Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  She slept in Linda’s bed, her head on Linda’s pillow, her gentle, rhythmic snoring right in Linda’s ear. When the alarm clock went off in the morning, the two of them would start the day with a little banter. Linda, still sleepy, would wave her hand obligingly from one side of her body to the other, and Gracie would follow it, jumping back and forth across Linda’s torso. She pawed at Linda’s face teasingly and licked her ears and face. “Gracie, lie down,” Linda would murmur, but she made no move to stop her. Gracie was livelier in the morning than at any other time—as if she had awakened to discover that her wonderful new life wasn’t a dream after all. It was real and, what’s more, a whole promising new day was about to begin.

  She glommed on to Linda as much as possible. In the bathroom, while Linda was getting ready for work, Gracie would nose open the door and make a beeline for the freshly applied lotion on Linda’s legs. In the evening, while Linda cooked dinner, Gracie parked herself in a corner of the kitchen and watched, fixated. When Linda mowed the grass, Gracie followed behind her, no matter how nonsensical the path. If Linda circled the yard ten times in a row, Gracie tagged behind unquestioningly. Linda laughed out loud at her dedication.

  The unwavering attention was intense, but Linda liked it. She’d known other people who’d felt a close attachment to their pets—whose dogs loved them no matter what—but until now she’d never experienced anything close to that feeling. She wasn’t looking for it when she adopted the Cavalier. She’d wanted a dog for her kids, not herself. But, inexplicably, a bond had formed between them, a connection that felt both powerful and good.

  Linda was drawn to Gracie in ways she could never have imagined. (Carol Bradley)

  There was a flip side, of course. If Linda suddenly left the room, or if someone lifted Gracie out of Linda’s arms, the little dog’s heart pounded. She whipped about, frantic, until Linda called to her. Her separation anxiety operated on high alert.

  The first time Linda took Gracie to Karen’s Pet Stop to be groomed, the Cavalier paced back and forth with apprehension. Linda usually bathed Gracie herself, but she relied on a groomer to trim the dog’s nails, clean her ears, and clip the hair out from between her paws. Being left at the doggy spa for hours at a time was nerve-racking for Gracie. The Cavalier seemed convinced that once Linda walked out of the shop, she would never come back.

  The same thing happened the first time Linda took a vacation. She and Eric planned a trip to Aruba—a romantic getaway for just the two of them. They left Gracie with Eric’s mother, Anna. Gracie, distraught, spent the first night running from room to room in Anna’s house, searching for Linda. By day two she had calmed down, but just knowing that Gracie was upset dampened Linda’s enjoyment of the trip.

  Traveling was the one downside to the new job Linda took after the holidays. She left the YMCA to work for the Team Pennsylvania Foundation, a public-private partnership that fostered economic development. As the director of development, she not only had to commute thirty miles to Harrisburg every day, but she spent an average of two days a week on the road. There was no way to explain her absences to Gracie. The Cavalier lay in her bed, her ear tuned to the back door, waiting for what must have seemed an eternity for Linda to come home.

  To make it up to her, Linda began taking Gracie with her as she ran errands around town—to cash a check at the bank, fill the car up with gas, or buy groceries. Lebanon, population 24,000, was a picturesque former steel town divided by railroad tracks. On the north side were blocks of row houses and a historic downtown distinguished by the ornate spire of the century-old Samler Building. The south side of town, where the Jacksons lived, was defined by midcentury shopping centers and neighborhoods with rolling lawns and mature trees.

  Gracie had no interest in the scenery. She lay on the center console of Linda’s sedan with her head in Linda’s lap, her eyes closed blissfully. The sound of wheels on pavement seemed to conjure memories of their first trip together, the day they drove away from the shelter and left Gracie’s old life behind for good.

  As Linda made her rounds, shopkeepers and service employees began to comment on the strikingly colored Cavalier stretched out next to her. “What a darling little dog!” they would say. Linda would explain that Gracie had been rescued from a puppy mill. She would tell them the story of Michael Wolf’s kennel and how Gracie had been used as a breeding dog. And she would point out the vision problems Gracie still suffered as a result of her scratched, scarred eyes.

