The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  The auction house in the barn takes a commission off the top, just like the far more famous auctioneers do when selling artwork or jewelry at Christie’s in London or New York City. And someday, Bob Hughes hopes to bring in the kind of money the bigger auctions make. He sees every other type of animal and its offspring being auctioned publicly, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, just after each industry’s big annual competition show. He thinks dogs should be no different.

  “When I got $12,600 that one time, a guy came up to me and said, ‘Wow, you sure got a lot of money out of that dog,’” Bob recalls. “I looked at him and said, ‘Did I?’ Because we’ll only know what these dogs are really worth when the American Kennel Club lets me hold an auction just after Westminster one year, using the champion. They do it with horses. Some horses go for a quarter million dollars apiece. What if Tiger Woods’s wife likes a certain kind of dog and wants to bid up the price to get the best one? We’ll never know the truth on these prices until they let me do an auction of the champion dogs.”

  Alas, the huge money wasn’t pouring forth on October 5, 2013. As the clock ticked toward three o’clock and the program’s fifteen English Bulldogs started arriving at the auction table, Hughes looked disappointed in the prices they were bringing. The females were going for $185 to $740 apiece, the males for $475 to $600, with the ranges dependent on everything from their ages to their looks to their history of producing puppies. Hughes probably wasn’t expecting five figures, like he got for that standout English Bulldog a number of years earlier, but something closer to four figures, or even a bit more than that, would have been nice.

  “They seem low,” he said, leaning back from the microphone and appearing to puzzle over what was keeping the crowd from upping the ante. This was a good-looking group of dogs, ten females and five males ranging from a few months to about five years old. Every single one of them had AKC registration papers (nearly one out of three dogs in the auction that day were eligible), and a few of the older dogs had recently produced litters of five to eight puppies apiece. One had managed to turn out ten in a single birthing.

  “The most expensive dog I ever sold was an English Bulldog,” Bob told the crowd, leaning full-throated back into the auction and nudging the sales harder than he had all day. “I know they’re not as popular right now, but give it two or three years. They’ll come back.”

  Chadd then took the mike, holding it with a little flair, and tipped it bottom side upward the way Jay-Z might. Chadd called out some prices before adding his own perspective, trying to raise the bids on the English Bulldogs to where the Hugheses thought they should be. “Anybody in the dog business knows that if you have the dog when the trend hits, that’s when you make your money,” Chadd told the crowd. Bidders shouldn’t shun a breed because it was a slow seller today, he implied; buying at a cut-rate price now could set up a gold mine of product to sell later.

  Jane Rosenthal, watching from front and center in the audience, shifted a bit in her lawn chair and tried to figure out how much money she had left to spend. Her mind was likely spinning with figures, not just those of the English Bulldogs, but of what she thought might be the prices on the breeds yet to come out. Given her experience at previous auctions, she probably knew it was going to be hard to get in on the Soft-Coated Wheatens, which were popular and would ultimately be the top sellers that day at an average of $1,485 apiece. She also likely knew she had little chance of horning in on the action for a French Bulldog, since that breed would be a close second at an average of $1,452 per dog. A couple of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels were yet to be auctioned, plus a slew of Yorkshire Terriers—enough Yorkies, actually, to fill five full pages in the program—and she might be able to offer the winning bid on some of those with the cash she still had on hand.

  Rosenthal is from northwestern Iowa, and she used to be a breeder. Not a commercial breeder, like what Hughes estimates as a good two-thirds of the people in the bleachers that day. She was a show breeder, turning out a far smaller quantity of Japanese Chin puppies with the potential to win at conformation dog shows (like the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, where dogs are judged by how well they conform, in terms of looks, to breed standards).

  She was an eager show participant until cancer struck her in 2007 and the chemotherapy drained what used to be her passion in life. “I just wasn’t interested in going to dog shows anymore,” she says. “I’d heard about the dog auctions and I got curious. I went to my first one in 2008. It was mind-blowing. Your brain is totally scrambled. I’ve been to the big shows like Westminster at Madison Square Garden, but I never saw so many dogs like this.”

