by Rory Kress
“I’ll be healthy too, so I will be ready for anything that you have planned.”
I guess when it comes to buying dogs, there’s no in sickness and in health kind of vow required. But then again, with Rex, you shouldn’t need it, right? He’s healthy. He promises.
Rex is puppy #487643 on PuppySpot.com. The site was formerly known as Purebred Breeders, LLC, until Greg Liberman took over as CEO in 2015. If PuppySpot feels like a dating website, it’s no accident. Prior to taking over PuppySpot, Liberman was the CEO and president of Spark Networks, the parent company of a gaggle of dating websites including JDate.com and ChristianMingle.com. In 2014, he left his former role and began assembling his dream team to be the executive leaders at his new venture, the updated, renamed, and much more consumer-friendly PuppySpot. Also from Spark Networks are his chief marketing officer and his chief information officer—the latter perhaps accounting for the website’s design that feels uncannily like an online dating site. Even PuppySpot’s new chief financial officer has worked in the online dating biz at eHarmony.
Given their successes in the online dating world, this new executive team knew they had a branding problem on their hands with Purebred Breeders, LLC. In 2011, the company had already been criticized on national television by the Today Show. The morning show had aired a damning feature on the Humane Society’s investigation into the broker. The investigation found that Purebred Breeders, LLC, at the time the largest online dog seller in the country, was selling sick puppies across eight hundred websites that it operated under a variety of names, misleading customers into believing that they were buying from local breeders in their area. In conjunction with the investigation, the Humane Society filed suit against Purebred Breeders on behalf of customers who received sick or dying dogs.13 Purebred Breeders sent a response to NBC News refuting the report, saying, “Of the hundreds of excellent breeders we deal with regularly, only six are identified in the complaint sponsored by the Humane Society. After determining that the issues raised with these breeders had merit, they were immediately terminated from our network.”14
Purebred Breeders simultaneously issued a press release that was much more forceful:
The NBC Today Show report on Purebred Breeders grossly misrepresented our company and the work we do, day in and day out to ensure that only the healthiest and best-bred puppies reach our families. The story did not reflect the overwhelming majority of our breeders who are animal lovers and do their best to raise healthy puppies. The Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS), who is behind the story, is a lobbying group that has a history of attacking organizations that are involved in the business of breeding and selling pets.15*
Undeterred, the Humane Society continued mounting its case and found the number of customers looking to join the lawsuit growing. Ultimately, however, the case was dismissed in 2012 when a Florida judge ruled that the Humane Society had failed to back up its claims.
By 2014, however, the Cooper City, Florida–based puppy seller was subject to another investigation, this time by the local NBC News affiliate.16 A woman complained that she’d paid Purebred Breeders $2,600 for a Labradoodle puppy and instead received a sick dog that was a poodle–cocker spaniel mix. At the time, reporters spoke to the Better Business Bureau, which said that they had received seventy-five complaints about Purebred Breeders in just the last few years. Meanwhile, the Humane Society lobbied with the USDA to push Purebred Breeders to get licensed as a broker. Purebred Breeders released another statement in response to the matter, saying it had refunded the buyer. The company also said that it was working with the USDA to be in compliance.
Either way, when Liberman and his band of online dating executives took over a year later, they knew they had to make some serious changes. After all, googling “Purebred Breeders” wouldn’t lead a prospective buyer to a very pretty scene.
