by Kim Kavin
“The mainstream is always under attack.”
—Bill Gates
Dave Miller would like to support a local dog rescue group someone mentioned to him. The seventy-five-year-old’s attitude may surprise some people, because he’s one of the proudest commercial dog breeders in the world. In fact, at the time of this writing, he was president of the Missouri Pet Breeders Association, which claims to be America’s largest and oldest group of its kind and is based in a state that produces, by some estimates, more than 30 percent of the dogs sold in pet stores nationwide. At the website for his business, Monark Puppies, Miller doesn’t talk about dog rescue at all. Instead, he explains that on his farm, he raises beef cattle, quarter horses, dogs, and grandchildren. Anyone who visits can stand with him among the outdoor pens containing fifty or so adult Newfoundlands, Beagles, Shiba Inus, Corgis, and Puggles. He pets the dogs and accepts their kisses with a smile, and he will tell you unequivocally that he’s every bit as much a dog lover as the smaller-scale hobby and show breeders—which is one reason why the local rescue group’s appeal for donations caught his attention.
“They go and get the dogs out of the shelter, and they put the dogs into foster homes, and from there they find the dogs a home,” Miller says. “Now that’s something that I could get behind. And I’d like to send those people some money, you know, make a donation.
“But first,” he says, raising his more than six-foot frame fully upright, staring out from beneath the brim of his cowboy hat, and wagging his index finger, “they’re going to have to stop calling me a puppy mill.”
Miller and his wife, Judy, began raising dogs in 2003 because, as they started aging into the senior citizen class, they found the pups easier to handle than larger livestock on their farm. On the day that put them to the decision, Judy was watching from the window while Dave got tangled with a quarter horse out in the front yard. He was nearly hurt. “That’s it!” she insisted, as Dave recalls. “She told me riding horses was for youngsters.”
Dave had been a bird hunter and raised some hunting dogs, so he and Judy tried raising other kinds of dogs, too. They never planned on having the dozens of adult dogs they now keep, but they happened to get in on the Puggle craze of the early 2000s in America, and in their first year with just three females, they sold $10,000 worth of Puggle puppies alone. They eventually invested about $180,000 to build kennels that meet state and federal requirements, and their farm grew to become one among about 2,600 commercial puppy operations in the central United States large enough to require licensing by the federal government. As of 2012, Dave says, they were putting about $690 worth of supplies, salaries, veterinary care, and other needs into every puppy they eventually sold. They grossed $140,000 that year and kept $60,000 as net income, give or take—still a heck of a lot more than most dairy farmers bring home in the area, just the same as it was in this part of Missouri back in the 1950s.
The Millers sell puppies to brokers and pet stores as well as directly to consumers online, and while they may get $1,600 apiece for their Newfoundland pups, overall they average about $1,000 per dog. It’s enough, he says, to provide for the family members and employees who help with the feeding and watering of all the dogs each day. “Judy could make more money being a greeter at Walmart,” Dave says. “But you see the people here, our niece, our grandkids, and it sustains our family.”
It also keeps the lights and heat on inside of the sixteen-by-eighty-foot mobile home where he lives on the farm with Judy and their grandchildren. The dimensions are noteworthy because anyone who walks around the Monark property will immediately notice that some of the dogs enjoy living spaces larger than the humans do. The Millers have open-top fenced enclosures with grass and gravel bottoms that are about thirty feet wide and eighty to a hundred feet long, big enough for even the largest Newfoundlands to work up a jaunt and play. Two to five dogs live in each pen, depending on the dogs’ size, and the spaces are as clean as any back yard where pooches hang out at private homes. For shelter, the Millers provide dog houses with cedar-chip beds along with insulated water stations to prevent freezing—an important investment given that on this particular day, while afternoon temperatures were balmy, the wind chill at night would go down to twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Newborn puppies are not expected to stay outside in that weather; they are kept with their mothers in mostly enclosed buildings with roofs and heated beds that provide a fifty- or sixty-degree environment even if the temperature drops to zero degrees outdoors.
