The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Ironically, the program had come to be because Harrison was a purebred dog lover. She had a Flat-Coated Retriever named Freddie who died at the ripe old age of fifteen, in 2003. Somebody told her she was lucky to have had him so long, because on average, that breed dies by age eight or nine of cancer. The comment made her curious. She’d been a print journalist writing about other topics since the 1980s, and her love of dogs and her aching heart from Freddie’s loss got her to clicking around the Internet. “Anybody with a couple of brain cells and Google, well, it’s just so obvious,” she says. “When I started to research other breeds, I just got more and more shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was uncovering, and I couldn’t believe nobody else had done it.”

  The fallout from her documentary was swift and severe. To this day, the airing of Pedigree Dogs Exposed remains the only time since dog shows became popular in the mid-1800s that the public stopped, considered the current reality of the dog industry, and at least temporarily halted the purebred marketing machine. It started with big-name sponsors pulling their money from Crufts. Then floods of letters and criticism battered the Kennel Club, some of whose members received personal, frightening threats. Breeders, long used to being cheered by fans during events like Crufts, instead reported everyday people spitting at them in the street. The BBC, which had broadcast Crufts for forty-two years, shocked the nation by taking it off the air beginning in 2009. It was akin to America’s networks relegating the Westminster show to Internet-only status. In the midst of the outrage, Britain’s most influential television producers simply pulled the plug and said, “We’re not willing to be a part of this anymore.”

  It was not the dog show’s death knell, but it was definitely a hoisting of the bell in the public square. And as any good marketing guru knows, once the message is corrupted to an extent that national media consider it toxic, there has to be a public perception of change for the business to proceed. It’s the same with politicians exposed as having torrid affairs or priests caught fondling children. The institutions behind the people need to at least present an appearance of meaningful contrition and change before the public will return as devoted followers of their message.

  The rehabilitation of Britain’s dog-breeding world thus began in earnest. Various sizes and shapes of bandages were applied in an effort to stop the bleeding of the industry as a whole. The Kennel Club amended its policies to ban the culling of dogs for cosmetic reasons, and it reviewed all its breed standards, ultimately creating quite a few new ones so breeders would no longer be encouraged to aim for features like flat faces, giant skin folds, and bulging eyes that inhibit a dog from breathing, walking, or seeing. (Yes, those things had to be written down as an official standard for some breeders to agree to them.) The Kennel Club also banned the breeding of parent dogs to their puppies, and the breeding of sibling dogs, which, until then, had apparently been common practice to get the look that won judges’ hearts. A national dog advisory council was started, and the Kennel Club created a ₤1.2 million (about $1.9 million) facility to create genetic tests that breeders might someday use to screen out diseases like the one that creates skulls too small for dogs’ brains.

  Not long after, Harrison was back at the BBC putting the finishing touches on Pedigree Dogs Exposed: Three Years On, a sequel that showed how, despite the changes, the overarching problems with health and welfare remained. The program talked about a champion Boxer from a kennel owned by a Crufts judge being used to sire nearly nine hundred puppies—several dozen of whom were believed to have genetically inherited juvenile kidney disease. It showed one whistleblower from the original documentary being booted from her breed club for speaking out about health concerns. It featured a veterinarian saying he believes many dog owners simply don’t realize how much their dogs are suffering to achieve modern looks. It included a member of the RSPCA taking yet another shot at Crufts, saying that tinkering with beauty pageants will never be enough—that the dog shows have to be about health and welfare for the problem to be brought under control.

  “There was a big campaign run to try and stop the sequel, and the BBC did get a little worried,” Harrison says. “The amount of meetings that I had to go to with lawyers and editorial policy for the sequel—every letter of every word in that film was watertight.”

  In the end, the sequel wasn’t nearly as shocking to the public as the original. It confirmed that problems remained, but by that time, the supporters of breeding had figured out how to manage their response more effectively, especially with all their new standards in place. Crufts, having aired only on the Internet in 2009, was picked up by the television channel More4. Millions of viewers returned to watch, even after an Imperial College London study showed the extent of inbreeding in ten breeds—Akita Inu, Boxer, Chow Chow, English Bulldog, English Springer Spaniel, Golden Retriever, Greyhound, German Shepherd, Labrador Retriever, and Rough Collie—had left the dogs at risk of birth defects and genetically inherited health problems, so much so that, in some parts of the world, including Germany, the lack of remaining genetic diversity would qualify them as endangered species.

