by Kim Kavin
“I think it was general politics that made it so harsh,” Paul says now, with the benefit of hindsight. He still stands by his testimony five years later, and he still believes that limiting the legal number of dogs a breeder can own is the only solution, but he laments the fact that various types of dog breeders and animal welfare advocates have become so polarized that they can barely have a conversation about the puppy mill issue, let alone resolve the problem. It’s almost like working with far-right conservative and far-left liberal politicians: never, no matter what, even if the entire dog industry implodes as a result, shall they ever give an inch or find common ground between them.
“You’ve got to find the people that are honest, willing to do whatever is necessary to make things work,” Paul says today, “and boy, those are few and far between.”
Elizabeth Brinkley is an example of a breeder Paul might describe—and who would describe herself, too—as having zero interest in compromise. The sixty-one-year-old owner of Dante Kennels near Richmond, Virginia, has been breeding Shetland Sheepdogs since 1974 and has spent the past fifteen years also working as a legislative liaison, going into the behind-the-scenes meetings where dog-breeding laws are written in multiple US states—and trying to put a stop to agendas like the one Paul endorsed.
Brinkley is not a large-scale commercial breeder herself; she is an AKC Breeder of Merit (self-described as “never inspected”) who owns nine dogs and turns out one, maybe two litters each year, selling the puppies for $600 apiece. Her dogs have been champions in America and in Britain, and she is proud to have “best in show” from multiple events on her résumé. Her dogs rotate turns living inside her home and in a converted eight-by-ten-foot tool shed with access to two outdoor runs, each twenty-five feet wide and the longer one about a hundred feet long. She’d let all the dogs live inside at once if she could, but, she says, her landlord won’t allow it.
Many people would say that, as breeding operations go, Brinkley’s setup in Virginia is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Dave and Judy Miller’s farm in Missouri, with Brinkley’s being far more like a small-scale enterprise than a large-scale one—but she stands firmly on the side of commercial breeders like the Millers, for what she sees as the good of the entire puppy-producing industry.
“First of all, the animal rights movement invented the words ‘puppy mill.’ It didn’t exist thirty years ago,” she says. “I’ve been in kennels with a hundred dogs and they’re fantastic, and I’ve been in hobby breeder kennels that I wouldn’t let my dogs near. It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the care.”
The problem, as Brinkley sees things, is that lawmakers are so busy trying to come up with new laws that they’re failing to provide funding and staffing to enforce the animal cruelty laws already on the books. Officials may have good intentions when they enact everything from limits on the number of breeding dogs to outright bans of dogs in pet stores because of alleged ties to puppy mills (now the case in some three dozen North American cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, and Chicago), but those tactics won’t solve the problems that exist. What lawmakers should be focusing on, she says, is not the number of dogs, but instead the number of staff members—both in their own policing agencies and at kennels of all sizes. Her argument is that having three hundred dogs on a property is no problem if, say, you have a big tract of land and twenty employees to handle the dogs’ daily needs. That’s fifteen dogs per person, close to the same workload many small-scale breeders have at their homes, where nobody questions the dogs’ care at all.
Brinkley bristles at what she calls “hobby breeders and snobby breeders” who raise their noses in disdain when discussing their large-scale commercial brethren or applaud anti–puppy mill announcements at shows like Westminster. The simple fact, she says, is that without the commercial breeders, there wouldn’t be enough of the popular purebred and cross-bred puppies, like the Maltipoo, to satisfy consumer demand. Large-scale breeders are a necessary part of the industry’s continued existence, she says, because of the sheer quantity of puppies the world’s dog lovers seek to buy. And in having that opinion, Brinkley is in total agreement with the rescuer who went to the Southwest Auction Service dog sale and said Westminster is the dream, but the reality is filling consumer demand through setups like Dave and Judy Miller’s farm. Big demand, quite simply, requires big supply.
