by Rory Kress
Things became even stranger once Kristin’s vet took a look at Lovey.
“He’s immediately running his hands over her and looking at her. [He says], ‘Oh, she’s really pretty. Where did you get her?’ And I tell him, and he’s like, ‘Okay, so how old is she?’ And I say four months. And he’s like, ‘Oh no, this dog is not anywhere near four months.’”
Kristin was stunned.
“I’m standing there like a total dingbat. [I asked], ‘What do you mean?’”
The vet, who Kristin had known for years as he cared for her previous dogs, pulled back Lovey’s gums to show Kristin her teeth—fully descended, not a baby tooth or gap in sight. He explained to her that a dog’s full, adult teeth typically descend between seven or eight months of age. In Lovey’s case, he pointed out, they were all in, and they had already accrued signs of significant wear and tear, with tartar building up on her molars. He estimated that Lovey was between a year and two years old at least.
Kristin asked her vet why the breeder would possibly lie about Lovey’s age.
“[He said] ‘If I were to guess, she probably didn’t go into heat. So they decided she’s no use if she can’t be bred. They probably thought they’d try to sell her, and if they can, great. If not, then they’d probably shoot her,’” she recalls him saying, assuring her that, in the breeding world, it’s relatively common practice.
Kristin and her vet decided to revaccinate Lovey just in case her paperwork turned out to be incorrect, as its credibility was already in question over her age alone.
The good news was that in spite of the diarrhea, her stool samples tested negative for any parasites or infections. They ran comprehensive blood tests and were able to rule out any serious issues other than severe allergies. They put Lovey on a new, hypoallergenic food and shampoo regimen that, in the days and weeks to follow, cleared up her skin and digestive problems. The vet consoled Kristin by explaining that all of Lovey’s problems seemed fixable and were likely due simply to neglect. He also chalked up the dog’s zombielike malaise to fear. It seemed to him that she’d likely never been around people before and was terrified but should eventually warm up.
After a two-hour vet visit and a bill topping $800 on her brand-new dog, Kristin started digging online in earnest. Very quickly, she was able to find numerous customer complaints against Cornerstone Farms despite its then-A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.3 The cherry on top was the breeder’s inclusion in the Humane Society’s Horrible Hundred list of the worst puppy mills in the country. Significantly, the Humane Society notes that Cornerstone Farms is a “repeat offender” and confirmed to me that the organization has received reports in years past that were so exigent, they had to be passed on to local law enforcement.4
“I’m just crying. I am so mad at myself, like, I can’t believe I fell [for this]. I would never want to support a puppy mill, and I know Missouri’s known for them, and I just didn’t do enough homework. I didn’t stop and think. In hindsight now, I’m comparing [the process] to the other two: the good breeder and the adoption,” Kristin says. “It made me really sick inside.”
Kristin continued in her attempts to seek information directly from the Ritters. She texted them that she loved the dog and had no interest in being refunded or in returning her but wanted to know how old she was really so she could appropriately care for her. She says that the messages went unanswered with the exception of one in which she asked what size crate to purchase for Lovey.
YOUR WORD AGAINST THEIRS
As the silence persisted from the Ritters, Kristin became increasingly incensed. She filed an official animal welfare complaint with the USDA. She also reached out to the Missouri Department of Agriculture to file a Bark Alert, a program the state founded back in 1992, primarily to crack down on unlicensed facilities.
“I’m telling the lady [at the Missouri Department of Agriculture] everything. She’s like, ‘Yeah, I hear you. But really, it’s your word against theirs. So unless you have it documented, there’s really not much we can do.’”
This conversation with the Missouri Department of Agriculture, as Kristin recounts it, is particularly puzzling to me. For its part, the agency refused to respond to any of my specific questions regarding Kristin’s case. But thanks to Missouri’s Sunshine Law, which allows me to request official records from the state similar to a FOIA request, I know for a fact that the Missouri Department of Agriculture has its own records explicitly documenting repeated, serious violations at Cornerstone Farms going back more than a decade. So what’s the point of all that record keeping if a consumer filing a complaint is going to be told it’s her word against the breeder’s?
But of course, Kristin had no idea what the state had on the Ritters, if anything at all. Unlike the USDA, the Missouri Department of Agriculture has never kept even a recent, partial database of breeder-inspection records online for the public to peruse on demand before buying. Instead, it’s up to a consumer to file a formal Sunshine request, pay a small fee, and wait several weeks or even months to receive these inspection reports and become fully informed before buying. For an average puppy buyer, this is a high bar for entry to learn about a breeder.
I filed my own Sunshine request on the Ritters with the Missouri Department of Agriculture. After several weeks of back-and-forth, I was instructed to mail a check to their office for their efforts. Soon after, a thick file on Cornerstone Farms arrived at my door. It was more than one hundred pages long with up to five violations per page in some cases. As I held it in my hands, I couldn’t understand how the state—in good conscience or in good service to its taxpayers—could tell Kristin that it was her word against the Ritters.