  By 2012, with the media rehabilitation effort continuing, a new Kennel Club rule was in place requiring dogs in fifteen breeds to undergo health checks after winning best of breed before they would be allowed to compete for best in show—and at that year’s Crufts, only nine of the fifteen winners anointed by the judges passed the veterinary screenings. The so-called best Basset Hound, Bulldog, Clumber Spaniel, Mastiff, Neapolitan Mastiff, and, yes, the Pekingese, less than a decade after Danny’s big win, were shown the door before the main event. While they may have been pretty, veterinarians deemed them unhealthy. And then, to cap off that bad-news year for the breeding community, former Crufts host Ben Fogle (England’s version of Westminster front man David Frei) announced that he believed his beloved Labrador, Inca, suffered from fatal epilepsy because of standard breeding practices, and said he was glad the BBC had taken Crufts off television.

  Pedigree Dogs Exposed aired in the United States only on BBC America on cable, and on a few PBS stations, Harrison says. It never got the wide exposure it enjoyed in Britain. No other program has ever been aired in America that explains the topic so powerfully. Nowadays, Harrison continues to push her message through a Pedigree Dogs Exposed blog and social media. She’s not against purebred dogs in general—“I love my Flat-Coated Retrievers; I just want them without the cancer,” she says—and she hopes that someday, breeders will accept her point that dogs shouldn’t have to suffer and die young so people can achieve artificial standards of excellence. Breeding for looks and for health should be the standard, she says, even if it means cross-breeding for a short time to let nature correct the genetic flaws humans have perpetuated to the point that they seem commonplace.

  “The Americans have shaped their dogs differently from the Brits, and of course they’re all breeding to the all-being standard,” Harrison says. “There’s nothing standard here. It’s like trying to tackle someone’s religion. You can’t argue it with logic intact. Once you realize it’s not cute, and you see a Pug or a Bulldog gasping for air in the street, it just breaks your heart.”

  She adds, “Some studies have shown that the average death of today’s Dobermans is around six. It’s absolutely horrific. And you get breeders saying, ‘Well, you have to love them a lot because you don’t have them for long.’ It’s as if it’s a given, and they’re unaware of how powerful they could be in changing things if they just saw it differently.”

  Wherever there is a middle-class audience of dog buyers still to be reached, though, the purebred message and media coverage continue to spread. A record 4.6 million people reportedly tuned in to watch Crufts in 2014. In that year alone, the Westminster Kennel Club issued more than seven hundred press credentials to media outlets from more than twenty countries, and its website had about twelve million page views from more than 170 countries. About twenty thousand dogs were registered to compete in the 2014 FCI World Dog
Show, held that year in Helsinki, Finland, with some of the pups coming from as far away as the Philippines, Australia, Peru, Brazil, Japan, and Russia.

  Of course, reporters from news outlets worldwide went to Helsinki, too. FCI World Dog Show officials positioned the tall silver trophy just so for the official photographs, which, in addition to the winning pooch, would also include a beautiful blonde in a long, red evening gown.

  The FCI winner for 2014 turned out to be an Affenpinscher nicknamed Tricky Ricky. He took top honors in Helsinki after being bred in the United States. The dog is co-owned by Indonesia’s Jongkie Budiman and Mieke Cooijmans of the Netherlands.

  Yes, that Mieke Cooijmans, the same person who co-owns Tricky Ricky’s father, Banana Joe.

  ____________

  * Brachycephalic dog breeds include the American Bulldog, Boston Terrier, Boxer, Brussels Griffon, Bull Mastiff, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Chinese Shar-Pei, English Bulldog, English Mastiff, French Bulldog, Japanese Chin, Lhasa Apso, Neapolitan Mastiff, Pekingese, Pug, and Shih Tzu.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  INDUSTRY WASTE

  “What’s dangerous is not to evolve.”

  —Jeff Bezos

  Oleg Deripaska recognized the problem long before the broadcasters arrived and revealed it to the world. Multibillionaires have a way of doing that, of seeing beyond what average people notice and discerning a smarter way forward. The only thing Deripaska didn’t realize, so early on, was that he’d have to be the one to build the actual road to the future that would save the dogs.