  She’d talked about Gracie with her officemate at the Y, Diane, who had recently gotten her first dog. At Team PA, her colleague Steve wanted to know all about the Cavalier; he had a rescued dog, too. Linda told Gracie’s story to her college roommate, Jennifer, who lived near Philadelphia. She commiserated about Gracie’s health problems with her friend Bill, owner of Wertz Candies; his rescued Dachshund had to have an eye removed. And before long, the neighbors who watched Gracie trot so faithfully behind Linda knew her story, too.

  Linda talked about Gracie so much it surprised her. She’d never been the type to be politically active—she had enough distractions just getting through the day. Suddenly, though, she had a desire to spread the word, to get people to see that puppy mills had to be stopped. The friends and acquaintances she spoke with were disturbed by the details of Gracie’s past life. Until then, many of them had known little about puppy mills. Before Gracie, Linda hadn’t given puppy mills much thought, either. The town she grew up in had no pet stores. Her grandmother bred Poodles a few times and sold the puppies, but that was a far cry from the large-volume kennels that had given dog breeding such a black eye.

  In the fall of 2007, after a reception to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Team PA, Linda had a chance to talk with Governor Rendell about the subject. They were standing near the dessert table when she introduced herself. She thanked Rendell for supporting tougher dog laws, and told him she had adopted one of the dogs from Wolf’s kennel. She found she was conversing with a kindred spirit. A couple of months earlier, Rendell and his wife, Marjorie, had taken in their third rescue dog, a Golden Retriever they named Maggie. They found her through Main Line Animal Rescue. A breeding dog in a puppy mill, Maggie had been deemed useless after giving birth to a stillborn litter. Now she was free to roam about the most prominent residence in the state.

  Julia played with Gracie when Gracie allowed it, but still yearned for a dog of her own. (Carol Bradley)

  Linda’s kids, too, had grown to understand how Gracie’s past shaped her personality. Ryan no longer took her fear of him personally—her behavior might have something to do with her past experience with men. When Erika’s friends made fun of Gracie’s “zombie eye,” Erika set them straight. “You don’t know what she’s been through,” she’d tell them. “She was abused, and don’t make fun of her.”

  Even Julia, who’d wanted a dog the most, was philosophical about Gracie’s need to cling to Linda so closely. Gracie needed an emotional lifeline—just one, apparently—and she’d found it in Julia’s mom. A year after the family adopted the Cavalier, “I thought she might become more outgoing and playful,” Julia said, “but I know why she’s not.”

  Chapter 18: The Crackdown Begins

  By the fall of 2007, Pennsylvania’s puppy mill operators were feeling the heat. The year before, the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement had revoked the licenses of a half dozen kennel operators. Now the bureau was yanking an average of two licenses a month. By year’s end, 120 more breeders shut their doors voluntarily.

  Among them was John B. Miller of Millcreek Puppy Barn Kennel. He paid a $1,750 fine and gave up his license as part of a plea agreement after a state inspector found his dogs living amid feces and sharp wires, their food and water bowls contaminated with rust and debris.

  In West Hempfield Township, the state revoked the license of breeder Elvin High and fined him more than $1,000 for letting eleven of his sixty-five dogs
languish with severe ear and leg infections. The suffering dogs were seized.

  The state also went after John Esh and his son Daniel of Ronks, Pennsylvania, who between them had more than 750 dogs. Dog wardens found the food bowls were contaminated with feces and dirt, and cages were full of moldy excrement. John Esh was unable to produce paperwork documenting that all of his dogs had been vaccinated against rabies. Daniel Esh was cited for confining dogs to cages too small even by state standards; wardens said they found six dogs crammed into one ten-foot-square cage.

  Eight months earlier, the Eshes’ kennels had passed inspection with no bad marks.

  In January 2008, Governor Rendell replaced the head of the Dog Law Bureau with Sue West, a board member of the Humane League of Lancaster County and a newly appointed member of the new Dog Law Advisory Board. The attorney general’s office gave Jeffrey Paladina, special prosecutor for dog law enforcement, the authority to represent dog wardens in court, leveling the playing field with the private attorneys who represented breeders on the other side of the aisle.

