by Kim Kavin
One dog, though, stood apart on the farm that day. He was pitch black and had the run of the place, bopping and loping around with his tail wagging and his ears flopping and his tongue dangling out of his wide mouth with a goofy smile. He was special at Sugarfork, and he seemed to know it. As Ken sat down to take a break from the day’s chores in all the kennels, this particular dog sauntered up to him and sniffed around his camouflage pants, eager for some of his master’s attention.
If an everyday dog lover had seen this pooch on the street, the reaction would probably have been that he was a mutt with some Labrador in him.
“This is him,” Ken said with a grin, sitting up in his chair and petting the dog with the satisfaction of a proud papa. “The German Blabrador.”
Ken invented the German Blabrador after breeding a Labrador to a Bloodhound, and then breeding the resulting puppies to a German Shorthaired Pointer. So far, he has produced two litters, and he says the ACA has offered to register the third generation officially. It would show up on the ACA website right between the Gelockter Bichon and the German Broken-Coated Pointing Dog, a few lines above the German Shepherd in the alphabetical list of breeds.
Is that the same as worldwide recognition by the AKC, the Kennel Club in Britain, and FCI? No—but give it time. The Rat Terrier, Chinook, and Portuguese Podengo introduced at Westminster in 2014 also had to start somewhere and work their way through the registries. The Portuguese Podengo, for instance, while just accepted by the AKC in 2013, has been approved by the Kennel Club in England since 2004. FCI published its version of the breed standard in 2008. With time and effort, there’s no reason the German Blabrador can’t also become recognized worldwide as a new style of dog available to the general public with credentialed paperwork.
So far, Ken says, the German Blabradors he has created are all great at hunting deer antlers, and since things are going so well, he and Abby are just as excited about continuing the project as they are about breeding their other dogs. After all, that’s what breeders do, and they are proud to do it in a way that keeps buyers coming back, even if their puppies never set one paw in a show ring like Westminster’s. Their pride is in producing healthy, happy pets that people want to take home.
“You can breed two champions and get junk,” Abby says, waving her hand as if to dismiss much of the hullabaloo that surrounds certain breed standards today. What matters to her is creating puppies who become valued members of people’s families. And she has plenty of customers, so she must be doing something right.
That same logic applies to her competitors, too. While the Andersons don’t advertise the prices they charge for their puppies, some of their competitors are striving to drive prices as high as possible by turning dogs into show ring champions—and receiving inquiries from customers all around the globe.
CHAPTER FOUR
FREELANCE PRODUCERS
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”
—Henry Ford
Colleen Nicholson didn’t sense that anything was wrong when a woman and her five-year-old daughter came to visit. Not at first, anyway. They seemed like perfectly lovely people who wanted to buy one of the Doberman Pinscher puppies Nicholson had listed for sale. The pups were still too young to travel on that day, so the mother and daughter also spent plenty of time with Nicholson’s adult male Doberman, Magnum, and he loved them both. They seemed like the kind of people who would give a dog a great life—the only kind of people Nicholson ever allows to buy puppies from her Kelview Dobermans business in central Pennsylvania, where prices ranging from $2,400 to more than $3,500 usually weed out anybody who doesn’t intend to treat a dog as a valued member of the family.
“The puppies were six weeks old, and we hadn’t met her husband,” says Nicholson, whose sister works with her to ensure everything is in place before the puppies grow old enough to leave. “We want to meet everybody. She’d say, ‘Oh, he’s a surgeon, he’s busy,’ but we insisted. They came on a Friday night in separate cars because he was coming from the hospital. He got out of his Mercedes, and he was this little squatty guy, and his posture was just pure arrogance. We brought Magnum out—Magnum, who loves the world—and he stopped short and growled at him. We asked him to wash his hands, thinking maybe it was the antiseptic smell from the hospital, but it didn’t help. So now, our red flag is up. We trust Magnum’s instincts.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, clearly something is wrong, so I’m going to give you back your deposit,’” Nicholson remembers saying.
