by Rory Kress
I’m the only car or person in sight as the road now bends downhill, bordered by a handmade barbed-wire fence anchored to tree branches stuck into the ground. An algae-covered pond glows neon green to my left. On my right, two dozen cows wander together in the field, bathing in a clear watering hole. It’s not apparent who they belong to—if anyone.
The road dips back uphill, and then, unmistakably, there it is: Simler’s Kennel. I recognize it from an undercover video that my animal rights investigator contact Pete shot. As confirmation, the address marker bears the number I’ve been looking for. I try to drive as slowly as possible without attracting any suspicion, although, this far down the secluded road, there’s no plausible deniability left to hang on to. The Simlers’ house sits on the left side of the road, distressed white clapboard and quaint. As far as I can tell, I’m the only human being here or for miles around.
But there are dogs.
The kennels straddle the small road, housing around 150 dogs or perhaps more. Each unit is of a different shape, size, and style, springing up haphazardly across the landscape like a favela. There are a few trailers with dogs presumably in stacked cages inside. Outdoors, there are stacks upon stacks of what appear to be hand-constructed, thin, metal-and-plywood dog cages. Some appear to loosely adhere to the Missouri regulations that dogs be allowed unfettered access to the outdoors. However, that access might be more of a curse than a blessing on a hot and humid day like today.
In the units housing larger dogs like Labradors and German shepherds, there appears to be no power or ventilation to protect them from the elements beyond the shade provided by the tin roofs above their heads. Instead, the doghouses sit dotting the field, disconnected from the main property by the road. Red coolers are zip-tied to the backs of their wire cages, presumably to provide food or water. But it’s hard to tell from the road, as the rusted NO TRESPASSING signs affixed to the cage areas keep me from venturing down to the kennels close up. At thirty-four weeks pregnant, I know I wouldn’t be able to beat a hasty retreat even if I tried. And even in broad daylight, I have that creeping, horror-film inkling that I’m being watched.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
As pregnant as I am, I wouldn’t have flown to Missouri and driven three hours from Kansas City on nausea-inducing country roads to get here if I didn’t have an interview lined up. For the past two weeks, I’d been in contact with Keith Simler’s longtime kennel manager, Jackie Dorris. When I reached out to Simler, it was Jackie who returned my call. She was friendly but cautious in our initial conversations, informing me that Simler is now in his eighties and does not oversee the day-to-day operations of the kennel. Besides, she’d assured me, she’s been in charge of the facility for the last thirteen years, so she believed she could handle all my questions herself. I accepted that Simler wasn’t willing to talk. After all, it was his late wife, Wanda, who bred Izzie back in 2010. Wanda passed away in 2014, and Keith took up the operation and reapplied for a new USDA license in his own name about a month after her death. Wanda is now buried at that church cemetery I’d passed at the crossroads to Simler Trail itself.
Things had been going smoothly with Jackie in our conversations ahead of my trip to visit her. Usually, she was bright and cordial, although with certain questions, I could sense that her guard was up. To ease her mind and my way to an interview, I sent her a text message with a picture of Izzie’s paperwork to show her that yes, in fact, I was telling the truth that my dog had come from her kennel. We chatted about Izzie’s papers in a phone call a few days later, and she told me, somewhat apologetically, that there were no more of Izzie’s littermates around in her breeding stock and that her dam and sire, Cindee Marla and Rich, were long gone as well. I gently tried to find out where they might have ended up, but she balked. After some prodding, she said simply if not cryptically, “Well, six years is a really long time for what we do.”
She expressed some surprise that I’d purchased Izzie in New York. I asked if that was uncommon, and she said she does not sell to the American Dog Club where I bought her anymore. When I asked her why that might be, she said she likes to keep a rotation of buyers and not sell to one alone too often.