  At that first auction, Rosenthal saw another woman who was buying dogs for a rescue group. She was outbidding the breeders to move the dogs from the commercial life into homes as pets. The rescuer would walk into the auction, hand over her driver’s license at the registration table, and then raise her bidding card just like everybody else in the room. Rosenthal soon had her own group, Luv A Chin Rescue, and before she knew it, she was helping other rescuers buy all kinds of breeds out of the auction. Rescuers who had homes lined up and waiting would call Rosenthal from all across America, telling her which dogs they could place with families if she could win their bids. “Lately, there haven’t been a lot of Chins,” she says, “but we have over twelve hundred in our database that we’ve gotten out since 2008.”

  A Chin that Rosenthal bought at the auction in 2008 gave birth to six puppies just four days later. The dog had previously been bred twice and had produced fifteen puppies by the time she was two years old—the age at which a show breeder might just be starting to think about breeding a Chin for the first time.

  “So over the life of the dog, it’s a huge difference,” Rosenthal says. “If she’d gone to a commercial breeder instead of to me, think of how many puppies she’d crank out over the years. If you figure ten puppies a year for a good seven years, that’s seventy puppies, not the ten or maybe fifteen, tops, that she’d produce with a show breeder.”

  In other words, Rosenthal felt she hadn’t just saved that one dog by outbidding the breeders in the room. She believed she had potentially saved lots more dogs from similar lives.

  Penny Reames, a rescuer from Kansas, feels the same way. She wasn’t at the October auction in Wheaton, but she has been there before, trying to outbid the breeders for the Scottish, Cairn, and West Highland White Terriers, which she then sends to a rescue group some 1,300 miles away in New Hampshire, where demand for their breeds is high. Reames tries especially hard to make it to the auctions in the fall, she says, because that’s when a lot of breed sellouts happen. “It’s cheaper [for the breeders] than building heated kennels to keep the dogs over the winters,” she says.

  Reames, Rosenthal, and other rescuers who attend the auctions sometimes take guff from their fellow advocates, who say they are only helping the commercial breeders by putting even more money into their pockets with every dollar that is bid. One such critic is Mary O’Connor-Shaver, an Ohio rescuer with Columbus Top Dogs who worked to get dog auctions banned in the Buckeye State.

  “We have a very strong statement on buying at dog auctions,” O’Connor-Shaver says. “We don’t think it’s a good thing. We think it’s a tragic embarrassment. We always ask for an outright boycott of these auctions. We’ve studied the numbers, and we think that some of these dogs at the auctions are being purposely bred for sale to the rescues. We’ve taken a really hard stand on it because we see that these breeders are watching the rescuers to see what dogs they’re buying. There’s a huge Bichon rescue in the United States, and they were going to these auctions, and the breeders figured it out. And guess what: It drove up pricing. As soon as they stopped, it drove down pricing, and now they relinquish them to the rescue with no fee.”

  Reames disagrees. In fact, she wishes more rescuers would buy dogs out of the auctions, and she plans to buy out as many as she can.

  “The way I see it,” Reames say
s, “the dog is going to be sold at auction whether we buy it or not. If somebody bids $250 and I can bid $255 and save that dog, why wouldn’t I do that?”

  And just to be clear, neither Reames nor Rosenthal is against the breeding of dogs. Both are perfectly fine with people breeding dogs for sale, especially the breeds for which they have a personal affection, like Japanese Chins and West Highland White Terriers. They just don’t want the breeding done on a commercial scale, the way Bob Hughes was raised to do it on his parents’ farm, with dogs being impregnated and handled and auctioned by the dozens and hundreds at a time. Yes, the serious commercial breeders are all licensed, and yes, they are inspected and fined if their operations fail to meet state and federal standards, but while the breeders argue that the standards for living conditions should be similar for all animals, rescuers like Reames feel they should be far higher for dogs, because dogs are different.

