Profit and loss - life in a puppy mill
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
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).
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
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.
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.”
Reference: http://network.bestfriends.org
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