Back in April 2015, my undercover investigator contact, Pete, visited Simler’s Kennel on behalf of the Companion Animal Protection Society (CAPS). As he often does, he took hidden camera video and posted it on the CAPS website. It seems like the incident still has Jackie and Simler on edge. For the most part, Jackie is the star of Pete’s video after he was handed off to her by Simler much as I was. When I asked Pete how he gained access to Simler’s facility, he was unable to give me details, as it could blow his cover for future investigations. But judging from the video alone, it’s clear that Pete enters the facility with their blessing as they happily guide him through a tour of the kennels. At one point, the video freezes, and a caption pops on screen to highlight a violation to Missouri state regulations: a wall obstructs the animals’ view of what should be unfettered access to the outdoors.
“I was concerned about sensory deprivation with these dogs. Because at Simler’s Kennel, they would take a large wall, and they would put it about a foot, if I remember correctly, about a foot in front of the outdoor cages,” Pete recalls. “If [the dogs] are inside, all they can see is the dogs across from them, the dogs next to them, and then that’s it. And then they go outside, and all they can see are the dogs next to them and a wall in front of them. And they have no understanding of the world, or that there is a world, other than occasionally someone comes in every so often to look at them, turn lights on and off, and maybe fill up their feeder. And that’s it.”1
In the state inspection reports I have from just two months after Pete’s visit, the agent failed to identify this violation or any others.
But Pete’s video of Simler’s Kennel does not show the same level of horrors that are seen at many other dog-breeding facilities. While it certainly does not paint the operation in a positive light, it is not nearly as bad as it could be. Even Pete admits that Simler’s Kennel, by comparison to the hundreds of others he’s seen, is not terrible.
“I guess there’s got to be two scales for it,” Pete says, considering how to best explain his evaluation to me. “So if we’re talking about a USDA scale, they’re great. They have a few violations, but they’re not that bad. And they appear to generally be in compliance. A few violations here and there. If we’re talking from an animal welfare perspective, then I would say that they’re average, which is to say they are horrible. And most of that would be relevant to the psychological well-being of the animals.”
I find this dual scale interesting. Throughout my investigation into the world of USDA-licensed dog breeding, I’ve been finding that even those who uphold the Animal Welfare Act are still unquestionably abusing their dogs. In 2015, the year that Pete visited Simler’s Kennel, the facility had no violations on the record—although it did have many in the past. As a result, I think Simler’s Kennel makes a useful case study into how dogs that are well kept by USDA standards are still suffering.
I ask Pete for some examples of what concerned him about the psychological well-being of the dogs he found at Simler’s Kennel. He points to one that sticks in his mind and is most apparent above the others in his video there.
“Simler’s Kennel is an example of stereotypy for these dogs,” Pete says, referring to the group of compulsively repeated behaviors seen in animals that lack mental stimulation. “They seem to be cage crazy. There was a large number of dogs I would see that, when I’d go up to them, they would just start spinning in circles and running in circles absolutely nonstop. Then they wouldn’t stop doing that based upon if we moved somewhere, or if we would put our hands up to the cages, or what. They had this running in left-hand circles behavior that was just constant. Dogs don’t normally act like that when they’re not confined.”
But for Simler, Pete’s video presents a problem in that it is very easy to find with a quick Goo
gle search. Now, a pet shop purchaser can see exactly what the commercial breeding operation his dog came from looks like, providing the transparency that is not afforded by the state or the USDA. Thanks to CAPS and Pete, I don’t need a FOIA request to judge the quality of the Simler facility for myself. Either way, with all the challenges the government and the industry put in the way of consumers learning about the reality on the ground at dog-breeding facilities, I find myself believing more than ever in the work Pete does.
Pete says that several other breeders he’s investigated have complained to or threatened lawsuits against CAPS for posting his footage online. When I ask CAPS if Simler has done as much, the group’s founder tells me she has not heard from Simler or Jackie Dorris to date.