  “This is treating the dogs the same as livestock,” Reames says. “These are domesticated animals. We have to encourage the good breeders who treat their dogs with compassion. I’m talking about people who let their breeding dogs live in the house, see a veterinarian, eat quality food, maybe there’s three or four mamas, but that’s all—that’s how you get good, quality pets.”

  And for what it’s worth, Rosenthal isn’t opposed to the auction in Wheaton, either. She says that without it, the rescuers couldn’t get to the dogs at all, because commercial-scale breeders don’t trust anyone who might utter the words “puppy mill” or who has even the slightest air of being an animal welfare advocate. (Such people are more commonly called “animal rights extremists” in this part of the Midwest.) If showing up at the auction is how she can do the most good for the most dogs, then Rosenthal is more than willing to keep going to the auction. She’ll hand over the money—not with a smile, but without causing a stir—if that’s what it takes to inject the cause of rescue into the marketplace.

  “I’m a Christian woman,” Rosenthal says. “I’m nice to everyone. I go and mind my own business. One time I met a man from Arkansas. He saw my Iowa plates in the parking lot. ‘Iowa,’ he said. ‘How’s the dog business up there?’ I just said, ‘Oh, you know, probably about the same as it is down here.’ And I just kept on walking.”

  While she’s a regular attendee, she’s obviously not a fan of the people selling dogs at the auction. She’s certainly not there to make friends; she’s there to disrupt their business model.

  “The breeders are all about money,” Rosenthal says. “If they’re not making money, they’ll have a kennel sellout. The dogs, the cages, all of it. They won’t pay to feed them if they can’t sell them. It’s all supply and demand. The dog shows? They’re fantasy. They’re a big ego trip. These auctions, they’re the reality.”

  Each of the three German Shepherds brought out from the back room were pregnant; they went for $510 to $550 apiece. The trio sold to a single buyer who probably went home satisfied that he’d gotten a good deal. After all, Hughes said from the podium, one of those Shepherds’ fathers had been sold at auction a while back for $6,500.

  The father of the teenage girl sitting in the bleachers wearing the pink sweatshirt and sparkly matching headband bought the day’s only Rottweiler, a four-year-old male listed as a “nice, aggressive breeder” with AKC registration papers. The price was $600.

  Hughes couldn’t get any bidders for the six-year-old male Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Feldmann’s Big Boy, called out as dog number 180 and so terrified being brought from the back room that he wrapped all four of his legs around the two handlers trying to calm and carry him. Nobody would even bid a single dollar, no matter how many times Hughes asked. “No sale,” he finally called out as the trembling dog was returned to his cage in the back room.

  When bidding seemed slow on the three Golden Retriever females, each just shy of two years old, and prices stalled in the mid-$700s, Hughes goosed the crowd, saying, “One litter will pay for all of them.” They went a few minutes later for $810 apiece, right around three thirty P.M., with another hour and a half still to go before the last dog would be sold.

  There were no West Highland White Terriers at the auction on that particular day, but Reames has seen plenty of them brought to the folding table over the years—after all, they’ve been among the more popular, in-demand breeds across America since the 1960s. A female Westie can start breeding just shy of her first birthday, and Reames often sees the younger, pregnant ones go for about $650 apiece. She doesn’t always know exactly what happens to them next, but she does know, just as well as Hughes and the commercial breeders do, how the money trail develops from auction day forward. Here’s how she explains it, to put into perspective how much money really is on the table inside of the auction house every time a dog’s number is called:

  A commercial dog breeder will get two litters of puppies out of that Westie during each of the five years after purchase. Every litter with a Westie is four to eight pups. That means a total of eight to sixteen puppies a year, or forty to eighty dogs coming out of that single Westie in five years’ time. Even if the breeder sells them all as males and non-pregnant females to a broker at a discount, for $100 apiece, that’s $4,000 to $8,000 going into the breeder’s pocket, minimum.