  For the first time in the state’s history, would-be kennel operators were asked whether they had ever been convicted of animal cruelty and whether their proposed business complied with local zoning ordinances. Lying on an application was grounds for rejection.

  After responding to 8,000 animal cruelty complaints in 2007, the Pennsylvania SPCA launched a toll-free animal cruelty hotline. And the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals joined forces with the Humane Society of the United States to lobby for change at the state capitol. In addition to serving on the governor’s ad hoc advisory committee, Bob Baker was now employed by the ASPCA as a senior investigator.

  Baker was pleased with the progress the state was making. For the first time in a long time, he felt, the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement was taking its job seriously.

  Bill Smith, though, wasn’t convinced. Where Baker was willing to work from inside the system (as well as outside of it), Smith subscribed to the Molotov cocktail approach. He badgered the Dog Law Bureau by e-mail several times a day, demanding to know why problem kennels were still in business. If authorities failed to act on the tips he sent in, he alerted the news media. Publicity, he’d decided, had a magical way of getting the job done.

  Smith, 46, was the founder of Main Line Animal Rescue, a nonprofit organization that since 1997 had rescued more than 5,000 dogs, rehabilitated them, and adopted them out to new homes. The work was demanding, and Smith received no salary—he lived on an inheritance and his savings. But he’d found his calling rescuing animals.

  Smith dealt with hundreds of breeders looking to get rid of older female dogs worn out from having so many litters, or younger male dogs who simply weren’t needed. The dogs frequently emerged in shockingly bad shape—suffering from mange, bladder stones, multiple tumors, and broken jaws or backs. Smith saw dogs who had undergone more than a dozen C-sections, without anesthesia, and more dogs crammed into kennels without food or water than he could count.

  “Frightened, malnourished, often without medical attention of any kind, [a mother dog] shivers in the cold days of winter and bakes under the August sun,” he wrote on his website. “Never knowing kindness or the slightest affection, she is a prisoner for profit.”

  At one of the earliest meetings of the new Dog Law Advisory Board, Smith brought with him a balding, skeletal Maltese-Poodle mix he’d rescued two months earlier from a kennel in Lancaster County. He purchased the dog for $100; Main Line subsequently spent $4,300 nursing the dog back from the brink of death. The dog’s sadly appropriate new name was Shrimp. This is the cash crop puppy millers refer to when they talk about their dogs, Smith told the advisory board as he cradled Shrimp in his arms.

  Main Line was the group responsible for the 2005 billboard that had publicly identified Lancaster County as home to hundreds of puppy mills. The group leased a second billboard in Missouri—a huge puppy mill state—followed by a third sign on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The billboards resonated with motorists. By the winter of 2008, contributions to Main Line enabled the organization to move into a $2 million headquarters on fifty-eight acres in Chester Springs, with a barn big enough to house one hundred dogs.

  Now it was time to take the message nationwide. Smith targeted one of the biggest markets he could think of. His organization leased a billboard in Chicago, four blocks from Oprah Winfrey’s studios. “OPRAH—please do a show on puppy mills; the dogs need you!” the sign begged, next to the photo of a sorrowful-looking dog. To Smith’s delight, Winfrey took his suggestion. She assigned her own reporter, Lisa Ling, to go undercover with Main Line staff and visit some of the most dreadful kennels in Lancaster County.

  Smith and Ling presented their findings on Oprah’s April 4, 2008, show. In a half-hour segment, the investigators told the wrenching story of puppy mills, complete with videotape. They traced several puppies for sale in pet stores to kennels where the mother dogs remained crammed into rabbit hutch–style cages that reeked of excrement. The investigators visited a third kennel where dozens of Pomeranians scrambled for attention in outdoor cages exposed to the elements. Smith explained why Pennsylvania breeders, many of them Amish, thought nothing of treating hundreds of dogs so neglectfully. It was a cultural thing—Plain-sect people didn’t see dogs as companion animals deserving of humane care. To them, he said on the show, “dogs are like an ear of corn.”