As tedious as it may have been, even this vital process aimed at transparency has come under fire. In July 2016, the Missouri House of Representatives passed a bill that would have eliminated the Sunshine Law on animal welfare and environmental issues. If it had passed the state senate, the bill would have taken away the public’s right to request reports on all factory farms including commercial dog breeders. Without it, neither Kristin nor I would know the full extent of the Ritters’ history of violations.
“The state legislature has tried to take away the Sunshine reports on health provisions for animals and the environment for the last four years…because [the state government] is controlled by rural legislators,” Bob Baker at the Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation explains. “[The breeders] don’t let people in to see the facilities, and then they want to cover up their inspection reports… This industry survives in the dark shadows.”5
While the bill had the votes to pass through the state senate, Baker and other advocates for transparency managed to fight it until it was amended to save the Sunshine Law.
But challenges to transparency remain an issue when it comes to regulating dog breeders. Baker points out that at a breeder conference he attended in the summer of 2016, the USDA’s Gibbens told the attendees that they were free to use post office box addresses on the then-publicly-available online USDA database so long as they kept their physical address privately on file with the agency and its inspectors.
I tried to attend this meeting for myself but was rebuffed by the USDA, told there were simply no available seats left—even as I informed them I was more than happy to stand. After the conference, Baker laughed when I told him why I hadn’t been allowed to attend. He reported to me that there were dozens of empty seats available.
So I went straight to the source and asked Gibbens about his comments to breeders that they may keep their physical addresses hidden from the public and inquired whether this allowance further impedes industry transparency.
“We try to be as transparent as we can, and that’s the reason for that search engine being online,” Gibbens said, back in August 2016. “And would the breeding industry prefer that the search engine not be online? Probably a lot of them would prefer that they not be online. But I think that kind of transparency helps hold the industry accounta
ble. Any industry like that that’s going to succeed is going to have to look acceptable to the public. And if the public can find out what they look like, then they can demonstrate their acceptability… I think we’re doing a good job of being transparent.”6
Six months later, as we know, the Trump administration pulled the entire database of publicly available USDA inspection reports from the web.
While the federal inspection report database was imperfect, it was still better than nothing at all. As of summer 2016, when Kristin was purchasing Lovey, the database was still up and running. But Cornerstone Farms had no violations on its year-old USDA license available for all to see—despite what state inspection reports clearly showed.
In documents provided to me by the Humane Society, I learned that the Ritters had only obtained their federal license in 2015 after receiving an official USDA warning for eleven instances of selling dogs without a license. For decades, they’d been able to operate with only state oversight until the USDA updated its retail sale rules in 2013 so that a breeder would need a federal license to sell to a customer without the buyer meeting the dog face-to-face. As of this writing, the Ritters are licensed by the USDA, allowing them to sell their dogs online to anyone nationwide.
As she launched her complaint against Cornerstone Farms to the USDA, Kristin had been making records of her own, keeping track of every text, email, phone call, and piece of paperwork, going far above and beyond what most average consumers would do. She compiled the documents and submitted them. After all that, she was informed that in order to receive the agency’s ruling on the complaint, she’d have to write a letter and mail it to the USDA’s FOIA office, then wait another sixty days. She did so, and the waiting game began.
“I can see why most people probably don’t do it,” she says of the lengthy, confusing, and arduous process.
Around this time, news of Kristin’s challenges with Lovey began to circulate around her group of friends. One friend, who volunteers as an anti-puppy-mill advocate, had done some digging on Cornerstone Farms in the past and handily dropped a stack of Missouri Department of Agriculture inspection reports on the operation into Kristin’s lap—the same ones that I obtained and verified through my own Sunshine request. They were disturbing to say the least.
On October 20, 2014, an inspector from the Missouri Department of Agriculture found a female standard poodle tattooed with the name “Brooke” at Cornerstone Farms to be compulsively shaking her head. The inspector checked her right ear to find “a buildup of brown/black substance.”7 The Ritters were ordered to take the dog for treatment with a licensed veterinarian. That same day, the state found two other female poodle mixes with “open sores in the ear, eye, and throat regions.” The inspectors learned from the Ritters that these wounds were caused by a dog fight.
“Licensee stated that she was treating these sores but the sores were not healing progressively,” the report reads.
On February 9, 2015, the same state inspector returned to Cornerstone Farms and marked eleven previously noncompliant items from the October 20, 2014, inspection had been corrected. However, the inspector found seven new noncompliant items to document.
In an enclosure housing Shiba Inu puppies with their mother, the inspector found the flooring to be violating state regulations. “One of the puppies was observed with all four feet passing through the wire flooring. Licensee shall provide proper sized flooring so that puppy’s feet will not pass through the flooring and so that the puppy can walk in a normal manner.”
The inspector returned on January 21, 2016, and found nine new noncompliant items, two of which were repeats that had already been found and identified on past inspections.8
As Kristin pored through these state reports, her blood began to boil.
