Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  Over time, Abby came around. In spite of her problems, she and Alycia bonded quickly. The sofa was Abby’s favorite spot, but she would jump off of it and go in search of Alycia if Alycia disappeared anywhere else in the house. Abby didn’t mind spending time in her crate. Being enclosed on all four sides gave her a feeling of security, and if Alycia needed to confine her for a few hours, Abby would step inside her crate willingly. She was so quiet and well behaved that Alycia soon began taking Abby to work with her in the afternoons, the way she’d done with her previous dogs. Alycia worked as an executive administrative assistant for a business consultant. Abby’s crate sat ten feet from Alycia’s desk; the dog spent most of her time there napping or chewing on a bone. The door to the crate stayed open.

  At obedience class, Abby hid behind Alycia’s legs but somehow managed to learn to sit, stay, and come. At home she figured out how to stand at the back door and bark, spinning in a circle, when she wanted Alycia to let her out. She loved the outdoors. The backyard was the place she was most apt to let down her guard and act the way a dog ought to, with no worries or cares. As soon as Alycia opened the door, Abby would race toward the edge of the low-lying deck, soar through the air, and hit the ground running, her shoulder-length Cavalier ears flying out behind her.

  In time she seemed almost normal, with one exception: Abby never overcame her fear of other people. She felt comfortable around Sandy Wood, the woman who ran the boarding wing at the veterinary clinic where Abby sometimes stayed, but that was it—no one else got close. She remained skittish and fearful. Years after her rescue, she jumped at the slightest noise—a door opening or an object hitting the floor. She learned to reach her front legs out for Alycia, but every now and again she cringed when Alycia came close. Her years in the puppy mill would haunt her forever.

  Abby, a Cavalier rescued from Michael Wolf’s puppy mill, with her new owner, Alycia Meldon. With the help of Alycia, Abby overcame some but not all of her issues. (Judith Gliniewicz)

  Which, of course, made Alycia love her all the more. Her life was much fuller with Abby in it, she said. “I’m so thankful for this little miracle.”

  • • •

  Unlike pam and alycia, Laura and Mike Hewitt dealt one-on-one with Wolf. They met him just days before the raid on Mike-Mar Kennel. Laura, a retired speech-language pathologist, and Mike, a vice president for Dupont Safety Resources, had recently lost their two rescued dogs: Mattie, a Keeshond, and Lucie, a Sheltie-Corgi mix. This time around, they wanted a Cavalier. Two of them, as a matter of fact. Laura had researched the breed and was convinced the friendly, diminutive dogs would make ideal pets.

  The Hewitts’ veterinarian referred them to Susan Krewatch, another client who had Cavaliers. She passed along contact information for Wolf. Laura checked out Mike-Mar Cavaliers on four different websites. One of them, breeders.net, featured four photos of Cavalier puppies and the assurance that the kennel was home to “over 200 champions in several breeds.”

  “My goal is to own the very best quality dogs that are healthy and happy,” Wolf wrote. “I have decided to sell my puppies as pets only not to breeders or exhibitors. The dogs are the happiest being a beloved pet.”

  Laura contacted Wolf, and over the next two weeks they e-mailed back and forth several times. He could tell she was a dog person, Wolf wrote. But when Laura asked to visit his kennel in person, Wolf kept putting her off, saying that he needed to undergo dialysis or that it simply wasn’t a good day to visit.

  Finally, he relented. On February 7, 2006, the Hewitts drove the fourteen miles from their home outside Newark, Delaware, to Lower Oxford. They arrived the day before Cheryl Shaw and Maureen Siddons made their unannounced inspection of Mike-Mar Kennel and three days before the dogs were seized.

  It was close to 4 p.m. when the couple turned in to Wolf’s driveway. The landscaping was overgrown, and it seemed peculiar to Laura that there were no signs advertising the kennel. But any doubts she had were erased the minute Wolf opened the door to the kennel building and half a dozen Cavaliers scampered out. The dogs surrounded the couple, begging for attention. Their friendly nature seemed like a good sign, although oddly, the dogs emitted no sound when they barked. Wolf brushed it off when Laura asked him about it. He simply said the dogs were well-behaved.

