The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  The puppies Hunte accepts are microchipped and preenrolled in the AKC’s Reunite program, which is designed to help owners find dogs who go missing—and which is another moneymaker for the kennel club, in addition to the purebred registration fee, if the puppy’s final owner continues the Reunite membership into consecutive years. Then all of the pups spend six days inside the thirteen kennel rooms getting baths, nails clipped, ears cleaned, surgery for things like hernias or undescended testicles, and watched for signs of behavioral issues. Occasionally, if another operation is already being performed, the puppy will also be spayed or neutered.

  As standard procedure, every puppy receives a battery of preventive medications intended to wipe out anything harmful already in his system, and to ward off anything new from taking root. These include a vaccine against distemper, adenovirus, parainfluenza, and canine parvovirus. Hunte dogs also receive pyrantel pamoate for intestinal helminthes (worm-like organisms), fenbendazole for prevention of giardia (intestinal parasites), sulfadimethoxine for prevention of coccidia (also intestinal parasites), and treatment for prevention of external parasites, such as fleas. Every puppy’s drinking water is infused with Pet Aid, a supplement used to reduce gastrointestinal stress and help maintain appetite, and puppies weighing less than two and a half pounds, or who are generally thin, also receive a Nutra-Gel supplement to prevent hypoglycemia. If a puppy needs more than the regular protocol, veterinarians prescribe medication on a dog-by-dog basis.

  Inside each of the kennel rooms, the dogs certainly look clean and healthy, and their barking echoes loudly enough to drown out most conversation. The slamming of the metal enclosure doors to lock them is sometimes jarring, at least to the human ear, but more than a few puppies have no problem sleeping through the noise. The air smells much like wet dogs after playtime in a river but otherwise has no stench, a testament to the climate control and ventilation systems that make working inside the kennels surprisingly easy on people’s noses. It’s true that the puppies in Hunte’s care have nowhere soft to lay their heads inside the enclosures with metal-grate floors, nor any toys to play with or chew because they could spread bacteria—a lack of stimulation that probably frustrates the ones who are teething. It’s also true, Stolkey says, that the pups spend virtually the entire six days inside the enclosures, twenty-four hours a day.

  On the other hand, the system doesn’t seem to affect most of the pups in any immediately evident way, as was clear on this Thursday, two days after intake, when most of the puppies seemed generally unstressed, with only a handful out of hundreds shaking or cowering. At least half of them kept right on snoozing even when people walked through, and others jumped and pawed at the enclosure doors, barking and whining for attention. The kennels at Hunte are not representative of how most dog lovers treat young puppies, but they are highly reminiscent of the kennels in many veterinarians’ offices and publicly funded shelters—and Hunte’s are brighter, cleaner, and less crowded than some shelter kennels, for sure.

  When a Hunte worker notices something that affects a puppy’s health, as was the case with a Yorkshire Terrier puppy walking in endless circles on this particular day, the dog gets extra care to try to correct the problem, including sometimes being placed in larger, mobile enclosures on the floor with more space to move around. Hunte also has what Stolkey calls a “sick puppy room” with about forty enclosures where puppies who show problems after intake are sent for upgraded care with equipment, including nebulizers. A separate, similarly sized room with its own ventilation system is used for puppies who get sick during transport to pet stores and are returned. Five veterinarians and eight veterinary technicians are among the staff of one hundred and seventy-five, along with additional support staff members who do everything from cleaning the enclosures to taking each puppy’s photograph for upload so pet stores can place orders online.

  Virtually all of the workers have smiles on their faces and seem both happy and proud of their workplace, and they are under constant watch, with even the surgical suite’s three V-shaped steel tables being wide open for viewing at all times through glass windows across from the kennels in the long white hallway. While Hunte may seem secretive to the public, inside the building, it would be hard for any worker to do anything harmful to a dog without a witness, at least in the kennel area.

  In the far back of the building that most people never visit, where some companies might cut corners on construction or cleanliness, the Hunte operation looks virtually identical to the clean, well-lighted area the public sees right inside the front entrance. It’s in the back where the USDA-regulated trucks are loaded, each with a version of Hunte’s ventilation, climate control, and kenneling systems to keep the puppies as healthy and clean as possible while en route to pet store displays. The trucks are loaded inside a cavernous, multistory, weather-protected garage that opens onto a big private parking lot, spaces that, even when mostly empty, hint at the high volume of business Hunte’s infrastructure can accommodate. Parts of the facility reportedly were expanded with two USDA loans totaling close to $4 million, both issued in the early 2000s before the global recession, and both of which Hunte officials say the company was paying back ahead of schedule before the economy crashed.

  Most of the trucks are bound for pet stores, Stolkey says, adding that the company also will ship puppies by air if there is consumer demand. The trucks, including the cabs, cost as much as $350,000 apiece to outfit, he says, and Hunte has about ten of the biggest trucks, which, with the exception of the Thermo King climate systems, look just like rigs hauling produce, furniture, and other goods all along America’s interstates. Most everyday drivers of sedans on the same roadways would have no idea puppies were even inside, given the bland white exterior panels that are noticeably free of the company’s logo, to avoid attracting attention.