She also believes that any incursion into the rights of the largest commercial breeders is, by definition, an attack on the business of all breeders. People who treat dogs badly, Brinkley argues, are going to treat dogs badly no matter what laws are passed. They may have one dog, or they may have a thousand. Either way, nobody can legislate morality. Laws affect only those breeders who follow them, and that rarely means people who keep dogs in squalor—but it always means people like Dave and Judy Miller, her own Dante Kennels, and the world’s most responsible show dog producers.
“I don’t want these puppy mills or substandard kennels or whatever you want to call them staying in business, but I also don’t want laws passed that are going to put me out of business,” she says. “A lot of the big muckety-muck AKC breeders want to pretend it’s going to go away, that it doesn’t affect them. It may take a really well-known breeder getting busted for the light bulb to go off over some of these people’s heads.”
She adds, “Those attacks are not just against the big breeders. They’re attacks on all of us. If our enemies succeed in taking out the big breeders, do you think they’re going to stop? We’re next, all because we won’t stand up for one another. We need to stop pointing our fingers at people and start dealing with the dogs.”
And actually, some officials outside the United States are approaching the so-called puppy-farm problem with thinking along the lines of Brinkley’s: it’s not about the number of dogs, but instead about the health of the puppies. While US lawmakers are debating how many dogs are too many for a breeder to own and shutting down pet store sales from coast to coast, other nations are focusing instead on the quality of puppies to reveal bad breeding practices. Since 2012 in Ireland, for instance, all puppies have been required to be microchipped so that unhealthy litters can be traced back to the source. Some parts of Australia require the same, as does Denmark and the island nation of Cyprus. England will require all dog owners to implant microchips by 2016. Dogs entering Japan from other nations are already required to be microchipped, and dogs entering European Union nations from foreign countries need either a microchip or a tattoo of identification.
Can microchip registry information be faked? Sure—all it takes is a breeder providing a false telephone number to the microchip company from the start, and the breeder will never be found. It’s another example of how unscrupulous people will find a way to do bad things, which is one reason the approach hasn’t taken hold in America. Legislative attempts to pass mandatory microchip laws have failed in large US states including California and New York, at least in part because of organized opposition from the AKC. As with breeders like Brinkley and the Millers, the AKC takes the position that responsible breeders and dog owners shouldn’t have to face undue government requirements, and the AKC includes mandatory microchipping in that category.
That’s not to say that breeders like Miller and Brinkley are against government intervention altogether. They want the lousy kennels that cast a negative light on their own operations to be inspected and shut down just as much as all dog lovers do. And to be brutally honest, as far as animal cruelty goes, Brinkley thinks some top show dog breeders are just as guilty as some so-called puppy mill owners. They’ll alter dogs—including cutting them so their ears and tails will stand just so—for no reason other than to earn a nod of approval from a judge, and sometimes in ways that are deemed animal cruelty in other parts of the world. “They think they’re better than the puppy mills, but some of them get just as greedy as the puppy mills do,” she says. “It’s not about the breed. It’s about winning. That twenty-five-cent ribbon means more to them
than the dog. It’s pure, plain, and simple about ego. To me, that’s just as much animal abuse as a substandard kennel.”
At the end of the day, the whole of the puppy mill language overtaking the breeding community has made Brinkley not only defensive, but also what she describes as defiant about telling people she’s a breeder. When she utters the B-word, they gasp at her as if she’s a criminal. Their eyes go dead cold because, she says, animal rights activists are convincing the general public “that every dog should be raised as a puffy pink poodle on a pink pillow.” That’s just not the reality—and it hasn’t been for quite some time now, even though each generation likes to think of itself as smarter than its parents or grandparents when it comes to buying dogs. There have always been small-scale, top-dollar breeders, but the vast majority of people buying purebreds have long shopped from the commercial-scale producers, whether they bought from them directly or through newspaper classified ads or in places like pet stores or, most recently, by way of the Internet.
“It’s a case of, do you want to shop at Macy’s or do you want to shop at Walmart?” Brinkley asks. “Because the stuff at Walmart is not as well made, do we take away your option to shop there? The American public should have the right to choose.”