  The breeder ushered the couple into the viewing room, a living room-like area decorated with threadbare furniture. He spoke at length about his show days at Westminster and pointed out photos of his champion dogs. Talk turned to breeding, and Wolf lamented the proliferation of Pennsylvania’s Amish-run puppy mills. “He deplored the Amish because of how they deceived the public,” Laura recalled. “He went into a whole dissertation” about their irresponsible practices.

  The Hewitts were more interested in the two litters of puppies that were piled together on a velveteen bed inside an open-topped wire pen. Laura leaned over to play with the wide-eyed dogs. It was good to see her interacting with the puppies, Wolf said. He said a couple had dropped by in a limo earlier that week to check out his dogs, but after neither the husband nor his wife bothered to actually handle the puppies, Wolf said, he refused to sell them a dog. The Hewitts later met other customers of Wolf who said he had told them the same story.

  Laura asked the breeder how old the puppies were; he said he couldn’t remember. She cuddled two puppies—a Blenheim with sleepy eyes and a tricolor dog. She was smitten, just as she’d suspected she would be. The Cavaliers were every bit as adorable as she had hoped. What’s more, they were available immediately. It had taken the couple weeks to get their last rescue dog.

  Laura asked if the Cavaliers were AKC-registered. Wolf no longer did business with the AKC, he told her. He said he raised his dogs not for breeding, but to be pets.

  That didn’t matter. Laura was definitely interested in the two pups she’d picked out. They’d call the chestnut and white Cavalier Winston, she decided, and the tricolor dog Wallace. Wallace came from another litter and was about two weeks older than Winston.

  Winston seemed to be congested; mucus spilled from one of his eyes. Laura borrowed a towel from Wolf to wipe the mucus away. The dogs’ hearts and eyes had been checked, Wolf assured them. They were healthy and good to go.

  He had a deal for the Hewitts, he said. Normally he charged $1,500 each for the puppies, but he would sell them the pair for $2,000. That sounded reasonable—the price was considerably less than the $3,000 a breeder in Baltimore was asking for a single Cavalier. The Hewitts’ only problem was that they planned to leave town in a few days. If they paid him a deposit, would Wolf be willing to hold the puppies until they returned? He agreed to do so, provided the couple paid extra for food. Mike wrote Wolf a check for $500, Laura snapped several photos of the dogs, and the couple left.

  On the way home, the Hewitts stopped off for dinner and Laura excused herself to go wash her hands. In the bathroom she glanced down at the black wool coat she was wearing. She’d deliberately worn black to see whether the puppies shed. There wasn’t much hair, but the coat smelled nasty—almost as bad as the mushroom barns in nearby Avondale when the farmers flung open the doors.

  “I can’t get this smell off me,” Laura commented to her husband. She had to have the coat dry-cleaned the next day.

  Laura wished Mike-Mar Kennel had been cleaner. But despite the odor, she and Mike were sold on the Cavalier puppies. Two days later, excited about her new pets, Laura e-mailed Wolf to let him know she had already sent some of the pictures of the puppies to family and friends. Now their friends were asking questions, like what were the puppies’ birthdates? Where did their parents and grandparents come from, and what information could Wolf share about them?

  The puppies “were all so loving and cuddly that I got overwhelmed being in puppydom and doggy kisses that I didn’t even use the list of ?s that I had prepared!” Laura wrote. She closed by saying, “Thanks so much for your help and in the
breeding and raising of such loving and precious dogs!”

  Thirty-four hours later, Laura turned on the eleven o’clock news and watched, astonished, the coverage of the raid on Mike-Mar Kennel. The station showed footage of rescuers carrying hundreds of dogs out and loading them into vans. Where in all that chaos were Wallace and Winston? she wondered. Laura felt as though she’d been kicked in the chest.

  She phoned the station, NBC10 in Philadelphia, and tracked down the reporter who was working the story. The Chester County SPCA was handling the raid, he told her. That night Laura wrote the SPCA a lengthy e-mail explaining that she and Mike had put down a deposit for two of the puppies taken from Wolf’s kennel. The following morning the couple drove to the SPCA shelter, ready to claim Winston and Wallace. The staff had bad news: The puppies were considered evidence in the case against Wolf. They would need to be kept in custody until the matter was resolved.