“I would defy anyone to raise a puppy in their home that’s as well cared for as our puppies,” Dave says, reaching out and rubbing behind a few ears as any dog lover might. The dogs in all the pens get excited when he, or anyone else, comes around. They jump and are sweet, wanting attention and offering kisses—big, wet, drool-laced slobbery ones, in the case of the Newfies who rest their front paws atop the gates and wag their tails like friendly neighbors. Dave says the dogs’ enthusiasm for human contact is a sign of proper socialization, something he works hard to achieve with every dog on his farm.
Dave and Judy also make a point of telling buyers they do not breed their dogs until they’re at least a year or two old. After that, they breed them about every six months, and most of their females give birth to five or six litters while living on the Monark land. After that, Judy takes the lead in finding each dog a home, being sure to explain the dog’s life to date so there are no problems with adjustments into a more family-oriented, and often more rambunctious, lifestyle where the dog is allowed to live indoors with people. Judy says her efforts to place the dogs in homes while they’re still relatively young is yet another thing that sets Monark apart from the region’s less responsible commercial breeders, who breed the dogs into old age and then kill them, claiming it’s the only humane thing to do because, at that point, the dogs can’t adjust to another lifestyle. It happens more often than she’d like to see in this part of Missouri, a state that, according to one recent report, is home to 20 percent of the worst puppy mills in America, places where breeders have been caught with everything from dogs in cages so small they can’t stand up to a frozen four-week-old Shih Tzu left outside in minus-nine-degree-Fahrenheit weather.
Nothing like that is being alleged at the Millers’ farm, where government inspectors are a regular presence and every puppy is born of dogs registered with the AKC or APRI. Dave says the AKC’s representatives, too, have been to his farm to do DNA testing and verify each pup’s parents. He values that level of quality control, as well as the level of buyers the AKC sends his way. “We get a lot of our leads from the AKC classifieds,” he says, adding that those particular buyers don’t try to chip away at his asking prices the way others sometimes do. “They are high-quality buyers.”
To the people who accuse him of raising dogs like livestock, always outside in enclosures like pigs, Miller does concede that there is a similarity, but probably not the one animal welfare advocates want to hear: “It’s no different than cattle,” he says. “If you don’t take care of them, they won’t produce.” Locals say the Monark setup rates an eight or nine on a scale of one to ten, as commercial breeding operations go, and the Facebook endorsements the Millers receive from buyers are endlessly glowing. Calling their farm a puppy mill does more than hurt the Millers’ feelings; it makes them angry, given how differently they operate from people who, at least back in the old days around here, raised puppies inside chicken coops and old dishwashers.
In fact, they say, it’s insanity to equate every pet store dog with a puppy mill dog, as so many advertising campaigns do. Their dogs are sold in pet stores, they say, and their puppies as well as their adult dogs are cared for and treated with respect. As breeders, they are licensed and inspected at the federal, state, and local levels. The transport companies that take their puppies to the pet stores are licensed and inspected, too. Then the pet stores at the end of the line are licensed and inspected. There is oversight at every step along the way to ensure the dogs’ heal
th and safety—a far different scenario than when any buyer enters into a one-on-one contract to buy a puppy from a small-scale hobby or back yard breeder, or, for that matter, many nonprofit dog rescue groups.
And despite the accusations levied against him because of the number of pups he produces, Dave says, even if the whole purebred dog market came crashing down, his dogs would still enjoy comfortable lives as long as he had the ability to take a breath or walk a step.
“If we had a complete sellout tomorrow and if I were so broke that I couldn’t buy dog food, we’d find a way to keep the ones who needed taking care of,” he said, raising his eyebrows and looking over his shoulder to see if his wife happened to be watching him through the house windows. “Judy wouldn’t stand for her dogs being mistreated.”
Are Dave and Judy Miller running a puppy mill? Is Dave right to wave his finger with disdain when people put that label on him? Is it right to call a commercial kennel like the Millers’ a puppy mill if the dogs never live inside a home, snuggle with a human on a sofa, or walk on a leash in a park, but otherwise are kept in conditions that meet all local, state, and federal regulations, receive veterinary care, and by all assessments seem happy and friendly and clean, and then produce puppies for many satisfied customers?