So first things first, Liberman’s team filed documents with the Florida State Department to change the company’s name to PuppySpot as of October 2016. When I inquired as to why Liberman and his executive team wanted anything to do with Purebred Breeders and didn’t simply start an online dog-selling company fresh, the media team sent me the following response:
We made the decision to use that preexisting company’s infrastructure as the basis for a reinvented company with a new leadership team, a different operating plan, and most importantly, a strong corporate culture founded on transparency and accountability.17
With the name changed from the sullied Purebred Breeders, LLC, to PuppySpot, the team relaunched the website with their new brand. In conjunction with PuppySpot’s relaunch, the company announced that it would celebrate that October is Adopt-a-Dog Month by making a donation to the National Animal Interest Alliance’s Shelter Project.18
While it may sound like this donation is going to directly help dogs in shelters, it is not. For starters, the National Animal Interest Alliance (NAIA) is not an animal welfare group. It is, by its own description, “an educational organization that was founded in 1991 to support and promote responsible animal ownership and use, and to oppose animal rights extremism.”19 Counted as animal rights extremists according to NAIA are—you guessed it—the Humane Society and the Animal Welfare Institute, among others.20 NAIA also has an advocacy arm that works to lobby on behalf of the group’s interests. Perhaps not surprisingly, NAIA and its president Patti Strand spoke out ardently against the change to the definition of retail pet stores in the Animal Welfare Act, closing the exemption for breeders selling online without a USDA license.
As for the shelter project that PuppySpot was offering a donation for? NAIA’s Shelter Project does not actually benefit dogs in shelters directly, despite the name. Rather, it is a project that collects data on dogs in shelters. In 2015, the project released data finding that purebreds were scarce in animal shelters.21 No surprise there. But the organization used this data to show that breeders are doing an excellent job of preventing overpopulation and poor health outcomes—points that are both heavily in question by animal welfare groups.
When I asked PuppySpot to explain why this project was their chosen charity, the company responded that they support the NAIA Shelter Project’s mission of “reducing animal euthanasia.”
But PuppySpot changed tack in one remarkable way from its predecessor. As of May 2015, the company became fully licensed as a broker by the USDA. As CEO Liberman tells me, this was a voluntary measure to be in full support of the USDA’s work—even though he believes the company technically does not need to be licensed for what it’s currently doing. The USDA told me that PuppySpot obtained this license due to the updated rule on retail pet shops that would allow breeders to sell to consumers over the internet. As of this writing, records showed that PuppySpot had no violations on its license. The company’s new consumer-friendly design also takes on the specter of puppy mills directly with a “No Puppy Mill Promise” heralded prominently on the site: “PuppySpot Guarantees Its Breeders Are NOT Puppy Mills.”
At this point, I’m less naïve than I was when I bought Izzie, believing her pet shop’s pronouncement that it only sourced dogs from USDA-licensed breeders, not puppy mills. As I’ve found, those terms are not mutually exclusive. So I asked Liberman how he ensures that he isn’t wholesaling dogs from puppy mills.
Liberman tells me that PuppySpot has a proprietary screening process—above and beyond all state and federal requirements—that breeders must pass in order to list their puppies on the site. While his website says that only 15 percent of breeders actually make the grade, Liberman tells me that in 2016 that number actually dipped to an even more selective 10 percent.22 In our interview, I asked Liberman several times to give me some specific examples of what PuppySpot requires of breeders in this proprietary process. Does it include demonstrated efforts to ensure psychological well-being, daily exercise, limits on how often the females breed, increased cage sizes? Any of the above? He wouldn’t budge. His media relations team would not either, despite Liberman’s repeated
insistence that he is in the business to bring transparency to the industry. The only insights they would provide are that the standards are “rigorous” and most breeders don’t make the grade.
“There’s a ton that goes into our screening process. It differs from the USDA process—it differs from every other screening standard out there,” Liberman says, again unwilling to get into any specifics. “There are a bunch of different standards out there that we can look at and make sure that we always have the best in class.”
Once the breeder is deemed acceptable by whatever those PuppySpot standards are, the dogs are then administered the company’s specific vaccination and health protocol—complete with yet another proprietary health exam, the details of which cannot be revealed to me.
I should pause here to say that I can respect trade secrets. I realize the value of keeping certain information proprietary. However, when the trade secret is screening whether a puppy is born and raised humanely, it seems that there should be some information given to the consumer beyond the statistics of how many breeders make the cut. Especially given CEO Liberman’s feelings about transparency.