As things stand today, that right to choose is intact around the world, and it’s currently being defended, perhaps most vociferously, by a single company processing tens of thousands of puppies a year—as fate would have it, about a half-hour’s drive up the road from Walmart corporate headquarters.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MEGA-DISTRIBUTOR
“We are currently not planning on conquering the world.”
—Sergey Brin
Michael Stolkey takes a measured breath before holding open the heavy, thick door that precious few outsiders ever get to walk through. “This is why people hate us,” he says, taking a few strides into the hallway on the other side. “The kennels.”
Stolkey is director of corporate sales for the Hunte Corporation, a privately owned business in Goodman, Missouri, that is at best wary, and at worst paranoid, about letting newcomers inside. The company, which opened in 1991, is likely the biggest legal distributor of puppies to pet stores across America, and it has long operated with great secrecy, hunkering down against the cries of animal welfare activists and allowing only carefully prescreened visitors to pass beyond this threshold. The business of readying puppies for transport to stores is conducted here in a well-honed, legally regulated, and systematic way, and the company’s sheer size, along with its supply chain of commercial and other breeders, are the stuff of great speculation and contempt. No conveyor belts or robot arms are at work, but even Henry Ford would be impressed with the assembly line nature of operations. It’s one of the things that make Hunte a big, easy-to-loathe target. Animal welfare activists have, among other things, followed the company’s trucks into the field and locked their drivers inside with the puppies, likely screaming from the asphalt about how the humans deserve to be trapped inside a cage alongside the dogs they’re selling in mass production style.
Nobody was locking anybody inside the door to the kennels on this day in late August 2014, when routine operations were busy, but not hectic, thanks to the seasonal lull in puppy sales. The doorway opened into a brightly lit, white hallway so long that it seemed almost to disappear into the distance of the $10 million, at least 200,000-square-foot facility, in much the same way hallways in large, sterile hospitals vanish into a labyrinth of the unknown. Workers wearing different-colored scrubs to indicate their job titles—veterinarian, technician, assistant—walked calmly to and fro, some with empty hands and others carrying one puppy at a time, petting them and cradling them as any dog lover might. A Siberian Husky pup, a baby Boxer, and a Shar-Pei with hair still growing into his face folds were among those being ferried back and forth to the photography room, the grooming room, and the surgery suite, giving the place an atmosphere similar to a large nursery filled with cuteness and coos.
One or two people have managed to sneak undercover cameras into the kennel section over the years, and YouTube videos show a bit of what goes on outside the public eye, where thirteen numbered doors line the long corridor’s right side. Inside each one are rows of kennel-style cages like the ones used in veterinarians’ offices and animal shelters. Some are large and some are small, to meet USDA regulations depending on each puppy’s height and weight. Two levels of the enclosures are on either side of every room, with the levels separated by a stainless-steel catch basin that is easy to clean after urine and feces falls through the metal-grate floors. Each room is climate controlled and separately ventilated to prevent the spread of airborne diseases, and each appears to contain about a hundred of the enclosures, which are the holding spaces for the tens of thousands of puppies the company distributes each year.
At the height of operations before the 2007 global recession, the industry giant was buying about ninety thousand puppies a year from breeders and distributing them to Petland and other retail stores not only in America but also in other parts of the world, marketing them in Europe with expectations of global sales and hoping to further increase Hunte’s annual revenues at that time, which were $26 million. Since the economic crash—which shocked the usually recession-proof puppy business by shrinking the supply of puppies coming from US breeders and slashing sales figures at the pet stores—Hunte’s business has been halved and shrunken back to domestic distribution only. Today it moves about forty-five thousand puppies a year, which likely means it is still the biggest distributor in the world’s biggest market for dogs.