  As far as Laura was concerned, the puppies were already part of her family—and now she and Mike might not see them for months. The predicament brought back painful memories. Seventeen years earlier, Laura and her first husband had one child and had arranged to adopt a second. Laura spent five months bonding with the biological mother; she even attended Lamaze classes with her. But four days after the woman gave birth to a little girl, she decided to reclaim her baby, and the couple were forced to give up the child.

  In an e-mail dated February 13, Mike informed Wolf that he had stopped payment on the deposit he’d left with him four days earlier. “We feel dismay, disappointment, anger, and shock in what the media has reported, and our decision was extremely difficult to make,” Mike wrote. A few days later, Wolf’s attorney, Eric Coates, returned the Hewitts’s check with a brief note saying the puppies weren’t available for now but that he hoped they would be in the near future.

  The Hewitts remained concerned about the puppies’ welfare. Laura stayed in touch with Chester County SPCA staff, and four and a half months later, when the dogs were ready to be adopted out, Laura arrived at the shelter early to claim the Cavaliers. Becky Turnbull pulled her out of the line to tell her there was more bad news. The puppies had been ill the night they’d been taken from the kennel, and neither had survived.

  To try to make up for the couple’s loss, Turnbull gave Laura first pick of some other Cavaliers, puppies who had been newborns when the raid occurred and were now barely 5 months old. Laura again chose two males, this time a Blenheim she named Baxter and a black and tan dog she named Duffy. She knew she’d made the right choice when the moment they were released the puppies scampered to her, jumped into her arms, and covered her with kisses.

  The Hewitts mourned the loss of Winston and Wallace, but Baxter and Duffy quickly stole their hearts. They had been rescued early enough to escape the trauma of puppy mill life. They were spared the fear and lack of socialization that plagued the rest of Wolf’s dogs.

  Physically, though, the dogs were a nightmare. Both had ear mites and bad teeth, even though they were still puppies. Baxter had a hernia that required surgery. Two weeks after the Hewitts brought the puppies home, the hair on Baxter’s face began to fall out. He was diagnosed with demodectic mange, a condition that can be hereditary but frequently is caused by a dog’s weak immune system. He suffered hair loss across his entire face. In a matter of weeks, he developed a worse form of the disease, sarcoptic mange—mites tunneling into the outer layers of his skin, causing it to become crusty and scaly and itch constantly. For weeks, Baxter buried his inflamed head in Laura’s chest, whimpering. And because the dogs slept with Laura and Mike, Laura herself contracted sarcoptic mange.

  It was love at first sight for Laura Hewitt and her two new Cavaliers, Duffy and Baxter. (Mike Hewitt)

  Eventually the Hewitts got the mange under control, but their dogs went on to experience a succession of other ailments. Duffy’s biggest problem was worms. He had every kind imaginable. His immune system was so fragile that two days after he went home with the Hewitts, he collapsed. That’s what happens with puppy mill survivors, the couple’s veterinarian told them. In crowded and stressful circumstances, their adrenaline races at such a high pitch that when the dogs finally start to settle down, they fall apart.

  Both Cavaliers suffered from gastrointestinal problems. In a matter of months, constant eruptions of blood, vomit, and diarrhea ruined the white carpet in the couple’s spacious home. It wasn’t uncommon for Laura to take one or both dogs to the vet three times a day. In the first year alone, the Hewitts spent nearly $10,000 fighting an array of health problems in their dogs.

  • • •

  Had she foreseen the ordeal she would undergo—not to mention the troubles the Hewitts would experience with their dogs—Susan Krewatch never would have recommended Wolf.

  She first visited him in 2004. She’d located him online and liked the fact that Wolf lived only about twenty minutes from her house in Hockessin, Delaware. His place was a little dirty and smelly, but not enough to sound any alarms. That first visit, Susan purchased a tricolor female she named Lily. Lily seemed healthy, so six months later Susan returned to buy a second Cavalier, another tricolor she named Bella.

