by Rory Kress
“At the time, ‘Doggie in the Window’ seemed like a sweet and harmless message, and everyone still thought the corner pet store was just a place to see adorable puppies. And now the puppies in pet stores may still be adorable, but most of them come from puppy mills. I’d never heard before of pet stores having mass breeding places or anything like that. I was just as surprised as I’m sure most people are now,” Page said in a video, interspersed with B-roll of terrified dogs in puppy mills. “The original song asks the question ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ Today, the answer is ‘too much.’ And I don’t just mean the price tag on the puppies in pet stores. The real cost is in the suffering of the mother dogs back at the puppy mill. That’s where most pet store puppies come from. And that kind of cruelty is too high a price to pay.”1
It’s been nearly a decade now since Page officially distanced herself from the original message of the song. She passed away in 2013. But the connection between puppy mills and pet stores has become increasingly understood by the general public thanks, in no small part, to public relations efforts like the Humane Society’s work with Page and similar initiatives across the animal welfare advocacy community. However, people—myself shamefully included—continue to buy these animals. Otherwise compassionate, smart, informed people, many of whom would be quick to say they are animal lovers, are still able to mentally distance themselves from the truth of where these dogs are born.
So why is it that we still can’t ignore that doggie in the window?
“An adorable puppy is its parent’s worst nightmare,” Tim Rickey tells me. He’s the head of the ASPCA’s field investigations team and has shut down hundreds of illegal puppy mills during his long career. You’ve probably even seen him yourself on the organization’s late-night infomercials, scooping dogs out of filth and cradling them against his ASPCA T-shirt as the announcer calls for donations. And while there’s no doubt that irresponsible breeding is central to the puppy mill problem, the demand and interest created on the retail side has been keeping these facilities in operation for years.
“When you walk into a pet store and see a cute puppy or a kitten in a cage, it’s very hard not to want to take that pet home. There’s a very magnetic force when you’re staring in the eyes of a ten-week-old puppy. People don’t think beyond that. That’s one of the central points: the retailers are really helping this industry,” Rickey explains.
No demand, no reason to supply.
He recounts to me a recent raid that his team led in Michigan where he discovered wire crates stacked one on top of the other in a dank basement. Bulldogs weighing fifty pounds were crammed into these tiny cages with no room even to move, let alone exercise or glimpse the outside world. In another room nearby, he spotted all the puppies separated out. They were freshly groomed and bathed—ready to go to a pet store, a broker, or a loving and unwitting home that very day, the dark secrets of their birth shampooed away.
“We’re looking at adult animals that are living in filthy, disgusting conditions. And we’re looking at the puppies that were probably going out that day. You see the difference. They pulled these puppies away from the mothers…and prepared them for the public. People see a beautiful, healthy puppy, and they never think about the conditions that the parents were living in,” Rickey says.
To better understand why people are able to purchase dogs they likely know come from inhumane breeding operations, I speak to Russell Belk, distinguished research professor of marketing at York University. He has written extensively about the psychology of ownership, particularly as it relates to humans and their canine companions. Additionally, as a world-renowned expert on consumer behavior, he has a uniquely academic perspective on why puppies fall into an ethical blind spot once they are made available in a retail setting.
“By the time the dog or cat is ready to sell, it is already responding to humans,” Belk explains. “It’s already jumping up from the cage and saying, in effect, Take me, take me, choose me, choose me.”2
While they may not have Belk’s academic credentials, pet shop salespeople implicitly understand more than you’d think about consumer behavior and psychology.
“There’s something called the endowment effect: that if we give people something—be it a sample product or a test-drive in a car—the mere fact that they’ve touched it and held it makes them more attached to it and less willing to give it up. That’s a trick that salespeople know,” Belk explains.