Jackie didn’t mention Pete’s video by name, but she asked if when I came to visit, I’d be trying to sneak hidden cameras into the kennels. Her tone was cordial, but the anxiety was very real. She said, with only a hint of defensiveness, that she had nothing to hide and has no violations on her USDA record, but still, it was something she wanted to avoid. Of course, she does have violations on her USDA record over the past several years—but that was not the point. I told her the truth: that I don’t conduct interviews with hidden cameras. I reminded her yet again that I was not an activist but a journalist, simply trying to learn more about what she does and where my dog came from. Besides, I said, trying to break the ice, “I’ll be thirty-four weeks pregnant by the time I get there, and I’m massive. Given that it’s August, you’ll see very quickly that there’s nowhere on my body I could get away with hiding a camera even if I wanted to.” She laughed. I don’t bother bringing up the fact that just two weeks before we began our conversations, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon vetoed the state’s notorious ag-gag bill that would have criminalized this type of undercover access. Technically, if I had wanted, I would have been within my rights to shoot undercover video—although, of course, that isn’t what I do.
We’d planned to meet at the kennel at noon on a Saturday in early August 2016. I booked my flight and hotel and then reached out to her once again to confirm that I was coming, full speed ahead. We chatted briefly and ended the conversation by saying that we’d see each other in a few days and that we were both looking forward to it.
So off I went, fingers crossed that the airline would still let me fly, big as I was. They did, begrudgingly, with a small amount of wrangling at the gate. I rented a car and headed off to the hotel to finish preparing my research for the interview and get a good night’s sleep ahead of what was sure to be a very long day of driving. Saturday morning, I set off for the northeast corner of the state, ready to finally see where Izzie came from, withholding judgment until I could set eyes on it myself. I fretted along the drive there that I might find Jackie very likeable and yet find her dogs to be in horrific condition. I hoped I’d find the kennel in surprisingly good condition and the dogs healthy and happy so that I wouldn’t have to cope with the dissonance of finding her personality at odds with what I knew was right and ethical. Maybe things had changed since April 2015 when Pete’s undercover video was shot and posted online?
About thirty minutes away from Simler’s Kennel, I gave Jackie a call to check in, letting her know I was close by. Immediately, the excuses began pouring out.
“There’s an emergency at the kennel. The dogs are already freaked out enough. I can’t be bringing anyone else on the property now. It’s, well, it’s just we have a situation, and it’s very last minute, so I can’t bring you out there,” she said.
“But I’m already out here,” I protested.
I tried and tried, but Jackie was unmovable. It didn’t matter. I was not going to be allowed to come to the kennel under any circumstances.
I tried to wiggle in with a new tactic, still driving straight ahead on the road to Simler Trail. I offered to meet off-site for our interview, told her I’d buy her lunch somewhere and we could just chat. I hoped that just meeting in person, I’d maybe be able to talk her into letting me come by.
“Well, I can’t because I have a family emergency too, and now we have to leave town right this moment. We’re going to be packing into the car and heading to Columbia [Missouri] any minute now.”
“Well, I’m only a half hour away,” I tried.
“I know,” she said with an exaggerated apologetic tone. She was overselling it a bit, in my opinion. “But we’ll be long gone by then.”
“I’ve come all this way,” I said, the self-pity in my voice as real as can be. “I’m thirty-four weeks pregnant, and you told me to go ahead and book my flight and come out. So I came—and believe me, it wasn’t very easy. After this, they’re not going to let me fly again for a long while because, as you know, I’m so far along in my pregnancy.”
“Gosh, I understand. That’s too bad,” she said, her words kind, her voice hardening.
“If you have to leave, is there anyone else on the property I can talk to since I’ve come all this way?”
“They’re all too busy, and there’s just no way. And Keith [Simler] wants nothing to do with this at all.”
We went back and forth for a few minutes until it became clear that I’d be getting precisely nowhere. Her excuses varied between saying that she was cancelling due to a family emergency and that there was an emergency at the kennel. My gut told me that there was no real emergency at all. Instead, I sensed I was dealing with a case of cold feet, or perhaps someone got in her ear and put the kibosh on this interview altogether. As a consolation, she promised we could chat by phone in the following week and said she’d give me a full interview on the record then.
