Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  Chester County SPCA protective services officer Craig Baxter. He was new to animal-welfare work, and struggled to cope with the squalor that stretched before him at Mike-Mar Kennel. (Carol Bradley)

  The first van was filled up in a matter of hours, two dogs to a crate. As soon as the vehicle was full, Baxter climbed into the driver’s seat and headed for West Chester, a forty-five-minute trip. The noticeably ill dogs would bypass the SPCA shelter and go directly to an animal hospital.

  Inside Wolf’s house, when the noise briefly subsided, Green heard the sound of clinking glass. She searched the room and found, tucked in a corner, a laundry basket covered by a towel. Underneath, two English Bulldog puppies stretched in their sleep alongside a hammer, a box of nails, and two glass bowls. Had someone deliberately tried to hide the newborns? It certainly looked that way.

  • • •

  No one can say for certain what the tricolor Cavalier with the swoosh on her front leg saw or heard, or what she must have thought when the door swung open and light flooded the dim room. The bright light probably stung her cloudy, irritated eyes. And the voices she heard were different from the voices she was accustomed to hearing.

  The people left. Then, several hours later, they returned. This time a man knelt and stuck a finger inside the Cavalier’s crate. “Hang in there, little one, we’ll get you out of here soon,” he said. The other dogs watched with apprehension as the man picked up the laundry basket and carried it outside. When he returned, he reached up and unlatched the door to a crate on the top row. That dog, too, was carried outside.

  This time the man made his way across the feces-covered floor to the Cavalier’s crate. He unlatched the door, reached in, and wrapped his hands around another Cavalier, a female. “Come on, baby, come on,” the man said. He disappeared with the dog. Minutes later he was back.

  The tricolor Cavalier stood, frozen. Four dogs were left in her crate and the other three were huddled together, pressed as far to the rear of the cage as they could get. The little dog stared straight ahead as the man returned once more, lifted her off the urine-soaked newspapers and hugged her close. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

  He carried the dog into the next room, where a woman sat at a table and a third person held a camera, waiting. The woman jotted down the barest of details about the dog. Breed: CKCS, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Sex: female. Color: tri.

  The Cavalier was the 132nd dog to be rescued from Mike-Mar Kennel. The woman at the table wrote the number 132 on a card and handed it to the man. He held the dog on his left arm, picked up the card, and posed for a picture. The dog was still frightened, but a part of her was also curious. The instant the shutter clicked she glanced up, her melancholy eyes staring straight into the lens.

  A frightened Cavalier stared into the camera as Baxter helped tag her as dog number 132. (Jill Green)

  The dog had to be carried out to the van—she had no concept of a leash and refused to walk on one. An hour later, when the van left for West Chester, she hunkered down in her carrier, the same as the other dogs. For a dog who had never left her kennel, the sensations of movement must have been disorienting and scary.

  Baxter had braced himself for a noisy ride, and it was noisy at first—the dogs yelped loudly as the journey began. Before long, though, almost all of the dogs experienced motion sickness and the smell of vomit filled the van. After that the barks subsided, and for most of the ride there was no noise at all except for the rumble of the engine. The silence, Baxter decided, was the eeriest sound of all.

  As rescuers went about the grim task of documenting his dogs, Wolf remained inside his house, sitting on his couch or at his computer and chatting with anyone who passed by. He appeared frail: Earlier, walking from his residence to the kennel, he’d grasped Green’s arm as they climbed a set of steps. While other workers set up equipment, Wolf was happy to show Green decades-old photos of his prize-winning dogs and the Best in Show trophies that decorated the front room of his kennel. He claimed to have a name and a pedigree for every dog on the property.

  To Green’s surprise, Wolf was completely nonthreatening. He seemed calm—stunned, perhaps, by the raid, but composed. Later in the day, when Beswick slipped on a pile of feces in his living room as she was passing through, Wolf asked politely if she wanted him to clean up the mess. “Why?” Beswick responded. “There’s plenty more where this came from.”