As a result, the customer who casually walks into a pet shop, thinking he is there only to look and not purchase anything, may find himself on the business end of the endowment effect. Now that he’s seen and interacted with a puppy, he’s going to want to take it home—better judgment and awareness of the puppy mill problem be damned. When the pet shop offered Dan and I an area where we could interact with Izzie out of her cage, hold her, and pet her, we were unwittingly experiencing this effect in action. This effect also explains why many people are unwilling to part with dogs they’ve purchased from a pet store that are later found to be sick. Once the dog is in our home for even a short time, Belk says, the animal has become an extension of our self.
“The real bonding and incorporation into our identity is what takes place after we acquire the pet,” Belk says. “Initially, it’s a matter of indifference—or almost indifference—whether one puppy or another in a litter is the one that goes home with us. But after even just a couple of weeks, that’s not the case, because we’ve started to bond with the animal. We’ve given it a name. We’ve fed it, we’ve begun to train it, and in doing those things, we’re putting our mark on it, and it’s putting its mark on us with its personality and its smile—if you will—and its response to us. The bonding that takes place after acquisition is probably when we most fully incorporate that animal into our sense of self.”
If a dog is purchased from a responsible breeder or from otherwise humane conditions, there should be no problem with the bonding that takes place once everyone is home safe and sound. However, Belk points out, people are more likely to make an impulse purchase of a dog at a pet shop than they would with a breeder, given the amount of time and research the latter process typically involves. As a result, the buyer in the pet store is going to be more likely to find himself emotionally intertwined with, at worst, a sick dog and, at best, a dog sourced from undesirable conditions.
Either way, a puppy is a puppy, and the human psychological response to it is undeniable, no matter where it comes from—and that is part of the danger.
“There may be some specificity to the person that is more susceptible to it. But puppies and kittens, like human babies, have these neonatal features. They have relatively big eyes and relatively big heads compared to the size of their bodies. That makes them cute. That’s why we take these same characteristics and put them on cartoon animals,” Belk says. “This is, if you will, maybe an evolutionary trait: we take care of baby animals. And humans have to take care of our babies for a long period of time compared to other animals. Partly because they endear themselves in this way from the moment of birth.”
Once attached, the human-canine bond can seem unbreakable. It’s enough, even, that people can emotionally distance themselves from the truth of their dog’s unseemly origin. As the dog becomes an extension of our family and our self, it becomes harder and harder to see the reality.
“Unless [the dog] has some kind of a physical mark—it’s limping, or it has an injury that it carries through life—that stigma attached to acquiring it begins to disappear,” Belk explains. “There may be a bit of [the pet shop stigma] that clings and doesn’t disappear, but for the most part, it gives way to the interactions with the animal and its personality—how it interacts with the family. It does, for the most part, become a family member and gets treated to birthdays and Christmas gifts and perhaps a funeral when it dies. So that context of acquisition ultimately fades into the background.”
This effect is so powerful that, surprisingly enough, eve
n animal welfare advocates can fall victim to it. And thanks to the internet, people can now engage with these animals without ever setting foot in a pet shop.
The ASPCA’s Tim Rickey has seen lifelong animal lovers allow themselves to be duped by the allure of a cute puppy with an ugly provenance. He recalls a colleague in the animal welfare profession telling him about a puppy his wife had bought from a breeder she found online. The breeder offered to meet her halfway between their homes given that they lived four hours apart. Rickey was floored at what he was hearing from his fellow animal welfare advocate, who should certainly have known better.
“I said, ‘You realize that’s a strategy within the puppy mill industry?’” Rickey recalls, shocked that his colleague hadn’t realized the breeder was trying to keep him from seeing the conditions into which this puppy had been born. “He’d never connected that. He just thought the breeders were being very nice.”
But the fact that even animal welfare advocates are able to overlook the true origins of a seemingly perfect puppy speaks to the power of the connection between the buyer and a dog for sale.