“We’re fully committed to transparency in what we do, and I think that’s one of the things that drew me to this industry,” he says, jumping to this topic of transparency before I can even ask him about it. “I think this is an industry where transparency in a lot of ways is lacking… We are still building a transparent business where there aren’t so many X factors with finding a puppy.”
He made a similar statement in the press release at the company’s relaunch: “At its core, PuppySpot is a service, but it is far more than just a service. It’s a community where dogs are celebrated and where trust, confidence, and transparency are paramount.”
Trust, confidence, and transparency. These are buzzwords for the pet retail industry, because it is well understood that all three have been eroded by bad actors in the breeding world. As a journalist, I’m particularly a sucker for transparency—a word that, by now, you may be noticing is a theme in conversations with Liberman and PuppySpot. If, in fact, transparency is one company’s core brand promises, I wanted to dig down a little further on it.
Let’s go back to our Morkie dream date, Rex.
His profile page offers some useful information: his birth date, the weights of each of his parents, his color markings, and the fact that he is unregistered with any pedigree like the AKC because he is a designer hybrid and not a pure breed. And of course—front and center—his price and the number to call seven days a week to purchase him.
That’s all useful information to have, but I wouldn’t call these facts a win for transparency. Nowhere on Rex’s profile does it tell me where he was bred and presumably is living until he is purchased. Unlike the online dating sites that Liberman and his cohort used to run, I cannot search on PuppySpot for potential dogs in my area. If I fall in love with Rex, he may be living at a breeder’s facility just down the road or on the other side of the country. I can’t be sure if he’s from a state with added protections or just the minimal federal regulations and weed him out of my search accordingly. I can’t even submit a FOIA request to obtain the inspection reports of his breeder, because there’s no name or USDA number for whoever bred this puppy. Instead, I must trust fully in PuppySpot to do everything for me—including my due diligence. This stands in sharp contrast to brick-and-mortar pet shops in an increasing number of municipalities that are now required to provide cage cards detailing who the breeder is for each dog. Here, no such luck. Liberman says that once a buyer begins the process, however, he is connected with the dog’s breeder and given all his or her information.
Still, I ask Liberman why a buyer should not be able to search by location—as one would do on a dating website—and then follow the tips he’s given by the ASPCA or the Humane Society to go see a breeding operation in person for himself and determine whether it is a puppy mill. He quickly dismisses the idea.
“That can often be a very reckless way to find a good breeder. Someone can look like a good breeder, and they’re not. And so we have our own standards to do all the vetting, to do all the qualifying,” he says, emphasizing the value of allowing his company’s “puppy concierge” to do the due diligence for the customer—despite not revealing what that due diligence entails.
“Historically, it’s been a very local business, and we saw the opportunity to come in here and say, okay, we want people to find the perfect puppy for their family, no matter where they are, no matter where the breeder is, and to have confidence that they were getting it from a responsible source. And that’s what we do. So much of what we do is focused on the compliance side of things,” he says.
However, PuppySpot is not alone in this space of connecting buyers with dogs. There’s also PuppyFind.com. As Liberman will be the first to tell you, sites like PuppyFind are more of an online classified ad section than a service that evaluates breeders and connects them with customers accordingly. Fair enough. PuppyFind’s site is slightly less visually appealing and consumer friendly, more of a catalog than an online dating site. But here, there is somewhat more transparency: each dog has his breeder’s name, phone number, and website listed below him so that a prospective buyer can at least attempt to do some light googling to kick the tires. Again, the value of having a breeder’s name has dropped significantly since the once publicly available USDA inspection-report database was pulled from the web under the Trump administration. Still, if I wanted to limit my search for a dog to a breeder in my area who I could personally visit and vet for myself, I could do that with the information provided on PuppyFind and not Liberman’s PuppySpot. However, this doesn’t mean that PuppyFind is, by any stretch of the imagination, a one-way ticket to a responsibly sourced dog.