The surgeon did not take her decision well.
“He started pacing back and forth and then he started shouting, ‘You can’t do this to me! I can buy whatever dog I want!’” she recalls. “Then I turned my back to get his check, which I hadn’t cashed, and he grabbed a lamp. The mother put the daughter behind her. She’d obviously seen that before. Magnum was by my side. If that guy had gotten any closer . . .”
Nicholson’s sister called for help, including the police, but in short order the man stormed out and drove away. The family never contacted Nicholson again, but the surgeon did come up in conversation during the following months at regional dog shows.
“We heard he got a German Shepherd,” she says, shaking her head with disgust. “Somebody gave that guy a dog.”
As hard as it is to believe, the only thing standing between some of the highest-priced puppies in the world and whatever people want to do to them is often a single human being’s integrity. When it comes to the small-scale end of the breeding business, the breeders and the buyers can get away with pretty much anything unless another person stands in their way. It’s just as true of breeders who sell dogs to a surgeon with anger issues as it is of breeders who follow the surprisingly common practice of killing Boxer puppies at birth simply because they’re born with white fur. At this end of the industry, regulators are virtually nowhere to be found. Everything the dogs endure, as with so many dogs around the world, boils down to human character and decency.
Nicholson is what’s known in the dog industry as a hobby breeder, which means a small-scale seller of dogs who usually turns out one or two litters of puppies a year. Hobby breeders often describe themselves as people trying to better their breed, and they produce pet dogs as well as show dogs. That’s why the prices for Nicholson’s puppies have a range: She charges more for the ones who have the most potential to win judges’ attention in the future. Hobby breeders usually are involved with breed clubs and registries, they sometimes invest more money in testing for potential health problems than other breeders, and they generally are people who let their adult dogs live in their homes as members of their families, just as Nicholson did with Magnum. They often breed dogs as an income-generating hobby, just as the label implies. Nicholson, for one, earns her day-to-day living as a real estate agent.
Legally speaking, though, a hobby breeder is no different than a back yard breeder, which is anybody who has a litter of puppies and offers them for sale. A back yard breeder might be somebody whose dog gets accidentally pregnant, or who sells a few litters of puppies each year with no desire to do anything but make a quick buck. In the eyes of most governments worldwide, hobby breeders and back yard breeders fall into the same category: noncommercial and unregulated. In America, breeders aren’t inspected by federal agents if they have fewer than four breeding females. The level at which legal regulation begins differs from nation to nation—in the United Kingdom, a breeder must own at least five females, for example, while in Ireland, it’s six or more intact female dogs—but generally speaking, laws that regulate breeders are based on the notion that smaller is usually trustworthy. The US government says hobby breeders need no regulating because they “already provide sufficient care to their animals.” The British Parliament took up a debate about puppy farms during 2014 while altogether ignoring the small-scale breeders. Frankly, nobody even knows who all the hobby and back yard breeders are, let alone where they are, so any inspectors trying to find them and regul
ate them would be utterly, hopelessly lost.
The lack of regulation means that standards vary wildly among small-scale breeders, which is how a lamp-wielding surgeon can get turned away by Nicholson while receiving a warm reception from a breeder of German Shepherds. Hobby breeders are, for the most part, free to conduct business however they see fit. If they aren’t trying to win at dog shows, which would require them to register their dogs with a group like the AKC or the Kennel Club in Britain, then there’s no reason for them to do anything at all beyond breeding a puppy somebody will pay money to buy.
Nicholson got into hobby breeding after buying her first Doberman in 1978 from a back yard breeder, a man she later realized was the epitome of everything that is wrong with the small-breeder end of the dog industry. Somebody had taken her to a dog show, and she’d fallen in love with the look of Dobermans. She did what most dog buyers did in those days: looked in the newspaper classified ads to find a Doberman puppy for sale.