  He and Ling were able to rescue thirty-nine dogs on their rounds. In the show’s most moving segment, Smith helped a Golden Retriever who had spent years in a cage struggle to stand on solid flooring. “It’s always amazing to me when I go out to pick up a dog, and they’ve had the dog eight or nine years, and it doesn’t have a name,” he told Winfrey. “It’s never been out of the hutch, it doesn’t know how to walk, and I have to carry it to the car. It’s heartbreaking.”

  For the show’s finale, Smith brought out Shrimp who, once emaciated and nearly bald, was now transformed. His snow-white coat was thick and silky. He even wore a red bow. The audience cheered wildly.

  Winfrey put her own personal stamp on the issue by vowing to “never, ever adopt another pet now without going to a shelter to do it. I am a changed woman after seeing this show,” she declared.

  The program struck a nerve. Millions of viewers had gotten a rare and unforgettable glimpse at the underbelly of commercial dog breeding. Puppy mill opponents could not have asked for a bigger publicity jackpot. Back home, even the head of Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau of Lancaster County called for a cleanup of puppy mills. “Change can’t happen fast enough,” the organization’s president and CEO, Christopher Barrett, said. “What’s happening in these puppy mills is atrocious.”

  For all the improvements Rendell had imposed, puppy mills still flourished. What was worse, some of the most egregious practices were legal. For example, breeders weren’t required to provide water to dogs all the time; if they provided water for just six hours of the day, that was considered adequate. A two-foot-long dog could be kept in a two-by-three-foot cage with no bedding. There were no hard and fast rules governing temperature or ventilation. And it was entirely permissible to confine a dog to a crate for the animal’s entire life, not removing the dog even once.

  Rendell couldn’t change all that on his own. To overhaul the Dog Law, he needed the legislature’s help. And it was going to take more than Oprah’s disapproving glare to get state lawmakers on board.

  The public wasn’t the problem. Sixteen thousand people had commented on Rendell’s far-reaching recommendations, a clear majority of them in support of change. Aside from the drumbeat of newspaper and television coverage about the horrors of puppy mills, interest in the issue cropped up in unexpected ways. In the summer of 2007, the F.U.E.L. Collection art gallery in Philadelphia’s Old City unveiled an exhibit devoted to the evils of large-volume dog breeding. The title of the exhibit, “Puppi
es Are Biodegradable,” came from a comment a dog breeder made at a zoning board hearing in Lancaster County two years earlier. Asked what happened to dogs who were not sold, the breeder had said they were exterminated, their remains spread over the fields as fertilizer. “They are biodegradable,” he explained.

  The exhibit included forty works of art chosen from several hundred submissions. One, by Philadelphia artist Jillian Kesselman, showed a farmer holding a mother dog upside down, puppies dropping out of her body. The dog was headless. Another painting depicted the menacing shadow of a farmer leaning over a cage where malnourished dogs lay, unmoving, around an empty bowl. A third showed a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign with two scrawny dogs sitting back-to-back, shedding tears. Hanging over them was the word “money.” Gallery director Jennifer Yaron even installed chicken wire throughout the exhibit so visitors would view the artwork as if they, too, were inside a crate.

  But Rendell’s plan also drew heated criticism from breeders, who said that complying with the proposed changes would cost each kennel anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. Hobby breeders and sportsmen’s groups argued that they shouldn’t be held to the same standards because their dogs weren’t confined 24/7—they were able to get exercise. The administration responded by rolling out a new plan that exempted smaller kennels but held the largest operators—the 650 or so breeders who sold sixty or more dogs a year—to even tougher standards than first proposed. Cages would need to be more than two times a dog’s body length, for example. And each dog would have to have access to an exercise run at least twice the size of the primary enclosure.

  All commercial kennel dogs would have to be examined once a year by a veterinarian. Kennel owners would be forbidden from administering rabies vaccinations or euthanizing dogs themselves. Veterinarians alone would be allowed to dock tails or perform C-sections; they could debark dogs only if there was a valid reason for doing so. Crate sizes would not change for puppies, nor would they have to have solid floors, but the crates could be stacked just two high. The temperature inside kennels would have to hover between 50 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Kennels would be required to have smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and possibly sprinkler systems. Dogs could not be tied up, and breeders would have to give them greater access to water.