Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  The lengths to which breeders were allowed to skirt already lenient regulations astounded Baker. For example, even though excrement was supposed to be removed regularly from a dog’s cage, federal inspectors were told not to issue a citation unless the fecal buildup was more than two weeks old. Inspectors typically let matters go three to four weeks before they cited a breeder. And left on their own, breeders tended to let the excrement build up even longer. Not until piles of fecal matter rose so high off the ground that they brushed the wire bottoms of the rabbit hutch-style cages was anything done, and then breeders remedied the problem by simply moving the hutches. It wasn’t unusual to see heaps of excrement dotting area farms; the heaps were never removed.

  Worn-out dogs were killed and thrown away like garbage. In Missouri, Baker stumbled onto a kennel owner in a back field who was shooting to death about thirty American Eskimo Dogs and Samoyeds. The breeds weren’t as popular as they’d once been, and they’d stopped selling. Baker identified himself as a supplier, so the breeder didn’t think to cover up his actions. He assumed Baker would regard the killings the same way he did—business as usual.

  Gradually, Baker pieced together the rise of puppy mills: how large-volume commercial dog breeding surfaced in the Midwest after World War II as mom-and-pop pet stores began to give way to corporate franchises; how marketing experts hired by the corporations had concocted an easy way to lure customers by putting adorable puppies in shop windows.

  Americans’ rising prosperity escalated demand for purebred dogs, and the advent of shopping malls multiplied foot traffic past pet stores. Having a pet shop in a town meant families no longer had to search the want ads or drive out to a farm to examine a litter. At a pet store, they could choose from a variety of breeds, and once they picked out a dog, the supplies they needed—collar and leash, food, toys—were right there, too. Moreover, buyers could charge their purchases on a credit card, something amateur breeders weren’t set up to handle. Pet stores made it so easy to acquire a dog that many families found themselves buying one on impulse. Roughly half of the consumers who later complained to the HSUS about buying a sick dog admitted that they had left home that day with no intention of getting a pet.

  The AKC registered these pet shop dogs by the tens of thousands. Between the mid-1940s and 1970, the number of registrations jumped from 77,000 a year to 1 million.

  To meet the demand, brokers who supplied puppies to the stores needed a steady supply of dogs. They zeroed in on Missouri and Kansas, centrally located states that were home to hundreds of small, isolated farms. Breeding puppies was a boon to Midwestern egg farmers who’d been edged out by large corporations. Farmers could put their empty chicken coops to use by housing dogs in them instead. The U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged raising puppies as a way for farmers to supplement their income.

  In the 1950s, department store chains such as Sears Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward were selling Poodles and Dalmatians alongside tool chests and bicycles, and puppy mills spread into Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. By the late 1970s, they were migrating east into Pennsylvania, putting them hundreds of miles closer to pet stores along the eastern seaboard. In 1981, a puppy broker from the Midwest held a demonstration in Lancaster County to show Amish and Mennonite farmers how, with little experience or investment, they could raise puppies for profit; several hundred farmers attended the workshop.

  In the 1970s and early 1980s, dog brokers and pet stores dealt only with puppies that were registered with the AKC. Amish and Mennonite farmers didn’t understand how to fill out the AKC’s paperwork, however; their registration applications were filled with errors and, as a result, were frequently denied. To remedy the problem, the AKC sent field agents to Lancaster County to teach these breeders the proper way to register their dogs.

  “Without the active assistance of the AKC, Pennsylvania puppy mills would have never been established,” Baker maintains. In fact, the Pennsylvania Federation of Dog Clubs, composed of member clubs of the AKC, was so livid over the AKC’s involvement that its president, Dotsie Keith, met with Baker and the Federation of Humane Societies to help draft the state’s original Dog Law. The legislature passed it in 1982.

  By now, though, the industry was mushrooming. Across the country, breeders used the cachet of AKC registration papers to sell purebred puppies, and the AKC collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in registration fees. While nobody was looking, dog breeding exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry, profitable for operators but at the expense of millions of mistreated dogs.