Later when I tell Pete what happened, it takes everything for him not to outright scoff at my naïveté. He alerts me to the fact that I’ve made, in his opinion, a rookie mistake.
“If you want to do the journalist thing, that’s very, very hard. Even just to talk to them,” he says.
I tell Pete that I’m not in the business of going undercover like he is. For what I do, it’s best to give people a fair shake to present their point of view in the interest of journalistic transparency. He tells me that even still, I shouldn’t have let Jackie know ahead of time that I was coming. I should have just shown up.
“It has to always be right this fucking minute. Never set an appointment. Never try and talk to them and say, ‘I’ll get in tomorrow or next week or in three hours.’ It is right now. Because if they have time to think about it, they will change their mind. Just get in there, and fucking work it, and get it done,” he instructs.
Maybe Pete’s right. And maybe if I hadn’t been so pregnant at the time of my trip, I wouldn’t have been worried about just marching up to their door, marching past all the NO TRESPASSING signs, and making my case. But I’m no longer making decisions for myself alone.
So here I am on Simler Trail, just a few minutes after my last, fruitless call to Jackie. There’s no sign of any emergency at the kennel as she said. At this point, I’m hoping to just show up and find her here or at least someone amid the crisis she vaguely referred to on the phone. But the place is deserted. More importantly, there are no signs that anyone is around to tend to the animals in the oppressive humidity of Missouri’s summer. I roll down my window for just a moment to hear the dogs barking. A red tick finds its way inside immediately. I fight it back outside and wonder whether the dogs are also covered in the little pests. Once I see that there’s no one around the main house and barn, I decide to keep moving down the road to see if maybe I’ll run into someone who will speak to me.
I roll on and on downhill, passing through the rows of stacked kennels up against the side of the road. Another abandoned barn spills hay out into the field, and then, without warning, the dirt road just stops, overtaken by wild weeds. There I am, a sitting duck in the middle of an open field, sprawling out about a half mile in every direction. Even in the sunshine, I feel afraid, scared to be so exposed and, at the same time, so alone in such a vast expanse. There’s nowhere to go
but directly back where I came from.
I maneuver a U-turn, leaving tracks in the tall, untamed grass. I head back up the hill for my second pass of Simler’s Kennel. It’s still deserted. I brake suddenly. There’s a large black Lab mix of some kind lying motionless just next to the road. It’s the only dog in sight that is free from a cage. I stop to take a closer look, concerned that it is only free because it is dead. But my squealing brakes wake him, and thankfully, he lifts his graying chin to see who’s stopping before going back to sleep.
I breathe in, trying to slow my racing heart before starting back to the main road. But before even a shred of relief can seep in, I see something that truly shakes me and will stay with me forever.
There, right next to me, in a rough-hewn, stacked, roadside cage, staring straight back into my window, I see Izzie.
The world stops. I force myself to keep looking.
I know it’s not her. I know that’s impossible. But she looks just like her. A muddle of her wheaten terrier puppies, each no bigger than my fist, circles around her feet. Her nipples sag along her belly. Her expression gives me nothing. She is just a blank face gazing back at me through wire mesh. She has Izzie’s same too-thin hair, the same honey-colored eyes, the same squared-off head. But unlike Izzie, when I lock eyes with this listless animal, I see no joy—and maybe no capacity for joy left in her tired, overspent body.
The puppies huddle on the cage floor. Soon, they’ll be gone, shipped off to someone as foolish as I was. But it’s not the puppies that stun me. It’s her who I can’t stop staring at: the mother dog who will watch them as they’re ripped away from her, who will be forced to breed again on her very next heat, who will suffer this miserable cycle in this miserable cage until her body gives out. Then maybe she’ll be killed. Or maybe she’ll be rescued to a life in a home. But she’ll never be quite like a normal dog. Sure, she’ll look like a dog. But some part of what has made this animal so sacred to humanity for millennia will have been robbed from her.