The purchasing of the pups happens on Tuesdays, which are known as “buy day” here inside the kennels. Hunte officials say they acquire puppies from USDA-regulated commercial breeders along with hobby breeders all around the middle United States, including not only Missouri and nearby Arkansas, but also Kansas, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, Illinois, and Nebraska. Hunte agents fan out in climate-controlled vehicles outfitted with a scaled-down version of the kennel ventilation and enclosure systems, and they drive hundreds upon hundreds of miles each week, going door to door and offering breeders wholesale prices for their puppies along with the kenneling systems and supplies that are part of Hunte’s vertical business model. The agents are not the final buyers, but are instead the facilitators who keep the product pipeline moving. They are in the field every Friday through Sunday, and they’re back in Goodman with truckloads full of puppies by Monday night, in time for “buy day” procedures that start Tuesday morning, when local dog breeders are invited to join the agents in offering puppies Hunte may want to buy.
Some of the dogs are purebreds with registration papers from the AKC, APRI, or ACA—founder Andrew Hunte once told AKC officials his company is the kennel club’s biggest customer in moving dogs that buyers later register with AKC for a fee—while other puppies who come in on “buy day” are designer cross-breeds, like Goldendoodles, that regularly prove popular with retail consumers as well. The owners of pet stores nationwide send Hunte their wish lists based on local demand, and Hunte tries to fill them through its network of breeders, though it also works with whatever dogs are available during any given week. If, for instance, Weimaraner sales happen to be slow in the pet stores but a respected breeder of Weimaraner puppies shows up with a litter, Hunte will still buy the dogs, to help keep the breeder in business until demand from consumers picks up again.
“We will always take the puppies,” Stolkey says, explaining that good breeders need a consistent buyer for their dogs to make their own business models work. Hunte wants to support the best breeders, he says, because doing so maintains a solid supply of healthy, desirable puppies overall.
The minimum age of puppy Hunte will accept is eight weeks, and no dogs are accepted who weigh less than a pound and a half—because the company has learned that the ultra-small puppies usually lack an immune system developed enough to survive the move through the system into pet stores. T
he company also turns away puppies from USDA-inspected commercial breeders who have received a direct violation, which typically means a problem that affects a dog’s health as opposed to, say, a substandard kennel enclosure. When a direct violation occurs, Hunte doesn’t strike the breeder from its books entirely; the company instead sends its agents into the field, offering supplies and educational materials to help get those breeders back up to snuff, so business can resume in the future. The company is smart about making money at both ends, for sure, which is either an admirable business strategy or a bottom-feeding one, depending on the point of view.
A Hunte veterinarian leads the goings-on every Tuesday inside the buy room, where he stands behind a scale (the average weight of accepted puppies is six and a half pounds) and examines the incoming puppies one by one. The kennels are built to house in the neighborhood of 1,300 dogs during the busy season, which suggests that on some buy days, the pups are receiving a pretty fast pass, maybe just a few minutes each, because of the sheer quantity of evaluations that need to be done. The veterinarian determines whether each incoming puppy is grade A, B, or C based on how closely the puppy reflects breed standards, Stolkey says. (“You don’t want somebody thinking it’s a Westminster winner when it’s not.”) Hunte then offers each breeder a sliding scale of payouts that also are affected by seasonal supply and demand, including Christmastime booms. The dollar figures are kept private, but they are definitely wholesale, far below the retail prices set for the dogs when they get to pet stores.
When the company opened, it turned away about 30 percent of the incoming dogs because they had things like heart murmurs, bad hips, and eye problems, but today, with Hunte’s sheer buying power having set the wholesale market’s standards, less than 10 percent of the puppies coming into the building fail to make the grade. It’s a similar business model to the one used by Tyson Foods, the world’s largest processor of beef, pork, and chicken, with headquarters less than an hour away. Tyson, like Hunte, owns none of the farms where the animals are raised but nevertheless often has a strong say in how they are bred and how much the farmers earn. Animal farmers basically have two options: sell directly to consumers at full retail price, or sell to distributors at wholesale price. Many puppy farmers choose the latter and work with Hunte because they lack the time or skills to do the retail marketing and sales themselves, especially with a newly imposed federal rule designed to prevent US breeders from putting up a website and shipping puppies to buyers sight unseen.