations. Over the past decade, she has built relationships with breeders across the heartland so that when a breeding dog stops churning out litters that are healthy enough to sell, they call Theresa to come pick it up and find it a home where it can become a pet. In return, the breeder agrees not to shoot it or otherwise euthanize it. It’s for this reason that I have changed all the names of the breeders and dogs in this chapter: I don’t want to interfere with Theresa’s hard-won relationships and her ability to continue rescuing dogs in the future.

  Most of the breeders on this rescue run seem relieved to have the option of releasing these dogs to Theresa, happy to not have to kill them when their economic value diminishes or fades. It’s a self-selecting group: the very worst puppy millers out there would likely not give Theresa or any other rescue the time of day. But even among this group, plenty of these breeders are bad enough.

  After watching one breeder callously yank a half dozen cowering shih tzus from their cages by their paws and matted scruff, Theresa loses her cool in front of the rescue team.

  “He hands us over dogs from ’05, ’04?” Theresa says, referring to the dogs’ birth years, eleven or twelve years ago. The fact that the breeder has opted to spare the dog from certain death is not enough. “I mean, give the dogs a break. If you retire them at five or six, they at least have some life left in them.”

  But her anger is short-lived as a bigger issue soon arises. One of the rescuers radios Theresa to let her know that a dog is missing from the list. All three vans in the convoy pull over on the dirt road where we’re traveling. A breeder at the last stop had told Theresa she’d be bringing a husky but forgot to pack it into the open bed of her pickup with the rest of her dogs and bring it to our meet-up.

  “They’re going to go back and kill it,” Theresa says, preparing to divert the mission and return to the breeder’s farm with her. To do so would mean driving all three vans carrying about one hundred dogs a full hour off the itinerary, delaying the five stops and meet-ups arranged with breeders for the rest of the day. Theresa performs the mental calculus, taking into account the poor condition of the rest of the dogs from this facility—so covered in mats that the breeder had pulled her Maltese dogs from their cages by the painful clumps in their fur as if they were handles.

  Theresa jumps from the van and hustles to catch the breeder on the road. She makes her promise not to kill the dog and to hold it until Theresa swings through the area on her next monthly run. Theresa reluctantly moves the caravan ahead on the day’s mission, still grumbling about that husky, not so sure that the breeder will keep her promise.

  Not all breeders are created equally. As we log hour after hour on these rural roads, I see firsthand how a breeder in Missouri, where the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act raises the bar for dogs’ treatment somewhat, differs from one in Oklahoma, Kansas, or Arkansas.

  Theresa does not paint breeders with broad strokes. She operates in an unusual gray area where few, if any, other advocates for dogs are willing to. Where most would find it abhorrent to even speak to a breeder who runs what can only be called a puppy mill, Theresa is willing to build relationships that, to the observer like myself, appear to even border on friendship. Many of the breeders we meet along the way hug her and her team, happy to see them again. With the breeders, Theresa is a brighter, friendlier, warmer version of her otherwise cynical, New York–native self. When one ragged Havanese with bloodied paws is transferred into her care and the breeder tells her its name is Jolene, Theresa breaks out into the Dolly Parton tune of the same name and gets everyone merrily singing along, even the breeder. The dog doesn’t blink—she doesn’t know her name; no one’s ever called her anything before. Once we’re safely back in the van and out of the earshot of the breeder, Theresa unleashes her fury on the state of that breeder’s dogs. It clearly isn’t easy to walk the line she treads every day.

  While some animal rights activists decry the breeding of dogs altogether—be it in a puppy mill or a sparkling clean and ostensibly humane facility—Theresa sees a more nuanced palette. Of one commercial breeder she works with in Missouri that we do not get to visit on this trip, she says, “If every facility was like hers, we wouldn’t have a problem. There wouldn’t be any puppy mills.” But then again, Theresa does not consider herself an activist.

  “I’m a person who believes in all living things’ right to humane treatment. I’m not a humaniac,” she says, creating a portmanteau of the words humane and maniac. “I’m not even an animal rights activist. Animal rights and animal welfare are very different. I do want animals in my home and in my life. Animal rights people think we never should have done that… There’s nothing radical about the way I act. I go in and very diplomatically work with these people to bring dogs home. Some people say it’s like I’m in bed with the breeders, like I’m protecting them… We’ve rescued over ten thousand mill dogs in less than nine years. How many times do you think we could bully [breeders], push them around, stab them in the back, whatever—and continue to bring these dogs home? At the end of the day for us, it’s about bringing these dogs home, out of that life. Nothing else.”1

  For their part, the breeders are wary and know well their reputation as purveyors of so-called puppy mills. Theresa points out to me on our travels the hallmarks of the breeding facilities that could easily qualify for the ignominious distinction of puppy mill: dogs that never see the light of day, wire-mesh cages, relen
tlessly repeated breeding and botched C-sections sewn up with fishing line until black or green ooze pours from the females’ genitals.

