Undercover Investigations Prove Pet Shop Puppies Were Coming From Puppy Mills
By Carole Raphaelle Davis
“Oh my God,” said my friend Carole Sax into the phone last November. “There’s a new puppy store called Posh Puppy in Beverly Hills and they’re selling dogs! I can’t take it, this is my town; we have to do something!”
She was fuming. I had known Carole since we volunteered walking homeless dogs for the Amanda Foundation in Beverly Hills 20 years ago. There, we learned first hand of the pet overpopulation crisis. We were walking dogs who had been rescued from death row in the shelter and the thought of people buying dogs when those dogs needed homes so desperately made us grit our teeth. Today, it’s especially disturbing to us that pet stores seem to be popping up all over the place while at the same time, 5 million companion animals are being euthanized in our nation’s shelters every year. It exasperates us that so many people would rather go to a pet store than go to the shelter and save a life.
Though there has been lots of press coverage on the subject, there are still people who don’t know that pet stores are supplied by large brokers and inhumane breeding operations. There is no other way for pet shops to have a constant supply of puppies of different breeds. We knew it was time to take a stand and convince puppy buyers to stop shopping and start adopting. Los Angeles, the second largest market for pets after New York, was the perfect place to tell the public about the ugly truth behind the pretty store fronts.
“Let’s picket the store,” I told Carole. “Let’s get all our friends to come out on the busiest puppy buying day of the year, the Saturday before Christmas. We’ll bring our rescued dogs to show the shoppers what fabulous dogs you can adopt at the pound.” The goal was simple: a group of regular dog lovers would get together every Saturday in front of Posh Puppy and tell the truth. We had faith that if we could get evidence, we could prove to shoppers that they were making a mistake by putting money into the hands of a business that profits from animal cruelty. We also knew that if we could convince them in L.A., where celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears buy their tea cup accessory dogs, we could convince the whole country.
In California, we have a Puppy Lemon Law, which requires pet store owners to post the name and address of the breeder of the dogs on their display enclosures. Putting that law to use, we recruited some friends who were willing to do some reconnaissance trips to pet stores. We wired ourselves up with undercover cameras and disguised ourselves. I put on some bimbo sunglasses and borrowed a long, platinum blond wig to give me the appearance of the kind of woman we disdain, the supercilious L.A. lady who lunches—you know the type, the kind of silly woman who buys a $4,000 pocket dog. We fanned out across the city, hitting all the pet stores to find out exactly where the puppies were coming from.
At the same time, we called on some professional investigators from LCA (Last Chance for Animals) to go and film the addresses we provided. When the photos and video came in, the proof was irrefutable. Bingo. Just like we expected, the puppies at Posh Puppy were coming from a puppy mill.
What we found out through our in-store investigations is that pet stores are openly defrauding the public - not just Posh Puppy in Beverly Hills, but all the pet stores we visited. We discovered that pet store owners, managers and employees routinely lie to people. They are all telling their customers the same lies - that they aren’t in business with puppy mills and that their puppies are “raised in homes” or that they are “well-socialized” and raised “underfoot and with lots of tender loving care.”
In the fashionable pet stores, the shoppers we observed who pay up to $4,500 for designer tea cup dogs are oblivious to the facts about the origins of the puppies on display. They don’t suspect that the people who work in the pet stores are actively concealing the truth. In every store that we investigated, when I asked about where the mothers of the puppies were, rather than answer my questions, employees would put an adorable puppy in my arms, allowing it to perform its magic.
Walter Hargis, a puppy mill investigator and co-founder of Puppy Mill Awareness Day belives, “They rely on the cuteness factor. Nobody is going to question where the puppies come from when they’re holding a cute little bundle of fur. What’s the first thing they think of? Usually, it’s how cute, or how much? No one ever asks, where are the parents?” We did. And we never got a straight answer.
But that didn’t stop us; the addresses we got from the puppy display cages and careful questioning had led us to the truth - the run down, dilapidated properties right in Los Angeles County where hundreds of dogs were imprisoned in outdoor cages, exposed to the elements, broiling by day in the hot sun and freezing at night. The breeding dogs we saw were Maltese, Chihuahuas, Shi Tzus and Yorkies. They were a pathetic lot, filthy, matted, sick with infections and congenital diseases. Many had injuries and all were showing signs of acute stress by continually turning in tight circles inside their cages.
Back in the stores, we found that there is a calculated effort to distract buyers and an unwritten policy to obfuscate reality. No one who works in these stores is willing to discuss what is really going on behind the scenes. It’s obvious that most employees have been trained to avoid scrutiny. Pet retailers evade probing questions with misinformation like, “we only get our dogs from small, local breeders.”
This description is misleading because the words “small” and “local” make it sound as if the dogs are being treated well. They’re not. Or, they claim that the breeding facilities are “privately owned” or “family owned.” Again, telling you nothing about the conditions and suggesting that the facility is swank, exclusive or that the dogs are members of the family.
These adjectives: “local” and “small” or “private” are euphemisms being used to falsely describe a business that abuses hundreds of animals nearby. So they are kind of telling the truth about size and proximity, but they are omitting the truth about maltreatment of the breeding dogs inside.
We found that some employees genuinely don’t know the answers to our questions, which is unacceptable; others do know which is reprehensible.
Another typical misinformation ploy used by pet retailers is to say: “We only sell puppies from USDA licensed breeders.” They use the USDA license as an unimpeachable source, and because the United States Department of Agriculture is a government agency, it serves as an unquestionable reference to erase any doubt that the breeding operation is humane. But it’s not.