“A majority of the public has not really made this connection which is, if you are going to buy an animal from someone breeding it, you should see where that animal is and make sure it’s not a puppy mill. But they want to believe people because they’ve already fallen in love with the animal,” Rickey says. “They’re already in love and emotionally bonded, and they want that pet. So, oftentimes, the rational thought they might have if they weren’t dealing with such a highly emotional issue is gone. They’re focused on getting the pet instead of taking a step back and saying, ‘I’ll drive the other two hours because I want to come visit your facility and see where this animal was born and see how the parents are being taken care of.’”
So how did we get to where we are today? Whose bright idea was it to put the doggie in the window in the first place, so far from the context of its birth?
Most in the industry credit the now-defunct Docktor Pet Centers with spurring the explosion of the commercial dog-breeding industry as we know it today. With more than three hundred stores across the country at its height in the 1980s, Docktor was more than three times larger than Petland, currently the biggest brick-and-mortar retail pet seller in the nation—the other large pet stores like Petco and PetSmart have committed to not selling dogs but rather to hosting adoption events.
Starting in the 1960s, Milton Docktor sought to make his business boom.
“He hired all these MBAs to come in and help…and what they quickly pointed out to him is, as in any business, you need to draw people into your store if you want to sell something. They felt that by selling puppies—putting puppies in the storefront window—you were attracting people into your store,” Bob Baker of the Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation tells me. “People would be walking by the store window, and they would see the cute little puppy and walk in. They quickly realized that once that customer came in the store, they could then sell them pet products. So then there was a demand for these puppies, and that demand grew because they realized that when you made that puppy sale, not only did you make money from selling that puppy, but also you had totally a ready-made market for pet supplies.”3
Baker recalls reviewing the old Docktor Pet Centers training manuals and finding that salespeople were expected to bring in as much money on pet supplies as they did on the initial cost of the dog itself.
“[Docktor] realized the profitability of selling dogs mostly as an attraction just to get you in the store. But then, later on, [he realized] the profit of selling that dog: you need feed for the dog, you need a leash for the dog, you need a collar, you need a bed. You can just sell so much more with that dog, and it really took off,” Baker says.
But puppies have to come from somewhere. And if you’re sourcing a supply chain for Docktor Pet Centers’ hundreds of franchisees across the country, just like any cost-savvy business, you’re going to go for mass production at low prices. Unfortunately for the puppies, responsible breeders didn’t fit the bill for Docktor.
“When they went to the responsible breeders, they had two problems. One, the price was way too high for [Docktor’s] profit margins,” Baker says. “They also had the problem that…no responsible breeder would ever sell a dog in a pet store. Most responsible breeders, they’ve spent a lot of time raising that dog. They want to make sure it goes into a good home… A good breeder wants their dogs well socialized and doesn’t want them stuck in a cage while they are waiting to be sold: that would be anathema to a good dog breeder. They also don’t want them coming into contact with other dogs at such a young age. Dogs are very susceptible to disease at that young age. Their immune system doesn’t fully develop at that point in time. They would never risk putting their dogs into a pet store environment, where these dogs are going to come in contact with randomly sourced dogs from all over the country.”
But just how do these “randomly sourced dogs from all over the country” end up in pet stores? The key element is often the broker: a middleman or a company that is licensed by the USDA and is tasked with buying these puppies from breeders and transporting them to wholesale at pet shops. Today, the nation’s largest broker is the Hunte Corporation.
Founded in 1991, the Hunte Corporation operates by the motto Where puppies come first! But today, they primarily do business under the name Choice Puppies after exposés from animal advocate groups irrevocably tarnished the Hunte name. It’s not surprising that the company would rebrand itself after a 2009 investigation from a Missouri advocacy group revealed that Hunte was dumping hundreds of pounds of dead puppies monthly—enough that the organization called for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to intervene.4
The Hunte Corporation is based in a sprawling 130,000-square-foot facility in southwest Missouri. The company buys up puppies across the heartland from breeders both large and small and then ships them primarily by tractor-trailer to pet shops, typically in big cities across the nation. Many animal welfare advocates agree that the reason puppy mills are so concentrated in the Midwest and in particular Missouri is because of Hunte: the company keeps breeders in business with a steady demand for their dogs.