  The broker will then sell those dogs to the pet stores at maybe half of their retail price, or about $400 apiece. So, subtracting the original $100 per puppy, that’s another $12,000 to $24,000 in income, creating a total of $16,000 to $32,000 so far from the initial dog. Yes, it does add up fast. The pet store then sells those purebred Westies to the public for the retail price of, easily, $800 apiece. That adds another $16,000 to $32,000 in gross income, for a conservative total of $32,000 to $64,000—every cent of it generated by that original $650 female who was sold at the auction five years earlier, and who will probably be brought back to the auction table only after her breeding production slows, when she’s considered used up.

  Then again, sometimes she might come back a bit early, if the owner decides Westies are no longer worth his time to breed, or if an inspector shuts down his kennel and orders it to be liquidated, dogs and all.

  “It absolutely blows my mind how many of these dogs come into the auctions already pregnant,” Reames says, talking about not just the Hughes auction, but also smaller ones she has attended. “At one auction, I saw a dog actually having her puppies right there at the auction. I’ve heard the auctioneer say, ‘It’s money in the bank, people!’”

  The mother lode of breeds at the October auction in Wheaton was the Yorkshire Terrier. Nearly sixty of them were advertised in the preshow flier, many of them from a breeder having a kennel sellout, a breeder who provided an endorsement stating that “the quality and health of their puppies are exceptional, from the size, hair coat, and the face that everybody wants.” The Yorkies would average just shy of $400 apiece by the time Hughes was done, with the most expensive one being an eighteen-month-old female who had already given birth to at least one litter of puppies, whelped when she was a year old, and who was likely already pregnant again. She went for $1,150, having earned a reputation as a good producer from a nice, young age.

  More and more people were stepping down from the bleachers and shuffling toward the door as the last of the Yorkies came out. It was getting late, their funds were used up, and, depending on their reasons for being at the auction, they had either accomplished or failed at their business goals for that day. Some of them seemed happy and some seemed frustrated, but none seemed shocked or disturbed about the existence of the auction itself. Southwest Auction Service may represent different things to different people, but it is one thing for sure: the epicenter, almost square in the middle of the map, of how dogs are bought and sold in America, and of how similar dog market interests operate in nations around the world.

  Virtually every player of significance is represented in the barn’s bleachers, from high-volume commercial breeders to small-scale breeders alike. There are breed registries like the AKC—
whose seal of approval often raises a puppy’s price in the general marketplace—as well as competing registries looking to make money off the fees that come from supplying each dog’s “official papers.” There are local rescuers and national-scale rescue networks that turn around and market the dogs for sale to the public as “adoptable.” Anybody is welcome to walk inside, raise a bidding card, and take a dog home, just as anybody is welcome to open a wallet at pet stores and in back yards and at adoption events all across the planet.

  Bob Hughes, at the end of the day, is selling dogs, which are a legal and regulated product. Like him or not, he’s doing it really well, in an environment that is professional, organized, and family-friendly. Lots and lots of customers are buying dogs through him, and if there were no deals to be made, then the scene would not exist. It certainly wouldn’t continue to be a profit-generating enterprise a quarter of a century after Hughes became an auctioneer.

  It just feels different than what most dog lovers know, of course, because when Hughes flips on the lights inside his barn, it’s like shining a spotlight on every last opinion and bias about dogs, and on what society has done to the dogs themselves—all they have been allowed to become and to represent, from price point commodities to furry-footed children, generation after generation, in the name of wanting to bring them by the millions into homes every year. Many dog owners may never set foot in that barn, but they are the ultimate buyers of the product being brought to the folding table, whether they are comfortable with that fact or not.

  As the last few dogs were carried out of the back room that day, one of the sellers got annoyed; the bidding on her five-month-old male Biewer Terrier had stalled at $500, probably because the dog’s fur was tan and white instead of the more common tricolor with black patches. The seller stood up from her seat in the bleachers and shouted across the room for Hughes to pull the dog off the auction table: “I don’t want to sell him for that! He’s called gold dust. It’s a rare color. I could get two thousand dollars for him over the Internet!”