Profit and Loss

Time to clamp down on the factory farms that churn out helpless puppies

Best Friends Magazine article - July/August 2007
By Sandy Miller

Chances are, it was the first time she’d ever seen the world outside a filthy, crowded kennel. And that’s what frightened her so much.
The dog cowering under the truck in the parking lot of a dog auction that September afternoon six years ago didn’t even resemble a golden
retriever. She was woefully underweight, her coat was short and dull, and her eyes were so infected she could hardly see.

“She was frozen, so scared she couldn’t move,” remembers Konnie Smith, a volunteer with Retrieve a Golden of Minnesota. Smith had driven four hours from her home in the Twin Cities to Jewel, Iowa, along with other volunteers to transport to Minneapolis 13 golden retrievers who were purchased at an auction with the hope
of giving them a better life. Smith volunteered to take one of the dogs home with them.

In her three years on earth, the dog who would come to be known as Spirit (pictured above) had never had a chance to just be a dog. Raised in a puppy mill, she’d never been petted, never chased a ball, never been taken for a walk on a sunny afternoon. To her puppy mill owners, she wasn’t a dog at all but a money-making breeding machine.

Spirit had spent her life in a dark, crowded place, freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer. She’d been a cash cow for her owners, popping out two litters of puppies a year, all taken from her much too soon by a broker who most likely sold them to pet stores, all of the players taking a share of the profits.

Spirit was one of the lucky ones. Had her breeders not gone out of business, her life most likely would have been spent on a series of auction blocks, sold to the highest bidder, moving from one puppy mill to the next until her reproductive years ran out. Then, like a perishable product that has passed its expiration date, she would
simply have been discarded, and probably not in a humane way. After all, to her puppy mill owners, she was now just a worthless piece of property, not a sentient being with feelings. When the money stopped coming in, her time would have run out.

Smith helped put Spirit and the other dogs into clean crates for their ride to safety. She looked at Spirit and knew they had a difficult road ahead of them. This dog had never known humans to be her friends. After all she’d been through, would this dog ever be able to trust anyone? Smith was willing to give it a try.

For Spirit, that day in September marked the end of a long and painful journey, and the beginning of a brand new life.

What’s a puppy mill?

Animal welfare organizations estimate that there are between 4,000 and 5,000 puppy mills in the U.S.

“The smallest we’ve seen have anywhere from 15 to 20 breeding dogs, but I’ve heard of commercial breeders who have 1,000-plus breeding dogs,” said Kelli Ohrtman, a research specialist for Best Friends Animal Society.

Puppy mills are breeding facilities that produce mostly purebred puppies in large numbers. Dogs are housed in crowded, filthy conditions without adequate food, water or exercise. They have little human contact and usually do not receive any veterinary care. When they can no longer have puppies, they’re abandoned, dumped at a shelter or killed. Their puppies are sold mostly to brokers who market them to pet stores, or to the public via the Internet, newspaper ads or auctions.

The majority of these factory farms are concentrated in Pennsylvania and the Midwest – Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma.

“Puppy mills thrive in small rural communities … and in agricultural towns with a livestock mentality,” said Mike Fry, executive director of the Animal Ark No-Kill Shelter in Hastings, Minnesota.
“These people see dogs as livestock.”

Missouri, which has more mills than any other state, is by far the worst – a “black hole of despair,” according to Fry.

Puppy mills have become the newest kind of factory farm. Indeed, the federal agency responsible for overseeing commercial breeders is the same agency that oversees livestock perations: the USDA.

The USDA – understaffed and ineffective

The commercial pet trade is regulated (though, many would argue, not closely enough) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS). The USDA is responsible for administer ing
the Animal Welfare Act, which requires breeders, brokers and dealers to provide minimal basic care to their nimals. Anyone who breeds pets for the wholesale trade or sells stock to other breeders must obtain Class A licenses, while
brokers and dealers are required to obtain Class B licenses. This does not apply to breeders who sell directly to the public.

Under the Animal Welfare Act, breeders must provide nutritious food, clean water and housing that is kept dry and cleaned of waste. They must also provide adequate veterinary care and observe their animals daily. But the regulations still allow for keeping dogs in cages, albeit with “sufficient space to allow each dog and cat to turn about freely, to stand, sit and lie in a comfortable, normal position, and to walk in a normal manner.”

How big is that? The USDA-APHIS has a formula. Each dog must be provided with a space calculated by dividing the mathematical square length of the dog plus six inches by 144. The dog must also be given just six inches of space above his head. So, a dog who is 40 inches long can be given just 14.69 square feet of space (roughly the size of a bathtub).