  Each truck is handled by two drivers who take turns sleeping in bunks up in the cab. They’re trained as what the company calls “care technicians,” able to administer some medications and look for signs of common stress-induced problems or illnesses that can arise during the two- to three-day transfer process to pet stores. Each truck is equipped with a GPS system that, Stolkey says, ensures the trucks stop every four hours so the drivers can check the dogs’ condition, food, and water, and clean the kennels. The air refreshes throughout the truck completely every three minutes, he adds. LED lighting remains on inside the trucks at all times so the puppies can see, making it less likely they will become disoriented and further stressed.

  Stress, after all, often leads to sickness, and Hunte claims that pretty much everything it does is based on maintaining the puppies’ health. The motive is of course not entirely altruistic; a solid cash flow would prod even the worst company to treat the dogs decently. Sick puppies at the end of the line don’t sell, and puppies who don’t sell are just plain bad for business.

  Headlines about puppies being burned alive are also bad for business, which is why each truck in the Hunte fleet has a fire suppression system, a safeguard installed after sixty puppies headed for pet stores died in a 2006 truck fire in Lowell, Massachusetts. There hasn’t been a similar accident since, but that fire remains one of the four main things for which Hunte is regularly criticized. The second is its supply chain, which includes a lot of large-scale breeding farms that animal welfare activists call puppy mills, portraying Hunte as the savvy, virtually invisible middleman that floods pet stores across America with puppy mill dogs, hiding the nature of their origin from puppy-loving consumers.

  The third criticism is one of the major headline makers, often written as “trenches full of dead dogs.” It stems from a violation notice from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which received an anonymous complaint on November 5, 2003, from what Hunte calls a disgruntled employee, about the company’s disposal methods. The actual complaint describes “mass puppy graves,” but the letter that state inspectors sent the company uses the more-often-repeated language, saying the trenches where Hunte was
burying dead dogs were correctly built but improperly spaced, and that a broken sewer line was discharging wastewater into a tributary of a local creek in violation of the state’s Clean Water Law. The notice also stated that Hunte was burying more than one thousand pounds of dead animals each year, surpassing the local limit, a claim Hunte says was inaccurate. The company has since taken the state’s suggestion to move to an incineration method of disposal, which, as the state wrote in its 2003 letter, is more environmentally friendly, less labor intensive, and more apt to create a better public image.

  “Anybody in agriculture knows where there’s life, there’s death,” Stolkey says by way of explanation. “Where there’s health, there’s sickness.” The company does not reveal the percentage of puppies who die in its care, but common sense indicates that if the percentage were large, then Hunte would have been out of business long ago. Working backward from numbers that are available, Hunte is moving about forty-five thousand puppies a year at an average weight of six and a half pounds per puppy. That’s a total of 292,500 pounds’ worth of dogs. One thousand pounds, the state limit for burial, would equal less than 0.5 percent of the dogs. Even if the percentage is ten times as high, the company would still most likely qualify as a no-kill facility, which means saving at least 90 percent of the dogs from severe illness and other problems, according to guidelines followed by more than five hundred communities with animal shelters designated as no-kill across the United States.

  Sick puppies are a reality of life, and they sometimes become part of the sales process despite the company’s systems and procedures. As the existence of Hunte’s own return room evidences, not all of the puppies make it into pet stores in good health. Hunte’s team says respiratory problems are its biggest challenge, what with most of the puppies being away from their mothers for the first time and becoming stressed with snotty noses or coughs, not unlike children going to school at the youngest standard ages. Hunte deals with a lot of the same issues large-scale shelters encounter, and because its dogs are ultimately sold in pet stores at high prices, consumers tend to get even angrier at the sellers than, say, buyers at shelters when sick puppies make their way into homes.

  Hunte at one point had an F rating with the Better Business Bureau, which received four complaints about the company during a three-year period and another 657 complaints against Petland stores, which are one of the primary destinations for Hunte-distributed puppies. While Hunte officials say they no longer distribute dogs internationally, Ohio-based Petland has stores in Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa. The two firms are entwined in multiple ways, with Hunte’s founder also owning at least one Petland store. Thus, when oversight agencies and animal welfare activists talk about Hunte, they also talk about Petland, because that’s the brand in the supply chain that puppy buyers will recognize. Most people who buy a pet store puppy who gets sick wouldn’t think to file a complaint against anybody but the pet store owner, even if the dog was actually in Hunte’s care far longer than in Petland’s.

  As evidence of sick puppies in the Hunte-Petland system, a 2010 Better Business Bureau report cited lawsuits by former owners of three Petland stores in Tennessee, Indiana, and Ohio who said they received sick puppies from Hunte. One said more than half of the sixty to sixty-five puppies he received were sick, another said several puppies he received from Hunte died of parvovirus within weeks, and a third said he had to spend some $40,000 in veterinary bills caring for Hunte puppies. In 2009, those claims were included as part of a class-action lawsuit filed against both Petland and Hunte by the HSUS, which argued racketeering and cited additional complaints about sick puppies from thirty-one people who bought dogs at the end of the retail line. A judge dismissed Hunte from the proceedings in 2010 without any findings of guilt, and ultimately all the racketeering charges against both Hunte and Petland were dismissed.