“You make the Humane Society’s [Horrible Hundred] every year, you have continual repetitive, multiple [offenses], but you have the same inspector… It’s just very incestuous,” she says, infuriated that the same inspector has been assigned to investigate the Ritters’ farm since at least 2002. “So this lady comes out, she writes you up on some violations, that’s her job. It looks like she is doing her job, because her job is to inspect you… In the meantime, nobody is paying [attention to] the dogs… She comes back six months later, and says ‘Yup, you’re compliant, and let me write you up on a few new ones.’… This just repeats. How long do you get to be not compliant?”
Kristin asked the Missouri Department of Agriculture this very question: how this cycle of finding violations, giving the Ritters time to correct them, and then adding new ones could be allowed to continue. She was told that the state regulators were working with the Ritters to help them achieve compliance. But when Kristin pressed to find out how many years the back-and-forth could be allowed to continue, she says she received no response.
I asked the department the same question and several others. While the state declined to respond to my specific questions, it did issue a written statement to me that included this remark: “The department’s goal is to get licensees back in compliance. If the department revokes a breeder’s license, then it has no regulatory authority at all. The department has a protocol by which repeat offenders are referred to the attorney general’s office.”9
Bob Baker has tried for years to involve the state attorney general and spur the office to file charges against Cornerstone Farms for their repeated violations, most recently with Lovey’s case. He says he has gotten nowhere as the Missouri Department of Agriculture has refused to refer Lovey’s case to the state attorney general.
MEANWHILE AT THE USDA…
Now that we know what horrors state inspectors were documenting at Cornerstone Farms, let’s come back to the federal inspection reports. They had nothing. USDA inspectors failed to notice or document a single violation at Cornerstone Farms even when they went to the facility on the exact same day that state inspectors found and documented a dozen.
On August 4, 2016, state inspectors found and documented thirteen violations, including a Labradoodle puppy and three standard poodle puppies with bright-red blood in their stool. The violations on this date also included two directs, the most severe class of violations, on the books for a male standard poodle with dark blood in its stool and a female standard poodle named Lacy with “dark discharge coming from the right ear” and a live flea in her coat.10
On August 8, 2016, state inspectors returned to check up on these serious cases and found another twelve violations, including several from prior reports that had not yet been corrected.11
But on August 8, 2016—that very same day—the USDA also sent out two animal care inspectors of its own to visit the Ritters. While some of the twelve violations that the state inspectors recorded that day would not be in conflict with federal law and only violate Missouri’s more restrictive regulations, several concerning the sick dogs recorded by the state would certainly run afoul of the Animal Welfare Act that the USDA is charged with upholding. However, two USDA inspectors visiting the property that day report that they found no noncompliant items during their visit. This, I reiterate, on the very same day that state inspectors found multiple violations.12
I couldn’t believe the difference between the state and federal inspection reports from the same facility on the same day. I decided to give the USDA the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the federal agents knew that the state inspectors had been out to see the Ritters that same day and had already documented the violations. Perhaps the federal inspectors chose simply to keep their notes off the official, then-publicly-available record. Given that the USDA has a policy of issuing teachable moments to help breeders improve without sullying their record, I figured that this might be where these inspectors had filed their observations on the Ritters. So I submitted a FOIA request for any “teachable moments” that might have been issued to the Ritters on that date. The USDA responded stating that no, there were no teachable moments for the Ritters issued during the time frame I had specified.13
&
nbsp; These same federal inspectors who failed to document a single noncompliance or even to educate the Ritters with a teachable moment had also visited the Cornerstone Farms earlier in the year, on May 23, 2016, and recorded yet again that they found no noncompliant items at the facility, even as state inspectors had found nine violations on January 21, 2016—including evidence of dogs with diarrhea and a Dogue de Bordeaux with dark blood in his stool. Again, my FOIA request found that the USDA inspectors failed to issue even an off-the-record teachable moment for this visit as well.
Considering that the USDA had to order the Ritters to obtain their federal license in the first place for selling dogs unlawfully without it, one would think that the agency would be interested in applying a little extra scrutiny to the facility’s operations during routine inspections.
Put it this way: State inspectors have never given the Ritters a clean report card. Federal inspectors, as of this writing, have yet to note a single violation.
With state and federal records in my hands from the very same day showing that the USDA was not documenting what Missouri inspectors were, I headed back up to meet with Gibbens at his Fort Collins office. It’s worth noting, I was never granted the opportunity to personally witness a USDA inspection despite my requests with the agency to do so. So instead, I had to rely on Gibbens to explain how federal records could paint such a different picture from what state inspectors found. I started by asking how the USDA works with states that have inspection protocols of their own. He said that each state varies but that in Missouri, federal and state inspectors communicate on a weekly basis and often do joint inspections.
“So let’s say a Missouri state inspector goes out with a federal inspector together,” I begin. “They’re there on the same day, and I’ve seen some records on the same day. And there are big animal welfare violations: sick dogs, for example. If the state inspector sees it, does the federal inspector also have to document it on his file?”