The USDA lists more than 5,000 dealers and brokers. Some are small operations of dilapidated outdoor hutches and some are large facilities that look like high-tech canine supermax prisons. Within that sinister world there is an even unluckier group of dogs being bred - dogs bound for bio-medical research. That’s right; they breed dogs specifically to be tortured by the bio-medical research industry and it’s all USDA approved.
According to Deborah Howard, president of the Companion Animal Protection Society, the USDA, which is supposed to govern livestock enterprises, “has been extremely negligent over the years in its enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA).” Deborah finds that the USDA's implementation of AWA has been “grievously insufficient.”
If you want to believe that our government is actually making sure dogs aren’t being abused in facilities bearing their stamp of approval, go to the USDA Web site and read the minimum standard of care. Read it and weep; you’ll be appalled to learn how dogs are mistreated legally in USDA licensed squalor. The commercial breeding facilities are only inspected annually. What goes on the rest of the year is up to a bunch of callous people who call themselves “companion animal suppliers.” Dogs are their cash crop. Mill dogs are allowed six inches in front of them in their cages - for life. Don’t gloss over that just yet.
Take the puppy mill test. Go stand six inches in front of a wall. Now stay there for the rest of your life. Puppy millers aren’t even required to give their dogs more than an artificial light and a fan. There is nothing on the books that requires millers to exercise or socialize the dogs. And remember, that is the USDA minimum standard of care. It’s often much worse than that.
An investigator (who wanted to remain anonymous) working on a case in a USDA licensed breeding facility in Wisconsin told me one dog, “had been kicked in the eye with something sharp, the eye had been pushed into her head and never treated and left there to rot. They were still breeding this dog. She didn’t need an eye [to breed].” And when these dogs are sick and can no longer produce? The investigator told me, “They dispose of unwanted stock with a bullet to the brain or by slamming them against a wall. They’ll dump them in a barrel of water and drown them.” It costs around $20 to euthanize humanely - it’s expensive to be humane.
Many breeding facilities have beautiful puppy selling Web sites with next day shipping. They’ll post pictures of adorable puppies with bows in their fur, romping through fields. Those pictures are posed. What you don’t see are the hundreds of dogs crammed into filthy cages, standing on wire flooring that tears the skin on their feet. What you don’t see is that they are treated without any human kindness or mercy. What you don’t hear is the loud, mournful howling to get out.
One of the reasons that people buy from pet stores or the Internet is because they aren’t skeptical enough. Most people don’t like to be a nuisance and they prefer to make their purchases without any stress or confrontations. They like the convenience and they want a fun shopping experience, like when they’re shopping for any expensive accessory or luxury item. But a dog is not an accessory or a luxury item, it’s alive. And it misses its mom. And its mom is being tortured in a cage. You’ve heard of blood diamonds? Well, these are blood dogs.
Our little protest grew into a movement with many other organizations joining in. The results from the LCA investigators of the mill that supplied the Posh Puppy store were handed over to David Goldstein of CBS2, who conducted his own investigation, which in turn, led L.A. County Animal Control to raid the mill and cite them for having three hundred and two dogs over their allowed limit. And in this case, those breeding dogs got lucky. Some of them went to the Lancaster shelter, where they were adopted into homes, and others were rescued by the Best Friends Animal Society, Animal Alliance, The Brittany Foundation and other, small rescue organizations. A couple of the breeding moms who were rescued came to us and our lives were changed as soon as we held them in our arms.
When we met the breeding dogs and held their tired and broken little bodies, their gratitude for their newfound freedom added fervor to our mission to educate pet store shoppers. We were ecstatic that these dogs would finally get a chance to have loving homes after so many years of torture in the dog factory. But unfortunately, that was only one mill. There are hundreds of thousands of breeding dogs still suffering in mills around the nation. We’d like to see pet stores that sell live animals go the way of old camera film development shops - that they all close because of the advent of newer, better technology. In the case of pet stores, or puppy mill outlets, we feel that adoption centers will eventually take their place as the newer, better, more ethical way to bring a companion animal into your heart and home.
As Gretchen Wyler, the late, great lady of animal rights used to say to me, “Cruelty can’t stand the spotlight.” She was right. Five and a half months after we started picketing Posh Puppy in Beverly Hills, they closed. Their other store in Tarzana closed as well. Beverly Hills is now puppy mill free. My friend Carole Sax, the one who started it all, has since adopted one of the rescued breeding moms. She’s a resilient little dog. Though she’s scarred from being forced to have so many litters, she is a happy girl now and is learning to live without fear of humans. She still turns around obsessively in tight circles, a reminder of the only exercise she got in her cage for so many years, but now she can see the sky and feel the grass under her feet. Finally, somebody loves her.
Until the cages in our shelters are empty and all the dogs and cats in pet factories are rescued, we need to stand in front of pet stores that sell live animals and speak out. We hear their cries, we are their voice. Our voice is true, our voice is strong. Together, let’s set them free. Carole Raphaelle Davis is an actress, animal welfare advocate and author of The Diary of Jinky, Dog of a Hollywood Wife, a book “written by” her rescued, death row dog, who describes Hollywood life with “biting” humor. Her Web site: www.hollywoodjinky.com.
What YOU can do:
Get active! Gather some friends and organize a pro-adoption, anti-puppy mill rally in your community.
It Works!
If you bought a sick dog or if you’d like to know if your dog is from a puppy mill: Contact www.PetShopPuppies.org and The Companion Animal Protection Society (www.caps-web.org) to fill out complaint forms. These organizations gather information for investigations and legal action.