  In one windowless building we visit in Arkansas, the stench is so powerful that I have to leave and reenter multiple times just to scan the room fully. Inside are sixty-four elevated cages filled with snow-white Havanese, French bulldogs, Yorkies, and their puppies. Theresa confirms that many of these operations favor the smaller breeds: you can pack more in per square foot and, as a result, make more money. Here, the dogs yap, nap, and nurse their clementine-sized puppies on wire mesh with gaps about a square-inch wide. They drink like gerbils from a metal nib attached to PVC piping that carries water to every cage but can never drink as their oral anatomy was intended, lapping from a bowl. As a result, dogs in these types of conditions suffer from their mouths rotting dead in their skulls, even as they live on. But still they breed. After all, a rotten mouth isn’t genetic, and it isn’t going to pollute their litters.

  Below the wire mesh of their cages are white, slanted pieces of plastic that channel into a makeshift gutter, carrying away their urine and excrement. Lining the walls of the facility are cages on the ground for the larger dogs, mostly English bulldogs. They have the modest luxury of metal dog doors that they can bang in and out of to a small, fenced, outdoor area on concrete.

  At this facility, it’s clear how much worse conditions can get without state provisions and inspections. This breeder is only beholden to the USDA and the Animal Welfare Act. This facility would never pass in Missouri, as most of the dogs lack any access or even view of the outdoors. But it’s good enough to pass federal inspections—and that’s all it needs to do. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly am not saying that conditions are humane or optimal in Missouri breeding operations. It’s simply that the breeders there are at least expected to meet somewhat higher standards than they are in other states like here in Arkansas. Which, alas, doesn’t say much.

  But heightened state regulations are only part of the story. It’s surprising to me to see just how little standardization there is for care from state to state and even facility to facility. What I’m finding, as we drag on through the heartland, is that every breeder comes to work with dogs for a different reason. Often these reasons determine the kind and quality of care the dogs receive and not the federal or state regulations.

  Back in Missouri, Maude, a pleasantly stout, elderly breeder gives up fistfuls of Pomeranian puppies, some with heart murmurs. It’s rare that Theresa’s group gets puppies unless they’re born with a health issue that makes them impossible to sell or breed: a missing limb, a heart problem, fused joints. As I pace her facility, I note that some of Maude’s animals at least have some ability to see the light of day and walk around together in a fenced, concrete enclosure, relatively free from their cages.

  The heart murmurs on Maude’s puppies are relatively mild. They may even go away with age or some medical treatment, and she could easily get away with selling them on the internet to an unwitting buyer, as cute and fluffy as they are. She could probably even breed them if she wanted to. The Animal Welfare Act certainly doesn’t stop her from doing so.

  “Can’t take no chances,” Maude says, shaking her long, gray ponytail. She isn’t interested in gaming the system. She cites a childhood tenderness for this particular breed and has now devoted her life to proliferating their puppies. “I been breeding Poms for twenty years. I always wanted one as a little girl and never could afford one.”

  Later, when I pull up her USDA inspection reports, I find she has no violations on the record.

  Other breeders transition from livestock to dogs. In many of these cases, there is no fondness for the dogs other than for their profitability.

  Take Bert, for example, a longtime dairy cow farmer in Missouri. He wears aviator glasses and a trucker hat with the logo of a local farm supplier.

  “I tried to get out of the milking and into dogs,” he tells me, still the owner of a farm with a few dozen Black Angus cows. “The dogs are a lot more work,” Bert says with an air of annoyance before striding off to pull a weary and bedraggled twelve-year-old West Highland white terrier from its crate by the scruff of its aged neck. Unfortunately, no state or federal regulations can stop that kind of treatment.

  Another breeder, Jeff, gently hands over two Yorkies, one Havanese, and a Maltese to Theresa’s team in Arkansas. The rescue group has stopped at one larger breeding facility here, and four other breeders have driven in from miles around to drop their dogs off too. Some come because they don’t want Theresa on their property—either because they don’t want her to see the condition it’s in or because they don’t want to be ostracized by their fellow breeders should they spot the rescue vans paying a visit. It’s a relatively small community, and people talk. Other breeders come to Theresa’s scheduled meet-up just to speed the process along and shoot the shit with their fellow breeders. But Jeff stands apart from the others, looking reluctantly at his dogs being loaded into Theresa’s van. He strokes his graying goatee.