Are the regulations enforced? Well, the USDA-APHIS is understaffed and, by most accounts, ineffective. According to USDA spokesman Darby Holladay, between 115 and 120 inspectors enforce the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act. Holladay added that there are 15,000 licensees and registrants under the Animal Welfare Act alone, but he told Best Friends he couldn’t comment on whether or not he thought the agency was understaffed.

Those 120 inspectors are responsible for monitoring not only thousands of breeders, brokers and dealers, but zoos, circuses and research facilities as well.

“We have the resources we have and we utilize those resources the best we can,” Holladay said.

Claudine Wilkins, legislative coordinator for Best Friends, said it isn’t nearly enough. “There’s a ridiculous lack of investigators,” she said.

In 1992, the USDA’s Independent Office of the Inspector General found that the USDA-APHIS could not ensure the humane care and treatment of animals as required by the Animal Welfare Act. But Holladay says the USDA has worked to improve inspections since that 1992 report.

“The USDA has taken tremendous steps to insure compliance with the Animal Welfare Act since 1992,” Holladay said.

The USDA conducted more than 16,000 inspections in 2005-06. Minor violations can often be corrected during an inspection, while others are given a date (usually six weeks to two months) to be corrected. If violations are not corrected by the time of a follow-up investigation, the USDA’s general counsel can file a complaint.

The USDA levied more than $1.5 million in fines in 2005-06, and the agency’s general counsel listed scores of complaints on alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act. If animals are in extreme danger, the USDA works with local agencies to confiscate the animals. Holladay said, “We do that quite often.”

But although commercial breeders who violate the Animal Welfare Act can receive a civil penalty of up to $3,750 per day per violation, a glance at USDA inspection reports shows that some puppy millers have been able to tally up violation after violation, and still keep operating.

“There’s such a lack of enforcement and so much recidivism,” Wilkins said. “They’re not being watched and regulated.” Fry agrees. “If the USDA were to levy those fines, they would have all the resources they need to regulate that industry.”

Take the case of Gary McDuffee in Morrison County, Minnesota. Despite a five-year history of USDA violations, Morrison County commissioners still issued McDuffee a new conditional-use permit for a facility that could hold up to 500 adult dogs plus any number of puppies. Previous violations included cages that were too small, cages that were deteriorating and contained sharp and dangerous materials, failure to clean animals’ enclosures, failure to
label shipped animals as live cargo, and use of expired or outdated drugs or medications.

The McDuffee case drew nationwide attention and put the puppy mill issue back in the headlines. Animal welfare advocates, including those with Fry’s organization, plan to appeal the ruling. Best Friends supporters have contributed $20,000 to help with the appeal.

Holladay says the USDA does try to educate its license holders and bring them into compliance. But Fry says some breeders just aren’t getting it. “You’d think after five years of noncompliance,” he said, “they’d realize educating
them wasn’t working.”

Government funding for puppy mills

Not only is the USDA lax in its regulation of commercial breeding operations, but it has actually poured money into them.

The USDA has loaned the Hunte Corporation, a large Missouri-based dealer and the largest wholesaler of puppies sold in pet shops, more than $4 million in recent years for expansion and upgrades. Hunte, which has grown
35 times its original size since 1991, is involved in the transport and sale of animals to 300 pet stores around the world.

When asked by e-mail if Hunte sold dogs from puppy mills, Hunte president Steve Rook said, “Puppy mill is a pejorative term created by animal rights groups. I do not intend to lend any credibility to those groups by using terminology that was created essentially as part of their propaganda. If you are writing an article and plan to use that terminology, I have no interest in being part of the article.”

Rook added that Hunte has no breeding operations, purchases puppies only from USDA-registered breeders and inspected breeders, and from hobby breeders who have three or less intact females, and that all puppies in Hunte’s care must pass an extensive examination performed by one of Hunte’s seven licensed veterinarians.

According to USDA documents, however, Hunte has had violations in the past for keeping animals in enclosures that were too small. And last year, 60 puppies on their way to Northeast pet stores died when a Hunte truck caught fire, most likely caused by a malfunctioning ventilator fan.

In January 1995, the Office of the Inspector General recommended new legislation to strengthen and enhance APHIS’s authority. Meanwhile, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) says he’s going to ask the House Committee on Government and Oversight Reform to conduct hearings on the USDA’s failure to enforce the Animal Welfare Act as it pertains to commercial dog breeding and brokering facilities.

Spirit comes home

Smith and her husband, Leon, carried Spirit’s crate into their kitchen and removed the top. “She was shaking so bad, we laid a blanket on top of her, turned off the lights and left her alone.”