  Outside, Chuck McDevitt scrolled through the Rolodex he’d brought with him. Before he’d gone to work for the SPCA, McDevitt was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He knew the heart-tugging rescue of dozens of frightened animals would appeal to the media. He also knew that to care for these dogs indefinitely, the SPCA would need public support—lots of it. His job was to get word out about the raid as quickly as possible. As soon as the rescue effort got under way, he began calling newspapers and TV stations.

  A reporter and a photographer from the Daily Local News in West Chester were the first to arrive. They pulled up at about the same time as the backup troopers from the Highway Patrol. Five TV stations out of Philadelphia—6ABC, NBC10, WB17, FOX29, and CN8—showed up shortly afterward.

  While McDevitt was getting word out about the raid, workers at the SPCA shelter were on the phone with neighboring shelters, asking for help. The SPCA could barely house 136 dogs, much less twice that many. The Delaware County SPCA, the Delaware State SPCA, the Pennsylvania SPCA, animal control in Coatesville, and the Applebrook Inn Pet Resort in West Chester all agreed to pitch in.

  Rescuers had expected to find Wolf’s kennel overrun with puppies. To their surprise, most of the dogs were adults, which was worse. These animals had languished for years with untreated afflictions, and over time minor problems had developed into major ones. Some dogs had broken legs or were visibly ill and needed immediate care. Baxter transported them to the West Chester Veterinary Medical Center. McDevitt drove to the clinic himself a Bulldog who had become violently ill after ingesting rat poison. Veterinarians at the clinic accepted thirty or so of the dogs before pleading for relief. They couldn’t take any more.

  In a bedroom at the rear of Wolf’s house, rescuers found an English Bulldog who belonged to Wolf’s son. The Bulldog was acting aggressively. She was doing her best to guard the disheveled room, where a torn-up mattress lay on the floor. “Just leave her there,” Shaw told the staff. Hours later, she returned to the room, slipped a makeshift leash around the Bulldog’s neck, and tugged her out. The photo taken that night of Pansy (as the SPCA later named her) showed her stretched out on her back, resisting still.

  Outside, the temperature was so frosty that rescuers stamped their feet to keep them warm. Inside, Beswick was perspiring heavily. The rescue effort was exhausting work, and after ten hours on the job, Beswick was so nauseous she had to leave. But Shaw was operating on nervous energy. The rescue effort was her baby. She had to see it through to the end.

  SPCA executive director Susie Spackman arrived late in the night to help, as did staffers from the Pennsylvania SPCA in Philadelphia and the Delaware County SPCA. Despite the reinforcements, Shaw was weighed down with worry; there were too many animals and not enough people to process them. Every dog taken to the SPCA would need to be examined a second time for wounds, matting, mites, and more. For legal purposes, every illness or injury, no matter how slight, had to be documented. Shaw was worn out, but her work wasn’t over by a long shot.

  Eyes welling with tears, Shaw turned to McMichael and said, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it.”

  Somehow, they persevered. Over the next twelve hours, Baxter alone made half a dozen trips to West Chester and back, the last of them at 3:30 a.m. Saturday. More than once he fought the urge to fall asleep on the road.

  It was 4 a.m. by the time Shaw, her husband, and several workers from the Applebrook Pet Resort left Mike-Mar Kennel. Shaw drove to the SPCA and spent another
hour preparing inventory lists. By the time she got home, it was 6 a.m. Too worn out even to shower, she changed her clothes, set the alarm for 8 a.m., and collapsed on the bed.

  Thirty people had taken part in the rescue. Together they had removed 337 dogs, three cats, and two parrots from Wolf’s premises. Added to the number of animals already housed there, the SPCA’s shelter’s population had tripled in size overnight, to 450 dogs. On a scale of one to ten, the Wolf case registered 100, Shaw would say later. “It was off the charts. It had all the emotions going.”

  Chapter 6: Sorting the Dogs

  By saturday morning, the word was out: The Chester County SPCA was overflowing with dogs who had been seized from one of the largest puppy mills ever discovered in the United States. The night before, the shelter had fielded sixty-five calls from concerned animal lovers. The new day brought hundreds more calls. Local residents dropped off towels, blankets, cleaning supplies, and donations. They showed up to adopt the dogs and were disappointed to learn the dogs weren’t yet available. The animals were considered legal evidence. They had to be kept in the shelter’s custody until Wolf and Trottier either surrendered them or were forced to give them up.