  “My wife didn’t want me to bring this one, so make sure she finds a good home,” Jeff tells Theresa, pointing to one of the dogs. “We fell in love with her.”

  Jeff bred horses for a decade before turning to dogs about seven years ago.

  “The horse market went to nothing,” he says. He then tells me in a whisper so that the other breeders can’t hear him, “Our kennel is very different. We play with our dogs every day. My wife sits in their kennels for hours just playing with them. Because we love animals, and that way, they’re not stuck in a cage all the time.”

  For what it’s worth, Jeff’s facility also has no violations on record with the USDA.

  But as Theresa says often, “No one thinks they’re running a puppy mill. It’s always the other breeder down the road.”

  Arkansas breeder Jane meets us at the same kennel. Just as Theresa says, she’s quick to point out that the worst of the dogs she’s relinquishing did not come from her facility.

  “These Yorkies come from a woman down the road from me,” she says, becoming enraged, pointing to the dilapidated and malnourished dogs, puppies no more but still small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. “She was going to put them down. I said, ‘Give them to me to take to this rescue.’ She said, ‘Rescue? Oh no!’ It’s because rescues make us look bad. But not all rescues are alike, just like not all breeders are alike.”

  As Jane preaches to the other gathered breeders and rescuers, I notice that the owner of the property where we’ve met is quietly cashing in a ginger-colored miniature poodle to another breeder who’d just finished retiring her dogs to Theresa. She hands him a wad of fresh twenty-dollar bills in exchange. He licks a thumb and counts out the money as a white bulldog named Panzer looks on, sitting on his distended, black testicles—the size of ripe grapefruits—oozing into a towel.

  I ask Theresa if this bothers her, to see breeders meet up to retire dogs to her and then purchase new stock from each other at the rendezvous she’d arranged.

  “It’s about the lives of the dogs we save,” Theresa says. “I don’t think they’re replacing the dogs they’re retiring.”

  It’s hard for me to be so sure.

  Virtually every breeder of the nearly twenty that we meet on this trip says the same thing to Theresa as they hand off their dogs: Find my dogs a good home. But the contradictions run deep.

  A breeder named Tom meets us in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Wichita, Kansas, rather than have us come onto his property. I can guess at what it might be like though when he opens the door to his truck and the stink that pours out is nearly unbearable: rotting mouths, vomit, and shit. He hands over a half dozen Havanese and a single black pug to Theresa. Several of the Havanese are covered in mucus-heavy vomit stringing down their chests.

  Tom is shy. He doesn’t make much eye contact, mostly looking down at his stained overalls. He wears a camouflage baseball cap with a ragged gray ponytail stuck up inside it. As the d
ogs are transferred, he quietly says, “I may be a breeder, but I still take care of them.” None of the rescuers seem to hear him as they work, or at least they don’t respond.

  He notices Theresa smoking as she works and shakes his head.

  “I won’t tell you what to do, but I never do smoke around my dogs,” he admonishes in a low voice.

  Theresa chooses to let the comment go.

  Tom asks for USDA disposition forms he can fill out on the dogs he’s relinquishing. This is the paperwork that allows the agency to monitor where the dogs go when they are nowhere to be found at his kennel at the next inspection—dead or alive, sold or rescued. In spite of the more than ten thousand dogs Theresa has rescued, she says that the USDA has only come to her facility once in ten years to make sure that these disposition forms actually tell the truth, showing that the dogs did in fact end up with her as the paperwork states and not in a shallow grave just a few yards from where they were born or bred.

  “Do you put biters down?” Tom asks. “I’ve got one, but if he’s gonna go out and bite a bunch of people, I’ll just put him down.”

  Theresa quickly insists that no, she will not put down a biter. Instead, she promises that she’ll work with the dog to train it, rehabilitate it, and change its behavior so that it can find a suitable home. Tom agrees to bring it to her next time she’s in town about a month from now.

  Theresa pulls one of the male Havanese out and prepares to crate him in her van.

  “Can he go with a female?” she asks, looking to pair him up for the journey with a crate mate that he won’t attack.

  “Depends on how good she cooks,” Tom says, smiling, warming up to Theresa and her crew.

  After the dogs are loaded and packed away, Tom and Theresa light up together. They lean against the hood of a Sprinter van as they smoke, and Tom tells us about the tornado that hit his mobile home last year.

  “It happened on Good Friday. Wasn’t nothing ‘good’ about that,” he says.