Is the way the Millers breed dogs on a commercial scale different enough to put them into a category other than the one that describes, say, someone like breeder Joy Wise? In July 2014, animal control officers near Cumming, Georgia, did a compliance check at Heavenly Kennels, where Wise claimed thirty-five years of experience and offered Chihuahuas, Miniature Schnauzers, Yorkshire Terriers, and other puppies for sale at online prices from $350 to $750. According to USA Today and the Marietta Daily Journal, Wise had been cited two months earlier—for 264 animal cruelty offenses, 264 animal neglect offenses, and failure to obtain a business license—and had been given a chance to clean up her property and correct the dogs’ living conditions. Instead, officers said, things had worsened by the time they returned and even more dogs had been brought in. They found pooches living in their own feces and in overcrowded cages. Some were trying to sleep atop their food bowls, which were more comfortable than the open wire floors. “More than 350 Dogs Seized from Suspected Puppy Mill,” read the USA Today headline. One dog gave birth to five puppies just a few hours after being seized. Many more were pregnant, and four dogs had puppies recently born.
What about the breeder Margaret Elaine Komorny? Is she the same as, or different than, Dave and Judy Miller? The same month when authorities took Wise’s dogs, the seventy-seven-year-old Komorny was sentenced in Livingston County, Michigan, on animal cruelty charges, with local media calling her a puppy mill operator, too. According to the Battle Creek Enquirer and the Livingston County Daily Press and Argus, Komorny had been keeping ninety-one dogs at her Raisin Tree Farms kennel, where she claimed twenty-five years of experience and specialized in the sale of Whoodles (a combination of Wheaten Terriers and Poodles). Two of her dogs had to be euthanized for medical reasons after they were found living among dozens in overcrowded, feces-covered, urine-soaked cages with no food or water. Dogs had ear infections, burst eardrums, tumors, various worms in their stool, rotted teeth, and feces so matted in their fur that they scalded the males’ testicles.
Or how about fifty-six-year-old Rebecca Van Meter? How does she compare with Dave and Judy Miller? The same month Wise and Komorny were brought before the law, according to WRCB News and the Chattanooga Times Free Press, police visited Van Meter’s property in McDonald, Tennessee, an unincorporated area outside of Chattanooga. Officials had received an emergency call about the conditions dogs were enduring there—an accusation that was a far cry from what puppy buyers saw at Van Meter’s website, Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagles and Bears, where the business name was above photos of smiling kids with puppies and the message “placing therapy puppies with special needs children and adults.” Sheriff’s officials and workers from the local SPCA found 247 dogs in stacked kennels and pens covered in feces, urine, and standing water. Some of the dogs had mange and staph infections. A number would need several months’ worth of veterinary care. “This situation helps bring focus to the need for stronger legislation,” Charles Brown, the director of a local agency, told the Times Free Press, “because anybody can just set up a puppy mill.”
All dog lovers have come to know the terms “puppy mill” and “puppy farm” in recent years. They appear on the news and in fundraising letters from animal welfare groups showing horrific photographs and asking for donations to shut down the big-scale breeders who treat dogs badly. The substandard kennels mentioned here are far more than an American phenomenon; US border patrols regularly turn up puppies being smuggled into California from puppy mills in Mexico. Ireland’s reputation as the puppy farm capital of Europe became so widespread that laws were enacted in 2012 to crack down. Recent reports show that Hungary and Slovakia are now among the Eastern European nations entering the trade. In Japan—where the culture stresses conformity and fads grow fast—puppy mills spring up to cash in on hot breeds such as the Siberian Husky, whose sales skyrocketed from a few hundred to sixty thousand in a single year after the breed was featured in a television show.