For five whole days, Spirit lay in the fetal position and shook. “She was so traumatized,” Smith said. “It was 10 weeks before she would walk across the floor when we were in the room. She would not move out of her corner.”
Smith and her husband took Spirit to the veterinarian for vaccinations and a general checkup. “We carried her in her crate and she pooped, peed and vomited all the way,” Smith said. “She was so scared.”

The veterinarian discovered that Spirit was pregnant.

Smith spent as much time as she could with Spirit, hoping she would learn to trust her. “I spent many, many hours sitting on the kitchen floor, head and body turned away from her, setting turkey and chicken in front of her so
she would learn that people meant good things to her,” Smith said.

Follow the money

When it comes to puppy mills, the bottom line is profit: profits for the breeders, profits for the brokers, profits for the people who transport the puppies like cargo, and profits for the pet stores that sell them.

The business of puppy mills is said to be much like the illicit blood diamond trade.

Simply put, puppies, as well as cats, birds and ferrets, have become the new cash crops. “There’s markup all along the way, from the puppy mill owner to the broker to the pet store owner,” Fry said.

Ohrtman agrees. “We talked to one breeder/broker who told us he sells his puppies for $300 each to pet stores. I’ve seen puppy millers who make as little as $75 on a puppy. It seems like the pet stores are making the most money from the deal, selling puppies for anywhere between $500 and $2,200.”

At the bottom of the gravy train, the puppy mill owner has to produce a lot of puppies to turn a decent profit, so he breeds his dogs twice a year, despite the damage to the dog’s physical health, and cuts costs by not hiring enough staff to adequately care for his dogs. Veterinary care is virtually nonexistent. And that is why so many mill puppies are suffering from all kinds of physical and behavioral problems by the time they reach the pet store.

Pet store puppies commonly have worms, upper respiratory infections, ear and eye infections, mange, coccidian and giardia, and some of these can be transmitted to humans.

Fry says that makes the problem a public health issue. “When you pack a bunch of animals together in horrible, stressful conditions, their immune systems are suppressed, which makes them susceptible to disease. You introduce any kind of pathogen and it can spread through the population very quickly. Then, you’re dealing with large quantities of fecal material going into streams and
groundwater and contaminating wells.”

It takes two

Puppy mills and pet stores depend on each other. It’s estimated that 90 to 98 percent of dogs sold by pet stores come from puppy mills, according to a Best Friends study. The Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council estimates that 3,700 of the nation’s 11,500 pet stores are selling dogs from puppy mills – about 300,000 to 400,000 puppies per year.

Petland is one of the largest pet store chains in the country. Its stores are independently owned and operated, and each franchisee is responsible for choosing pets sold in their store, according to Brian Winslow, Petland’s director of business improvement.

In an e-mail to Best Friends, Winslow said Petland puppies and kittens come primarily from three sources: individuals in local communities who breed registered pets and offer occasional litters; pet rescue groups and local individuals who offer mixed-breed puppies and kittens for the store’s adoption program; and licensed professional distributors who purchase registerable pets from professional breeders who are inspected and licensed by the USDA.

But some of the worst puppy mill operators have USDA licenses in their pockets. One of Petland’s biggest suppliers is the Hunte Corporation.

Winslow says Petland has a constantly evolving “do-not-buy” list of breeders who have been determined to operate substandard facilities. And although “no one can guarantee the health of any living being,” all Petland puppies and kittens go home with current vaccinations and a health warranty that covers infectious diseases for 14 days and hereditary and congenital concerns for one year.

Fry and several of his colleagues once surveyed pet stores in their area to see where they got their pets. Fry says all the pet store officials they talked to said their pets came from small breeders. They asked for the USDA numbers on the puppies and then called the USDA to get the inspection papers. They discovered that the pet stores’ puppies didn’t come from small breeders at all, but from large commercial breeding operations. Fry calls it “consumer fraud.”

“It’s an industry that’s based on lies and deception,” he said. “People are buying sick dogs that cost them thousands of dollars because they’ve been lied to.”

Only half the dogs bred at puppy mills even make it to the pet shops. The other half die from the mills’ squalid conditions, hypothermia, starvation or the horrors of transport.

Today, thanks to the Internet, prospective buyers can order a puppy without having to leave the comfort of their living rooms. Puppy millers are now marketing their animals on the Internet, and they don’t even need a USDA license to do

Best of show?

Though Spirit was in bad shape when Smith rescued her, she was still AKC-registered. All Spirit’s puppy mill owners had to do was fill out an application and send it to the AKC with a check – $20 per dog, or $25 per litter plus $2 per puppy.