For its part, the Humane Society has been advocating on behalf of consumers over at PuppyFind. In October 2016, the organization had a law firm file suit in Arizona, where the site is based, on behalf of consumers who say they unknowingly were led to purchase sick puppy mill dogs from the site. The complaint accused PuppyFind of inflating ratings and deleting negative reviews in an effort to mislead customers. The Humane Society was also able to trace puppies posted on PuppyFind to known commercial breeders who had made the Horrible Hundred list for their numerous violations with the USDA.
Unlike Liberman’s PuppySpot, PuppyFind does not have a USDA license. Nor does it need to. It operates merely as a matchmaker and middleman, connecting buyers to breeders. This is likely why PuppyFind offers up breeder contact information to buyers: ultimately, it’s up to the breeder to arrange for shipping and transportation. PuppyFind is not licensed to do any of that. PuppySpot, on the other hand, manages the transaction, from finding the dog, to shipping it to the consumer through its team of travel agents, to making it possible for the consumer to potentially never even know the name of the dog’s breeder. While Liberman tells me that “the breeder will interface with the buyer as much as the buyer wants to interface with the breeder,” his site does make it awfully easy to never have to.
As far as the Humane Society Legislative Fund’s Amundson sees it, both types of online aggregators should have to be licensed by the USDA.
“Here’s the shtick: if they serve as a go-between [for] the breeder and the ultimate consumer and they never take possession of that dog, they are a broker, and I want these folks turned in. I want them to know the role they play carries responsibility,” Amundson says. “It’s almost worse than what some of the breeders are doing, because [the websites] never see these living, breathing puppies that they are part of a transaction on, and it just blows my mind. This is not a broker who is selling reduced-price washers and dryers. These are living, breathing puppies that they are making a business of. And they have no [interaction with] the animal welfare side because nobody has tackled this issue of turning them in to the USDA… Certainly at the federal level, they operate with impunity… And I don’t care if they are innocent in the whole situation, because
they don’t know what they’re doing. Somebody has got to educate them, and because it’s interstate commerce, they should be brought under the Animal Welfare Act specifications on the definition of broker.”
But not every puppy that crosses state lines for sale comes through a broker.
Now we arrive at Vincent LoSacco, the owner of Just Pups, a notorious chain of New York and New Jersey pet stores. For years, LoSacco used Missouri breeders Randy and Kandy Hale as his primary suppliers. But when the Hales faced dozens of violations from the USDA and the state of Missouri, they relinquished their licenses and turned over the business to LoSacco to run in his own name, even as they remained the designated local agents running the show on the ground.
So in 2015, LoSacco became his own breeder, supplying his pet shops. This as the people who were actually running the day-to-day operations were the very same folks who the USDA and the state had put out of business after years of violations. But with this move, LoSacco could operate without a USDA license, because he was breeding and transporting his own animals to sell in person more than twelve hundred miles from where they were born, qualifying for the retail pet store exemption. So much for the customer being able to provide his own oversight at a pet shop.
However, over the course of 2016, mounting animal cruelty charges and health code violations forcing LoSacco’s stores to close left him with a problem: lots of dogs and nowhere to sell them. So in July 2016, despite all the charges against him, LoSacco managed to obtain a USDA license that would enable him to sell online or to other retailers. In fact, he has since sold his dogs to the American Dog Club store in Long Island where I purchased Izzie, according to a cage card provided to me by the Companion Animal Protection Society (CAPS). The owner of the American Dog Club, Elliot Gordon, did not respond to my repeated requests for an interview.
But being able to sell dogs online was not an expedient enough solution for Vincent LoSacco. With his legal fees mounting and his sales numbers slumping, LoSacco set about cashing in by selling off hundreds of his breeding-stock dogs at an auction in August 2016. When I heard about it, I jumped on the next flight to Missouri to see it for myself.