  Throughout the 1980s, the HSUS worked to rein in reckless breeders. With a camera in his pocket, Baker trespassed onto many properties to document abuse. By calling ahead and asking when a breeder was going to be home, he was also able to find out when they were going to be away. He steeled himself to avoid eye contact with the animals and focus instead on recording as many grim details as he could. “You’re just there to obtain evidence and get out,” he recalled. In a matter of several grueling months, he visited 284 kennels.

  Armed with Baker’s research, the HSUS was able to push through some improvements. Pennsylvania and a few other states passed laws of their own to monitor large-volume dog breeding. Local humane societies frequently followed up on Baker’s investigations by filing animal cruelty charges against breeders.

  In Kansas in the late 1980s, Baker led state attorney general Robert Stephan on a tour of licensed kennels. Stephan was so sickened by them that he prosecuted some of the breeders himself. He called the worst offenders the Dirty Thirty. Breeders across the state shut down their operations rather than risk finding themselves in Stephan’s crosshairs. The number of puppy mills in Kansas plummeted from nearly 1,200 to fewer than 300.

  Meanwhile, the HSUS launched a campaign against Docktors Pet Center, the largest pet store chain in the United States, after discovering the stores were routinely selling sick dogs to customers. All 300 Docktors stores wound up closing as a result.

  In 1993, Baker left his position as chief investigator for the HSUS to become a field investigator first for the Companion Animal Protection Society, and then for the Humane Farming Association. By 2005, he had visited more than 800 puppy mills and helped bring charges against dozens of breeders. He had done all he thought he could do and was ready to turn his attention elsewhere. He shipped a quarter-century’s worth of archives, including some 800 photos, to fellow advocate Libby Williams, the cofounder of New Jersey Consumers Against Pet Shop Abuse, or NJCAPSA for short.

  A year later, though, Baker was pulled back into the fray. Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell was getting ready to crack down on puppy mills, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) asked Baker to step in and help.

  Elected to office in 2002, Rendell had spent his first term trying to reverse the state’s high unemployment rate and jump-start its stagnant economy. He injected money into tourism and agriculture and launched a series of green initiatives to clean up rivers and streams and reclaim polluted industrial sites. The rumpled, self-confident officeholder had an ambitious agenda and was running for reelection in the fall. His schedule was on overload.

  But Rendell was also a dog lover. He and his wife, Marjorie, a federal judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Third Circuit, had two Golden Retrievers adopted from rescue groups. No one needed to remind the governor that Pennsylvania was one of the top puppy-producing states in the country—infamous for the nickname Baker had bestowed upon it as the Puppy Mill Capital of the East. Roughly 2,500 kennels were licensed by the state to house anywhere from 26 to 500 dogs apiece, and hundreds more unlicensed kennels festered under the radar. In Lancaster County alone, Amish and Mennonite families operated 300 kennels, the largest concentration of puppy mills in the United States.

  The proliferation of large-volume dog breeding was already a prickly subject with the governor. When a certain billboard surfaced along
the Pennsylvania Turnpike one morning in February 2005, Rendell was downright mortified. The billboard showed a family of tourists decked out in Hawaiian shirts, riding gaily in a convertible, and in nostalgic, 1950s-era typography, the words, “Welcome to Scenic Lancaster County.” Below that it said, “Home to hundreds of puppy mills. Learn more about Pennsylvania’s notorious puppy mills. Visit these websites: mainlinerescue.com; stoppuppymills.org.”

  Rendell decided to form an ad hoc committee to study the success of the state’s dog law. In January 2006, Baker met with the governor and agreed to serve on the panel. He was intimately familiar with Pennsylvania’s statutes; four years after helping push through passage of the Dog Law, he’d promoted a state puppy lemon law designed to compensate buyers who unwittingly purchased sick puppies.