“I paid three hundred seventy-five dollars,” she says. “It was a guy with a few Dobermans. He had both the parents there, the place wasn’t dirty, and he was friendly, but the dog had diarrhea and was vomiting from the time I got home. The dog never got right. He always had chronic issues. And he had a nasty temperament. We went to a conformation class, and at four months old, he was trying to bite the judge.”
Nicholson remembers calling the breeder and asking for help. After all, $375 was a lot of money back then, the equivalent of about $1,400 today. The price, she’d thought, should have been some indication of quality. “They said, ‘You got your puppy, we got paid, we’re done,’” she recalls. “It was an ugly education.”
The dog died of cancer at age four, and Nicholson decided she could set a far better example personally for the breed that had left her so smitten. “Our whole intention was to better the breed and make great puppies,” she says today, after twenty-five years in the breeding business with her sister. “We would never treat people the way those people treated us with our first dog.”
Dog shows fascinated Nicholson, so she also took up handling as a hobby, showing other people’s dogs in the ring for a fee and learning, a little more each time, about which qualities mattered to her. She cared about temperament and health because of her previous experience. She could see that some dogs were more trainable than others. She began to learn what physical qualities met the AKC breed standard. Nicholson wasn’t exactly shopping while she was handling, but she was always on the lookout for a great puppy, and one day, she saw a four-month-old Dobie who made her swoon.
“The woman tells me it’s a thousand dollars,” Nicholson says with a laugh. “I’m twenty years old at the time. I’ve got about a hundred dollars, but she’d seen me showing dogs.”
They made a deal for Nicholson to work off the rest of the price by forgoing handling fees, and that’s how she ended up bringing Magnum home. He was everything she’d imagined even before that awful night with the surgeon. The Doberman was sweet, beautiful, smart, protective, and great with kids—the kind of dog lots of people might want. Part of the deal was that she’d allow the woman to breed Magnum, and that’s when she started paying visits to the experienced breeder’s home to learn about newborn puppies, when she wasn’t asking around elsewhere. “This whole time I was still showing dogs, and I was picking the brains of the old-school breeders,” Nicholson says. “I was learning how the sire brought this quality and the female brought this other quality.”
Magnum was bred five times in his life. The first time Nicholson tried with her own female, she got twelve healthy puppies—but the mother wouldn’t produce any milk. She had the dog spayed and found her a calm life among people in a nursing home. “This is my hobby,” she says. “It’s not the dog’s hobby. Some dogs love to be moms. Some don’t. It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay.”
She has spent as long as a year trying to choose a stud for her females, whom she doesn’t breed before age three because she doesn’t think they’re yet mature enough to handle motherhood. “I think at three, they’re mentally ready to be a mom,” she says, adding that by age three, the dogs have had all their major health tests and been in conformation dog shows enough times to earn champion status. “The dog is settled enough that it can be a responsible mother. You can breed them younger, but it’s not okay. A twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl can have a baby, but should she? It’s pretty basic common sense.”
Nicholson typically breeds her dogs less than a half dozen times throughout their lives before allowing them to retire as pets in her home. She says they live out their days playing with other Dobermans and have plenty of access to the two grass-covered acres that surround her house when they’re not separated in their crates. She expects everyone who buys a puppy from her to give the dog that same quality of life, and she is available to owners of her pups right up until the inevitable end.
“When your puppy is twelve and a half and dying, I am supportive,” she says. “I am helpful. You’re not just buying that puppy. You’re buying into my knowledge.”
Last year, Nicholson says, she had about fifty people, many of them repeat customers, on a waiting list for the twelve puppies she produced—and she doesn’t even let them choose their own dogs. She learns each puppy’s temperament and then matches them to each buyer’s lifestyle, offering only the puppy she thinks will do best with each family. Retired senior citizens, for instance, will never get the most energetic dog in the litter, no matter how much they love the pup’s color or are willing to pay. If a person doesn’t want the puppy she offers, then Nicholson moves on to a buyer she believes will give the dog a top-notch life. Plenty of people on the list are willing to take whatever dog she gives them.