The American Kennel Club name alone conjures up images of the crème de la crème of canines proudly prancing around a show ring with their handlers. Surely they all came from the finest of dog lines, their parents pampered and cared for by their loving owners.

Think again.

“The AKC makes between $20 million and $30 million a year off dog registrations,” Fry said. “A large percentage of that is from puppy mills. It’s a cash cow. Without those registrations coming in, they would take a serious loss in income.”

According to the AKC’s 2006 audit report, the AKC made more than $33 million from registration fees, accounting for almost half of the registry’s $72 million in total revenues that year.
Lisa Peterson, AKC’s director of communications, said the AKC does inspect breeders. She said breeders who produce four to six litters a year are randomly selected for inspection. Breeders who produce seven or more litters a year are inspected every 18 months. If they pass two inspections in a row, they get one inspection cycle off and then go back on the rotation. Peterson said the AKC, which has 14 inspectors, conducted about 5,000 inspections last year. “When our inspectors go in to inspect,” Peterson said, “breeders have to meet our standards of care for dogs.”

The AKC has fined and suspended breeders who use their registry who have been convicted for cruelty to animals (the average penalty is 10 years and a $2,000 fine) or who have failed to comply with the AKC’s Care and Conditions Policy, which usually brings a one-year suspension and a $1,000 fine, according to AKC documents.

Yet the AKC has consistently come out against state legislation that would require the most basic care standards, such as Minnesota’s Senate File 121 and House File 1046, as well as Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell’s efforts to strengthen that state’s dog laws.

“We oppose any legislation that takes away the right of the owner to determine what’s best for their pets,” Peterson said.

On Fry’s Animal Wise radio show, Peterson recently said that the AKC believes that dogs are the owner’s property, since that is how they are viewed in the eyes of the law. And that belief, say animal welfare advocates, is one of the major problems.

Fry says that when it comes to legislation mandating basic care for animals, the AKC makes up “straw-man arguments that are completely without substance.”

Take the AKC’s argument against Minnesota’s Senate File 121, which would oversee breeders with six or more
intact breeding female dogs.

“The AKC says the number is too low and it’s arbitrary, but they miss the entire point that providing a minimal level of care is important, no matter how many animals you have,” Fry said. “I personally believe that if puppy mills
had to apply the care, even if it’s very minimal, they wouldn’t be able to make a profit. The AKC isn’t going to get their cut. It’s really all about money for them.”

There ought to be a law

The lack of USDA oversight has encouraged some states to take it upon themselves to strengthen laws governing commercial breeders.

In Minnesota, a state with 127 USDA-licensed kennels, including three of the nation’s largest with more than 1,000 animals each, Senator Don Betzold has introduced Senate File 121, which sets basic standards of care for animals.

“You can’t have animals in a cold barn with inadequate food and inadequate heat,” Betzold said. “You have to have some sort of medical care for the animals. It’s not being provided by some of these irresponsible breeders.”

Beltzold says Minnesota currently has some of the weakest animal laws in the country. “Some of these animals are clearly being bred in filthy conditions,” he said. He hopes to change that by having commercial breeders with six or more breeding animals become licensed by the state. The state will use the license fees to hire its own inspectors.

Senate File 121, as well as the House version, House File 1046, received opposition from even small breeders, who thought the bill was too detailed and would put them out of business. It’s too late for the bill to be heard this year, but Betzold hopes to introduce a less detailed version next year.

“If nothing else, it will simply adopt the USDA standards and then enforce them,” he said.

In the meantime, he’s hoping that better breeders will hop on board and support the bill. “We should be putting the irresponsible breeders out of business. I would think responsible breeders would want that. Consumers would have more confidence when they’re buying puppies and kittens that they’re getting healthy animals.”

Ohio has a similar bill in the works. And in Pennsylvania, where puppy mills have been springing up all over, many of them in Amish country, Governor Rendell has proposed legislation that would strengthen criminal penalties for cruelty to animals. He’s also proposed new regulations that would increase cage sizes; institute exercise requirements; set new standards for shelter, sanitation and temperature control; and require kennel owners to keep more detailed records.

Rendell also replaced every member of the state’s Dog Law Advi-sory Board and created six new positions in the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement. Having just one or two dog wardens per county, he explained, “made it impossible for us to keep up with the conditions in all the kennels in Lancaster.”

Animal welfare groups welcome these changes, but say they still really don’t get to the heart of the problem. With more than 2,440 mills, Pennsylvania is known as the puppy mill capital of the East. Lancaster County became home to many of them when the Amish and the Mennonite populations needed a new revenue stream.