  The ad hoc committee consisted of representatives from the attorney general’s office, the ASPCA, a veterinarian, and several ordinary citizens. To Baker’s surprise, not everyone on the committee favored revamping the dog law. Several members blamed the problem on a few bad apples and overblown media coverage. “Even the person representing the governor’s office was terrible,” Baker said. “She made the comment that as long as there were poor people without health insurance, why were we worrying about dogs.”

  To convince them otherwise, fellow committee member Marsha Perelman, a businesswoman from Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line and an ardent animal lover, hired an undercover investigator to document conditions at puppy mills. Baker followed up with more detective work of his own. He also turned to his friend Williams of NJCAPSA.

  Williams, 55, had plenty of evidence to share. A passionate dog lover, she’d spent the last half-dozen years collecting and disseminating every iota of information she could find about Pennsylvania’s puppy mills. She attended conventions for breeders, stayed abreast of Dog Law Advisory Board doings, and kept track of problem breeders who ran afoul of the state Dog Law Bureau. She focused on Pennsylvania because, of the seventy-plus pet stores in New Jersey that sold puppies, as many as half sold dogs brought in from the Keystone State. The rest were trucked in by brokers from the Midwest.

  From her ground-floor office in her home in southwestern New Jersey, operating mostly on her own dime, Williams helped seek recourse for consumers who’d purchased ill or dying puppies from breeders or pet stores. She dug up kennel inspection records and passed along to consumers the information necessary to file a complaint. Every once in a while she wrote the complaint herself.

  Posing as an uninformed buyer, Williams wangled her way into more than a dozen Pennsylvania puppy mills. She wanted to see for herself if the appalling rumors she’d heard about these outfits were true. Not one of the dogs she saw in intensive confinement behaved normally; the animals either barked furiously or crouched in their cages, shell-shocked.

  Animal welfare advocate Marsha Perelman and veteran puppy mill investigator Bob Baker reach out to pet a puppy mill survivor. By 2006, Baker had visited more than 800 substandard kennels across the country. He knew better than anyone how weak and ineffective the laws governing kennel operators were. (Libby Williams)

  In 2005, Williams helped rescue eighty mixed-breed dogs when the broker died and his widow contacted her organization. The dogs were several months old and looked happy and socialized in their pens, but as soon as anyone reached in to pick them up, they were terrified—frozen, she recalled. At another puppy mill, a friend accompanying Williams furtively called her attention to a mother dog pacing about in a cage, a dead puppy hanging from her mouth. Elsewhere in the barn, breeding dog after breeding dog lay on wire floors, nursing puppies. Years later, Williams was still haunted by the memory of the mother dogs refusing to make eye contact. “They looked down as if they were ashamed—as if to say, ‘I’m not even worthy of having you look at me,’ ” she said. “They just looked so spent.” She shook her head at the thought that, weeks later, unsuspecting buyers would spend up to $1,500 apiece for the puppies produced by these overbred dogs.

  Pennsylvania’s kennels were nothing short of scandalous. Newspapers had repeatedly exposed the conditions. Between 1991 and 1996, the Pittsburgh Press, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Post detailed the fetid environment, particularly in kennels operated by the Amish. To the surprise of many, Amish farmers admitted openly to raising dogs as livestock—they confined them to tiny cages and destroyed the breeding animals as soon as they stopped producing. The Post described dogs caged in dimly lit barns—filthy, covered in feces and so broken in spirit they were “unresponsive to a visitor’s presence and voice.” The stories prompted the passage of the puppy lemon law, but did nothing to curtail the poor breeding practices.

  Libby Williams and Sweetie, a Gordon Setter who found a new life with her after ten years in a dilapidated kennel. (Libby Williams)

  Pennsylvania’s 1982 law wasn’t working, in large part because it wasn’t being enforced. Breeders were ignoring space requirements and, worse, denying veterinary care to their dogs. When a dog became sick or injured, it simply languished; it cost the breeder too much to take the dog to the vet. A breeding dog’s reward for producing litter after litter was to be shot dead around the age of 5 or 6.