Another thing she refuses to do is ship puppies to people who want them sent by plane after finding her on the Internet. Buyers have to come to her home so she can evaluate them before handing them a dog in person—and each bill of sale requires the new owner to complete at least one level of obedience class with a professional trainer. She also takes handling fees of about $85 per showing from owners whose dogs she brings into AKC-sanctioned rings, and she reserves the right to use at least some of the dogs she sells for breeding purposes, although that doesn’t always happen.
“We could breed more, but we are making a choice not to make a living off the animals,” she says. “Two acres next door came up for sale a while back, and we could’ve bought it and expanded, but we didn’t.”
She’ll even tell buyers, with brutal honesty, that not all of the puppies she produces have been perfect. Life is not perfect, she says, and even the best breeders can’t guarantee that nature won’t take a wrong turn. When she talks about bettering the Doberman breed, she means aiming for puppies who are physically sound, have good temperaments, and show no signs of common Doberman health problems such as hip dysplasia, the bleeding disorder Von Willebrand disease, hypothyroidism, or cardiomyopathy. But twice in the past thirteen years or so, she had puppies born with problems she could not predict. One had juvenile renal disease and had to be euthanized at just over a year old. The other puppy was born about a decade later with only one kidney.
“With that dog, I gave them the option of a new dog or their money back, and they took the money and used it for vet bills,” she says. “The dog lived to be two. It was heartbreaking.”
Neither of those dogs, of course, was bred to create more puppies—which is the real rub for Nicholson when it comes to small-scale breeders who say they’re just like her but in fact care about nothing but sales, like the man who bred the first Doberman she owned. Buyers sometimes disappoint her, too. She has known well-respected people in the show dog world, including one veterinarian who stunned her by allowing puppies Nicholson had bred to live in disturbing conditions, to the point that Nicholson bought at least one of the dogs back. She avoids some of her fellow hobby breeders as potential partners because she repeatedly sees their dogs being born with health issues or bad temperaments, and
she knows as well as anyone that some hobby breeders with respectable credentials would have given that abusive surgeon a dog, cashed his check, and continued with business as usual.
She sincerely wishes all puppy buyers would investigate breeders like her as thoroughly as she investigates them. Doing so would solve a lot of the problems dogs are forced to endure.
“A full-time breeder is not necessarily a professional,” Nicholson says. “When I say professional, I am talking about integrity, loyalty, honesty, trust. I’m talking about character you should be proud to have.”
It’s important for buyers to ask questions, she says. Then ask more questions. And more still. If any breeder, even one who seems to have impeccable references and is charging thousands of dollars, won’t answer every question or make eye contact, move on. The governments of the world may think small breeders are generally more trustworthy, but Nicholson, based on her years of experience, does not always agree.
“Never,” she says, pausing for emphasis, “never ever make assumptions.”
A utilities meter reader, sent to do an everyday house check on usage for May 2014, was the first person to notice the smell. It was wafting like invisible, toxic clouds from inside the house in Paoli, Indiana, a small suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, where neighbors mostly keep to themselves.
The meter reader called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and Chief Deputy Josh Babcock arrived soon after. He and his fellow officers pulled air-purifying respirators over their faces to protect their noses and throats from burning in the putrid ammonia stench. They walked around the house, often not believing what they were seeing: two to three inches of feces in some places where dogs were walking. Kibble had been tossed atop the muck, though there was no water in bowls or anywhere else the pups inside the home could reach. Nine Poodles were packed into three cages, and another twelve Poodles were free to roam through the sludge. Some had maggots living in their skin, including under their eyelids. A veterinarian later shaved nine pounds of matted hair and feces from a single dog, with some of the clumps nearly the size of baseballs.