  Ryan Boyle, Hunte’s vice president of sales and operations, doesn’t deny that sometimes puppies get sick. He says the company faces “buy day” problems similar to those encountered by shelters and rescue groups, which cannot always verify a puppy’s health care prior to entering any facility. “We have the same struggle here, to make sure the puppies got their vaccines,” he says. “We ask for the labels but we don’t have a video of the breeder administering it.”

  Dr. Bill Oxford, a veterinarian at Hunte, says the company’s “buy day” check, six-day holding period, exit-day check, and additional check by the pet store’s veterinarian upon arrival two or three days after leaving Hunte’s kennels constitute a process that exposes most immediate health problems. Boyle admits that the only thing any company—or rescue group, for that matter—can truly guarantee when it comes to puppies is a sound system of checks and balances, which Hunte believes it does well. “The six days is incredibly important from the breeder to the pet store,” Boyle says. “The best-regulated path to market is through this facility. I don’t think anybody can doubt it.”

  Nor, to Stolkey’s thinking, can the other half dozen or so puppy distributors in the United States make the same claims. “Go up the road to our competitor,” he says, almost as if making a dare. “See if they’ll let you go in.”

  Temporary respiratory illnesses, parvovirus, and the like are different from lifelong genetic health problems, which are another often-criticized aspect of purebred breeding in particular. Hunte does offer a multiyear refund guarantee against genetic health problems on every puppy it sells, a guarantee it is able to make in large part because of a proprietary software system that flags problems throughout the Midwest breeding community.

  “We probably have the largest genetic database in the world,” Stolkey says, based on the number of dogs Hunte has processed in its nearly quarter century of doing business. It’s not an unlikely boast; even with today’s business being half the size of what Hunte once enjoyed, it’s a reasonable guess that well more than a million puppies have come through the Hunte buy room and kennels. The AKC claims to have the world’s largest database of canine DNA, but Hunte may indeed have the largest database of troublesome breeders. “We have eyes on the ground,” Stolkey adds. “My agents will come back with photos of USDA-licensed kennels, and we’ll say, ‘Okay, we have to get to work here.’”

  In fact, the desire to eliminate sick puppies is the entire basis on which the Hunte Corporation was founded. As hard as it may be for some animal welfare advocates to believe, Andrew Hunte started his business for the same reason many of them got into the cause of rescue: to get more healthy puppies out of the system and into people’s homes.

  Andrew Hunte, a native of Barbados, got started in the pet store business in Florida. He knew little about the farms where so many puppies are born, but he quickly grew upset about regularly receiving shipments of sick puppies from breeders in the Midwest. He became more and more frustrated as it happened time and time again, until one day, in the 1980s, he decided to drive out from the Sunshine State to look around the places where the puppies were originating. It was the age of Ronald Reagan, the time of a boom economy in which farmers could make a lot of cash breeding puppies as cheaply as possible. Hunte poked around the Midwest and realized that what was happening with the dogs was, to his eye, disturbing.

  “He thought, ‘No wonder I’m getting sick puppies,’” says Greg Brown, Hunte’s marketing director. “People raised their dogs like livestock. There was no manual.”

  Hunte set out to put himself between the breeders and the pet stores, to institute quality control that he felt needed to exist not only for the breeding and pet store businesses to thrive, but also for the health and proper care of the dogs. The list of industry firsts Hunte now claims is long—and shows how few standards of care existed among breeders and pet stores just thirty years ago. Hunte says it was the first company to move animals in specially built vehicles, to develop an air purification system for kennels, to forgo housing more than two puppies in each enclosure, to segregate puppies from different breeders to prevent cross-contagion
, to hold hobby breeders to USDA-compliant standards, to develop products like the nutritional supplement Puppy-Aid and the nonalcohol (and used everywhere throughout the facility) Hunte Hand Sanitizer, and to encourage the USDA to amend its regulations and ensure puppies younger than eight weeks are never bought or sold.

  That last advancement is especially significant, because in challenging USDA standards as not good enough, Andrew Hunte placed himself right alongside many of today’s animal welfare advocates, who say that even modern-day regulations fail to ensure a reasonable quality of life for breeding dogs and their puppies on the farms.

  Hunte also instituted an annual Breeder Educational Conference, which has been held every year since 1999. It’s a two-day event featuring speakers and exhibits along with tours of the Hunte Corporation, to show everyday breeders how Hunte believes things should be done (and what products are for sale to help do it, at conference-special prices). The conference is akin to secondary education for breeders aiming to be professional when dealing in dogs, much like conferences organized by Best Friends Animal Society for rescuers trying to set higher standards in that segment of the dog business. In 2013, the Hunte event speakers included a researcher discussing the positive effects of early neurological stimulation, an Oklahoma State University representative talking about biosecurity, and USDA representatives hosting a town hall discussion about regulations. In 2014, the lineup featured a University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine expert on whelping, an AKC representative talking about health tests, and a USDA regional director explaining laws about Internet puppy sales and foreign imports.