  The state laws created a situation that made it difficult, if not impossible, to nail unscrupulous breeders. Pennsylvania’s dog wardens had the authority to inspect licensed breeders. But it was police officers employed by nonprofit humane societies who actually enforced the state’s animal cruelty law. Unless they had a warrant, however, humane officers weren’t allowed to enter private property to determine whether any cruelty had taken place. It was a classic Catch-22: The people who were permitted to see the problems were not allowed to do anything about them. In theory, dog wardens could inform humane officers of a problem, but few did.

  The relationship between dog law officials and the breeders had grown far too cozy, as far as Williams was concerned. A bureau official later conceded that instead of reprimanding breeders for committing violations, wardens were more inclined to help them comply with the rules.

  Pennsylvania had fifty-three dog wardens, and needed more. Money wasn’t an issue. The state earmarked revenue from dog license sales to pay for enforcement, something most states didn’t do. But Pennsylvania wasn’t spending the money: Its Dog Law Bureau was sitting on a $14 million surplus.

  The state’s puppy lemon law needed tightening, too. Buyers who unknowingly purchased a sick or diseased dog had the right to return the puppy for a refund, exchange it for another dog, or seek reimbursement for veterinary bills up to or equal to the purchase price of the dog. But the law didn’t go far enough for families whose new pet turned out to have a life-threatening illness such as parvovirus or pneumonia; dog owners quickly racked up hundreds, if not thousands of dollars more in vet bills than they could ever hope to get back in the form of a refund.

  The governor’s ad hoc committee said breeders should be required to pay all of the veterinary bills associated with a sick puppy. The committee also said the attorney general’s office should survey veterinarians to determine which kennels ill puppies were coming from, and publicize the puppy lemon law more aggressively to make sure buyers understood their rights. The absence of veterinary care provided to dogs in commercial kennels was the system’s single biggest failure, Baker believed.

  Aware that animal welfare advocates took a dim view of their practices, commercial breeders had become more careful to conceal their operations. Where once hutches full of dogs could be seen from the highway, the cash crops were now hidden inside low-slung metal barns. Some commercial breeders refused to deal with the public at all—they sold their dogs to brokers instead. A few breeders admitted to Baker that they knew people would be horrified if they saw their facilities up close.

  • • •

  The raid on wolf’s kennel occurred a month after Rendell formed his ad hoc committee. The nasty details of Mike-Mar Kennel
filled newspaper columns and the airwaves. This time the governor decided to go public with his discontent. In March 2006, a month after the raid, Rendell told the Philadelphia Inquirer he was considering a shake-up in the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement. While he was at it, he announced another bold move: he planned to fire all fourteen members of the state Dog Law Advisory Board. The board was made up of dog breeders, veterinarians, representatives from animal welfare groups, animal research entities, sportsmen, and pet shop owners, and had no real enforcement authority. The group had convened just three times since Rendell took office. Rendell said the board had not been active enough, and the ASPCA chimed in, faulting the bureau for hiring too few dog wardens, failing to train them properly, and failing to report cruelty violations to humane society police officers.

  Behind the scenes, the ad hoc committee offered another recommendation: that Rendell should empower the state’s dog wardens to continue monitoring breeders whose licenses had been revoked. The governor agreed. If the wardens had possessed that authority earlier, they could have stopped Wolf long before the Chester County SPCA was forced to step in, the governor said. “People say we lie down on kennels, but here they did the right thing [revoking Wolf’s license], and the guy goes back in business and we never know about it,” Rendell said. “Once we close a kennel, we should go back and do spot checks.”

  The message to breeders was unmistakable. Moreover, Rendell was just gearing up. On October 17, 2006, seven months after the raid on Mike-Mar Kennel, the governor held a press conference on the steps of the Chester County Courthouse to propose a sweeping overhaul of the state dog law. Flanking him were Chester County SPCA board president Sandra Thielz and humane society police officers Cheryl Shaw, Michele Beswick, and Rebecca Robers. Also on hand was one of the dogs rescued from Michael Wolf’s kennel—a colorfully bedecked Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Cricket—embraced by her new owner, Amy Dluhy of Chester Springs.