Naturally, I wanted to learn more about the Hunte Corporation given its central role in connecting pet shops to breeders. I reached out to former Hunte President and CEO Ryan Boyle over the course of nearly a year until he quietly left the company after a fourteen-year tenure in July 2016. My requests for an interview were never answered. I also attempted to reach the company through its frequent ally, farmers’ advocacy group Protect the Harvest, as well as through its contact portal—all to no avail.
With no answers from Hunte, I turned to the Humane Society to get a better picture of this puppy brokering behemoth. For starters, I wanted to know exactly how many puppies Hunte transports every year.
The animal advocacy group had successfully obtained Hunte’s most recent USDA license renewal applications through a FOIA request. The Humane Society’s John Goodwin provided them to me, along with the company’s license renewal applications from over a decade ago by way of comparison. These numbers tell a story. Hunte, the nation’s largest broker, wholesaler, and transporter of puppies for sale, is the bellwether for the dog-selling industry. Keep in mind: in 2005, there were few, if any, restrictions on who pet shops could purchase from. Today, there are pet shop restrictions or bans in the state of California and in two hundred municipalities and counting. By contrasting Hunte’s numbers from 2005 to 2015, it’s clear to see just how effective pet store bans and ordinances restricting purchases from breeders with violations on their USDA inspection reports have been on reining in this industry.
Let’s take a look.
In 2005, the Hunte Corporation sold 88,235 puppies. By 2008, it had dropped somewhat to 72,890.
These earlier license renewal forms do not go into much detail on the company’s earnings from these puppy sales—an omission that went on to be correc
ted in more recent forms. Instead, Hunte simply lists its “total gross dollar amount derived from regulated activities” as being over $100,000—certainly an understatement to say the least, as we can be sure these puppies were not selling for just over a dollar apiece.
But by 2013, as more states began regulating which breeders pet shops could purchase from and more municipalities banned pet shops from selling puppies that were not obtained from a rescue, Hunte Corporation had started to feel the pinch. In just five years, the company’s number of reported puppies sold had dropped by half, down from 72,890 in 2008 to 37,247 puppies sold in 2013. Also in 2013, the company began reporting a more accurate figure for the total gross amount earned from selling these puppies. In 2013, those 37,247 puppies brought in $16,823,283 to the Hunte Corporation.
In the years that followed, the numbers kept dropping.
In 2015, the company sold 34,038 puppies. But this time, the Hunte Corporation made significantly less money in doing so: $12,330,147. These dipping figures show that the average price per puppy that Hunte was able to command when selling to retailers dropped from being around $450 in 2013 to around $362 by 2015 as the market thinned out.
These numbers speak volumes. First, they show that local and state ordinances restricting or banning the sale of puppies in retail establishments have a very real impact on commercial breeders and the brokers that keep them up and running. Second, the numbers show that the value of a commercially bred puppy is dropping—which suggests to me that consumers are getting the message that’s being tirelessly trumpeted by the ASPCA, the Humane Society, and others that a pet shop dog is not worth the money and they would be just as happy with a shelter dog. While animal welfare advocates see this as a win, the pet industry is not surprisingly crying foul.
“I think pet retail bans, in general, are an emotional response and unfortunately an ineffective response to an acknowledged problem, which is illegal, irresponsible breeding,” Mike Bober, president and CEO of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council (PIJAC) tells me.5 His Washington, DC–based organization acts as the representative and lobbyist for pet stores, animal distributors, and pet product manufacturers—including Hunte. PIJAC has been vocal about its efforts over the years to raise the standard of care at USDA-licensed breeding facilities and has also published animal care guidelines for pet retailers, which are not required to be inspected by the USDA each year.