But what, exactly, is a puppy mill? There is no legal definition, even according to leading animal welfare groups. If a puppy mill is defined as a large breeding operation, then legally operating people like the Millers are looped in with all the rest. If a puppy mill is defined as a place where dogs are kept in squalor, then it must include some one-dog back yard breeders along with the multinational smugglers, which means kennel size is irrelevant. Perhaps the best anyone can do is to say a puppy mill is a commercial breeding operation that puts profits above the well-being of dogs, but given that definition, some show dog breeders qualify, too. After all, those who continue to produce breeds like Pugs with ultra-flat noses and the resulting constant breathing problems, and to sell those puppies for thousands of dollars apiece, are arguably putting profits above the pooches’ well-being. What about Colleen Nicholson, the show-quality Doberman hobby breeder? She crops the ears of her puppies, a practice that is legal and sought after by puppy buyers in America but that is banned as animal cruelty in many other parts of the world. Is she putting profits above the well-being of dogs with every $3,500 pup who goes out the door?
Even the so-called dog experts are vague in their definition. Remember the announcement made over the loudspeakers, but not for television viewers, at the 2014 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show? The one saying with great pride that none of the dogs in the ring that week were from a puppy mill? The distinguishing factor was nothing quantifiable, and in fact nothing more than what people felt in their hearts: that they were breeders who cared. That’s what the announcer said. It’s the same argument used by Dave and Judy Miller, and by Colleen Nicholson, and probably by many people arrested on animal cruelty charges, too. Puppy mills, at the end of the day, are kind of like pornography in modern society: everybody thinks they know it when they see it, and buyers are instinctively opposed to it, but beyond that, the lines are blurred, and dog lovers keep buying the product the worst offenders are producing. If that weren’t true, then puppy mills and pornographers would have all gone out of business many, many years ago.
Even breeders themselves can’t agree on how to come at the issue of the largest-scale breeders, and they can be more vicious than any trained fighting dog if someone from their own team drifts too far toward the animal welfare side in the debate. A thirty-year veteran of Collie breeding named Ted Paul learned this the hard way in 2009, when lawmakers in his home state of Oregon introduced a bill that would limit the number of dogs a breeder could own. The number they settled on was fifty. They decided to choose a number, and for better or worse, they landed at fifty-one or more dogs constituting a puppy mill.
If some everyday dog lovers feel like that’s a generous place to draw the line, Paul agrees. “It seems like an awful lot of dogs to me, too,” he sa
ys today. “It was looked at as, people who have already gotten themselves into conditional problems where they have too many dogs, they can cut back and still have a career in dogs.”
At the time the legislation was introduced, Paul testified in favor of it at the state Capitol building in Salem. He first listed his credentials: AKC dog show judge, breeder of champion Collies, past president of the Collie Club of America, past president of the Purebred Dog Breeders and Fanciers Association, and past president of the Cleveland Collie Club. His reputation could not have been more impeccable as a member of the breeding community, which is why he was listened to so carefully as he told the lawmakers he thought the law was an excellent idea. “My concern with the people who operate puppy mills is that they are callous, ruthless animal abusers who will breed any two animals they think will sell,” he later told the HSUS, expounding on his testimony for the general public. “They are in it only for the money, and in their greed they treat animals as a cash crop deserving of no favors, just torture.”
His language was harsh, and the backlash was both swift and personal. Traitor was one of the, well, kinder words some breeders seethed in Paul’s direction. They accused him of being two-faced, of calling himself a proper member of the fancier community while aligning himself with what they deem the aggressive animal rights agenda at the HSUS. The Dog Press, which covers dog fanciers, ran the all-caps, we’re-declaring-war-style headline “DOG SHOW JUDGE OWES APOLOGY.” Bloggers called on the AKC to suspend Paul’s privileges for conduct detrimental to the sport. Breeders shouted for more enforcement of animal cruelty laws instead of new laws that paint all large-scale puppy sellers with the same dark, tainted brush. Paul stopped receiving invitations to judge at dog shows. Some breeders urged past show winners to return the ribbons he had awarded them, shipping them back in disgust. One can only imagine the packaging they had in mind to leave on his doorstep.