  Bella had problems immediately. Susan’s vet found a corneal abrasion on one of Bella’s eyes, dead ear mites in her ears, and patches of missing hair. A few days later the puppy developed bronchitis. Her body wouldn’t tolerate antibiotics, so Susan had to hold an inhaler over the dog’s nose to clear out her lungs. She confronted Wolf about the problems over the phone. He agreed not to cash the $200 deposit check Susan had left him, and she was satisfied. Two hundred dollars covered the vet bill.

  Bella eventually regained her health. But three years later, Lily developed a heart murmur and painful urinary tract infections that wouldn’t go away. The infections made her so sick that her eyes glazed over and she could hardly walk or lift her head. She turned out to also have E.coli and Pseudomonas, serious bacterial infections. Exploratory surgery revealed worse problems. Lily had just one kidney and, on top of that, a recessed vulva, a condition that could enable urine to pool in the folds of her skin, triggering bacterial growth. A surgeon operated on her vulva, but problems continued. Then Lily’s vet determined that she had subluxation, a partial dislocation of the bones in her hind legs. “But don’t worry about that now. That’s the least of your worries,” the vet told Susan.

  Too late she realized she’d been dealing with a puppy mill. The signs were all there: Wolf’s house was filthier and smelled worse every time she visited. He kept trying to sell her male puppies—presumably so he could keep the females for breeding purposes. The last time Susan visited him, she brought along Lily and Bella, and Wolf proudly showed her his kennel: a building filled with dogs in stacked crates. He seemed not to notice that the floors of the building were awash with urine. Susan’s own dogs were skating about on the slippery floors, and Lily began drooling uncontrollably, a sign of acute stress.

  Susan was horrified by the rank conditions, and told Wolf so. “I said, ‘Michael, this is terrible. There are too many dogs to a cage. They aren’t even able to walk around and turn around.’ He said ‘Oh, no no. We’re cleaning. They’re not usually like this.’” Susan bathed her dogs when she got home that day and vowed never to go back. A year later, though, despite what she’d seen, she recommended Wolf to the Hewitts.

  “He just kind of sucked me in,” Susan recalled years later. “He said, ‘You know I love dogs more than people’—that kind of stuff. And he made a big fuss over the dogs—the ones I saw.”

  Chapter 16: Tackling the Puppy Mills

  Robert o. baker understood better than anyone how widespread the hidden world of puppy mills had become.

  A former stockbroker from St. Louis, Baker, 59, began chronicling abuses in horse and dog racing and dog theft rings in the late 1970s. He wrote the book The Misuse of Drugs in Horse Racing. In 1980, after 60 Minutes featur
ed his work, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) hired him to look into puppy mills.

  His assignment was straightforward: Find out whether the federal Animal Welfare Act was making any headway in improving conditions at commercial kennels. The U.S. Congress had passed the law in 1966 and expanded it four years later to establish minimal standards for the care, housing, sale, and transport of dogs, cats, and other animals held by dealers or laboratories. Large-scale breeding kennels were now required to be licensed, and federal inspectors were supposed to inspect the kennels once a year. But the HSUS kept hearing anecdotal evidence that, ten years after taking effect, the law wasn’t making much of a difference. Dogs were still being inadequately housed, poorly bred dogs were still winding up in pet stores, and customers were still being victimized.

  Baker got a job selling kennel supplies and equipment to brokers and breeders, which provided a crash course in the how-to’s of large-scale dog breeding. From time to time he also approached kennel operators on the pretext of buying a dog. Breeders weren’t always fooled; in Missouri, he was shot at by a kennel owner who discovered him on her property with a television camera crew. But most breeders had no problem letting him view their operations up close.

  He quickly discovered that far from being hampered by the Animal Welfare Act, puppy mills were flourishing. Breeders routinely flouted the law’s minimum standards. In kennel after kennel—sometimes old chicken coops—he saw dogs confined to cages so small they could barely turn around, visibly hungry, and diseased. Pennsylvania’s farmers didn’t have chicken coops, so they housed their dogs in old washing machines and refrigerators or tied them to oil drums or abandoned cars, unprotected from the elements.