  Shaw had slept a grand total of two hours. When the alarm clock buzzed, she roused herself and staggered to the shower to wash off eau de kennel, a potent combination of urine, feces, and fear. It was impossible; the stench permeated her shoulder-length hair and would linger for days, even after several shampoos. The kids would want to hear all about the raid, but they were sleeping, so she threw on a T-shirt that said, “Happy to be Grumpy,” and slipped out of the house. By 9 a.m. she was back in the office, headed for the coffeepot.

  The raid was over, but the legal machinations were just beginning. The SPCA had yet to issue any charges against Wolf. If Shaw could convince him to surrender his dogs, the organization might be willing to drop the charges. That would free up the SPCA’s shelter to adopt the dogs out immediately, avoiding the cost and emotional toll of housing them in a shelter for months on end.

  Wolf had relinquished three dogs the night before—two Doberman Pinchers and a Mastiff. The Mastiff was old and ill. It was less clear why Wolf had given up the Dobermans; they weren’t his type of breed, apparently. More important, Wolf had seemed willing to consider a wholesale surrender. “Think about it,” Green had urged him. “We can probably work something out.”

  Without a state kennel license, Wolf could not lawfully have more than twenty-six dogs on the premises under any circumstance. But if there were three or four dogs he felt particularly close to, Green said, the SPCA might be willing to clean them up, spay or neuter them, and return them to him. Provided Wolf cooperated, that is, and gave up the rest of the animals.

  Green left Wolf’s property the previous night covered in grime—before entering her house, she’d stood on the porch and peeled off her clothes. But she was optimistic that the case might be wrapped up in a short time. On Saturday afternoon, she accompanied Shaw back to Lower Oxford to see whether Wolf was willing to resolve matters quickly. While they were there, Shaw also needed to go over with him the inventory of animals who had been removed the night before.

  The visit went badly. Wolf pressed to keep twenty-five dogs—just enough to stay under the state-imposed limit—but Shaw had no intention of returning that many to him. She tried to reason with him, to no avail. Midway through their conversation, she and Green glanced out Wolf’s window to see Trottier standing outside, behaving menacingly. Aware that he was being watched, Trottier set a bag of feces on fire on the ground next to their Jeep and began throwing leashes and gloves at the vehicle. When that failed to flush them out, he fired up a chainsaw and yelled, “They ain’t getting any more.” The atmosphere was so tense that Wolf eventually stepped outside to calm Trottier down. When the two women got in the Jeep to leave, Wolf got into his own car and escorted them out of the driveway to make sure Trottier didn’t follow along behind.

  Trottier came anyway. Minutes after Shaw and Green exited onto Highway 1, they glanced over at Baltimore Pike, which ran parallel to the highway, and saw Trottier’s vehicle racing along, trying to catch up. Suddenly, their Jeep lurched to a halt. The engine was dead. “This is not happening,” Shaw muttered, incredulous, from the passenger seat. She called the state police to ask for help, but a minute later, Green was able to start the Jeep up again. She mashed the accelerator and quickly managed to lose Trottier.

  Wolf’s unwillingness to surrender his dogs was unfortunate: It meant the animals would need to be housed indefinitely, until the case was resolved in court. That could take months. The cost of caring for them for that long a period could easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and all of it might be for naught; if Wolf won the case, he would get his dogs back. Absent a breeder’s license, he would still need to find homes for most of the animals. But he would be free to sell them to other disreputable kennels. The dogs would probably be just as bad off as before.

  • • •

  Back in west chester, SPCA shelter staff sorted through the dogs, determining which of them could be sent elsewhere. Each animal needed to be examined physically. The shelter put out a call for veterinarians who were willing to help.