The Amish tradition is for fathers to hand down a portion of their land to their sons. In looking for a way to make a living off those smaller plots of land, they discovered puppy mills.

“They say, ‘If we can’t farm or we can’t build furniture, we need to stack our produce,’” Wilkins said. The result? Cage upon cage of puppies stacked on top of each other.

But changes are also taking place at a more local level. In Minnesota’s Sherburne County, commissioners
were already working on an animal ordinance when things started heating up in Morrison County over McDuffee’s permit. So commissioners decided to put some teeth into the ordinance to prevent puppy mills like McDuffee’s from moving in.

“As far as we knew, we didn’t have anything similar to a large dog breeding operation in Sherburne County,” said Sherburne County planner Jon Sevald. “We’re lucky we didn’t have the problem. We wanted to deal with it before it became a problem.”

Sherburne’s new ordinance requires anyone within the unincorporated townships with four or more dogs older than six months to get a county kennel license. And they can have no more than 40 dogs older than six months, and no more than 10 of those dogs can be breeding females. The kennel must be located on at least 2.5 acres. There are two kinds of permits – private permits for those who aren’t breeding or boarding, such as sled dog owners, and commercial permits for those who are breeding or boarding. Commercial kennels are inspected at least once a year by a trained investigator from the sheriff’s department.

Fry applauds Sherburne County’s ordinance. “It’s like Sherburne County put a sign on their border saying, ‘No puppy mills allowed.’”

Other counties in Minnesota are looking at Sherburne County’s ordinance as a possible model for enacting their own legislation. But Sherburne County is a rarity.

“Many local municipalities don’t have anything on their ordinance books that discusses breeders,” Wilkins said. “It’s pretty much the Wild West out there when it comes to puppy mills.”

Wilkins says cities and counties should seize the opportunity to enact local laws regarding commercial breeding. They could use the revenue generated from issuing local commercial breeding permits to fund their animal control departments. She adds that the USDA and local municipalities need to work more closely together. “The state should make sure the applicant is in compliance with the local ordinance prior to giving him a license. Until they can comply with the local ordinances, the state department of agriculture should
not be giving out licenses.”

What you, the consumer, can do

Ultimately, when it comes to shutting down the commercial pet trade, the solution lies with the consumer.

“If there were no demand, “ said Ohrtman, “there wouldn’t be puppy mills, at least not on the scale that
exists now.”

So what can consumers do? Plenty.

First, don’t ever buy a pet from a pet store or a newspaper ad, or over the Internet. Those are the places puppies from mills are likely to end up.

The local shelter should be your first stop, even when shopping for a purebred. It’s estimated that one in four dogs in a shelter is a purebred. Breed rescue organizations are also a great resource.

“It takes a little more work,” Ohrtman said. “It may mean going to a shelter three or four times until you find the right dog, or it may mean waiting for one from a breed rescue. But, when you adopt an animal, you’re saving a life and you’re not contributing to the problem.”

Consumers can also write their legislators and their local paper to encourage them to enact stronger ordinances regulating commercial breeding, and to provide the necessary funding to enforce those ordinances.

Spirit’s journey to healing

It was one small step at a time, Smith says of Spirit’s road to healing. At 10 weeks, a breakthrough.

“She walked across the floor and came and sat next to me. She also walked in from outside and went up the stairs to get treats with my other dogs.” Spirit was learning to trust a human being for the first time in her life.

Spirit gave birth to 11 puppies, and three of them were stillborn. It would be her last litter.

“She had such a difficult time with her whelping because she was in such bad physical shape and undernourished and scarred, and the pups were so big for our little girl,” Smith explained. “There was one remaining dead puppy that she couldn’t deliver, and she went in for an emergency spay the following morning.”

The veterinarian told Smith he had never seen a dog’s uterus so stretched.

This time, Spirit’s puppies got to stay with her until they were old enough to go to their new owners, whom Smith checked out thoroughly.

Spirit continued to heal, both physically and emotionally, but she still carries bad memories that can’t be erased.

“She will always be more shy than a normal dog,” Smith said. “We can’t completely erase the first years of her life. We can’t give her back the socialization that she missed as a puppy. We can’t remove all her fears after being bred repeatedly and kept kenneled and mistreated. But we can give her love, fun and a wonderful life.”

Today, Spirit lives a good life with the Smiths and their other two golden retrievers, Sam and Allie.

“She is a happy girl,” Smith said. “She now rules the house. She runs around the backyard with the other dogs and plays with toys. She sits on the couch and has her tummy petted when we watch TV. She’s first in line for treats and she sleeps in our bed at night. Life is good.”