  Dogs known to be pregnant were taken to Applebrook Inn, a pet resort for dogs, cats, and other small animals. Applebrook had a fireplace where the mothers-to-be could curl up and keep warm, and it offered the added assurance that all of the animals on the premises were vaccinated. At the SPCA shelter it was anybody’s guess whether Wolf’s animals had all their shots.

  The organization’s immediate task was to parcel out a third of the dogs to other shelters. By midday Saturday, a dozen regional animal organizations responded, sending vans to pick up 135 of the dogs. The Pennsylvania SPCA in Philadelphia took 63. Others went to the Delaware Humane Association, the Delaware SPCA, the Delaware County SPCA, the Bucks County SPCA, the Humane Society of Berks County, the Animal Rescue League of Berks County, the Humane League of Lancaster County, Hickory Springs Farm Boarding Kennels, and the Montgomery County SPCA.

  Twenty-five of the dogs, mostly Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, went to the Humane Society of Berks County. An officer from that organization drove to West Chester and loaded the dogs—among them the tricolor Cavalier with the swoosh on her front leg—into a van and transported them thirty-nine miles north to Reading. After six years in a cage, Dog 132 was experiencing her second road trip in twenty-four hours. Her worst days were behind her, but the little dog had no way of knowing that. She was experiencing something new, different, and scary.

  Meanwhile, Wolf wasted no time launching a public relations counterassault. He told the Philadelphia Daily News that his dogs were living in crowded circumstances because their kennel was being renovated. He denied claims that the dogs had been living in filth and blamed the cooped-up confines of winter for the smell. “If you have a lot of dogs under one roof, you’re going to have an odor,” he claimed.

  In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Wolf protested that the SPCA “took my little friends.” His dogs had been well cared for, he insisted. He said he fed them strained baby food, hamburger, and cottage cheese.

  “We love them. We played with them all the time,” he said.

  Wolf was showing no remorse. If anything, he portrayed himself as the victim. The overwhelming number of dogs on his property was evidence of his compassion, he said. If he couldn’t sell a dog or find a home for it, he would simply keep it. “I kept dogs alive after I should,” he told the Inquirer. “They wagged their tails, they ate. I’m old; are you going to put me to sleep?”

  He also vowed to get his dogs back even if he had to sell his house to do it.

  “All my years of devotion and love—it’s horrible.” Wolf told one newspaper. “It makes me sad at this point in my life I have to be in this position.”

  The SPCA fielde
d calls from several breeders who claimed to own some of the dogs taken from Mike-Mar Kennel. Wendy Trottier said she had been keeping two male dogs and a mother with four puppies at the kennel while she was out of state caring for a friend. She defended the conditions at Mike-Mar Kennel: “Any time I’ve been in there they were clean,” she said. “I know my son cleans the cages twice a day.”

  Word of the raid raced through the breeder grapevine. A local terrier breeder, Ann Zevnik, told the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal that she’d known Wolf a decade earlier when he bred Pekingese and Maltese. “He was a wonderful breeder, but he dropped out of showing dogs long ago,” Zevnik said. The SPCA fielded several calls from people defending Wolf. “A man has a right to earn a living” was the gist of their comments. But as information sifted out about the abhorrent condition of his dogs, the criticism faded.

  With the exception of Crystal Messaros, the neighbor who had complained about the foul smell emanating from Wolf’s property, nearby residents professed surprise to learn that Wolf had been housing so many dogs. “In the summer, you can hear dogs barking sometimes, but you can only see a couple at a time,” Harvey Stidham, who operated an auto body shop across the highway, told a reporter. Tom Rickards, who lived across the highway, told the Daily Local News he rarely smelled anything, “though once in a while you would get a whiff.”

  Green was puzzled at how Wolf could come across as intelligent and caring and yet be blind to such squalor. She marveled at his charisma. She could see he had the kind of showbiz personality that could persuade people to spend $2,500 on a puppy. And she was struck by the fact that Wolf had initially allowed Shaw and Siddons to inspect the property—something he didn’t have to do.

  “He had the right to say, ‘No, you’re not allowed to come onto my property,’ but he didn’t. And he allowed us to take pictures,” Green said. “Why did he let them in?”