  It was several years before the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, and the Russian tycoon was walking around the sites where about fifty thousand of his workers were building everything from the athletes’ village to the seaport to the revamped airport. He was forty-four years old at the time and a dog lover since childhood, when his first best friend was a stray who would walk with him to the post office. He remains a fan of pups today and has no fewer than nine of his own, which is why he couldn’t help but feel a connection to the increasing number of dogs roaming around with the Sochi construction workers. At first, he saw one or two at a time, but as the Games approached and workers began to return home to other parts of Russia, Deripaska was seeing the dogs in packs. The workers, he realized, had been feeding them as pets and now were abandoning them, creating what would become an international spectacle of strays.

  About six months before the opening ceremonies, local government officials were ignoring his requests for help and announcing plans to exterminate the dogs ahead of the international attention that the Olympic Games would bring. A mass cull would be unthinkable if it were done to purebred show dogs—like the ones expected to flood by the thousands into Moscow for the FCI World Dog Show in 2016—but for the friendly, healthy strays living as pets in Sochi just a few years earlier, the plan, to Russian officials, made perfect sense. That realization is why Deripaska had his teams develop a rural area of government land just beyond Sochi’s borders into an animal shelter called Povodog. He gave $15,000 to construct the initial site, and he pledged about $50,000 to run it for the upcoming year. By the time reporters descended on Sochi to cover the world’s best bobsledders, skiers, and figure skaters in February 2014, Povodog was feeding and vaccinating about eighty dogs, including about a dozen puppies, with plans in the works to shelter hundreds at a time.

  Deripaska was far from alone in his personal outrage about the government plan to kill the dogs; reports surfaced of everyday Russians like Vlada Provotorova, a dentist who rescued Sochi strays using a makeshift shelter, and Igor Ayrapetyan, who drove about a thousand miles from Moscow to rescue eleven Sochi strays and bring them back to his home. But Deripaska, as one of the world’s richest men, was a magnet for major news organizations. He’s married to the daughter of Valentin Yumashev, who served as Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff, and he has been said at various times to be even wealthier than fellow Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich, who owns several of the world’s largest superyachts and a personal Boeing 767. Deripaska’s mere existence as a character in the homeless dogs’ story got the attention of news producers around the globe who normally wouldn’t care about any dogs besides the ones who win at Westminster, Crufts, and the FCI World Dog Show. Even Yahoo Sports ran an article titled “How to Adopt a Sochi Stray Dog” after the storyline eclipsed the gold medal counts in daily news reports from the Olympic Village.

  It was arguably the only time in modern history that global media came together to promote the world’s throwaway dogs with the same force and attention so often given to dogs considered the purebred elite. And the kicker was that the entire fuss was made over about four thousand pooches, give or take a few. It’s a number so small that it usually fails to register in many of the nations whose top networks covered the Sochi strays, nations where far more homeless dogs, purebreds and mutts alike, are killed en masse on a regular basis.

  Sochi’s dogs represented a fraction of the number abandoned every summer in Spain, Italy, and France, where in the last country alone, an estimated one hundred thousand domestic pets are left behind when their owners take off on annual vacations during July and August. The problem has become so acute in the land of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité that the French SPCA runs an annual campaign, putting up posters in Paris transit stations to implore people, “Don’t leave your pet this year.”

  The four thousand dogs in Sochi also were a statistical blip compared with the estimated sixty-five thousand pooches—one for every thirty people—living on the streets of Bucharest, Romania. Those dogs became what are known as roamers, or strays people consider pets, feeding them and providing them shelter at night, after the government ordered houses demolished and replaced with smaller, pet-unfriendly flats. In early 2013, a four-year-old boy died in an attack by roaming dogs, and the government in Romania came up with a solution similar to the one envisioned in Russia: round up the dogs and kill them. Photos soon emerged of people clinging to beloved dogs, including one woman grimacing and pleading as she threw her body between men with cages and her dog, who was trapped beneath a net. “On many locations dog-catching teams capture each and every dog they see on the street,” says Ruud Tombrock, the Netherlands-based European director of World Animal Protection. “Owners then have fourteen days to find their dog in one of the many crowded and sometimes distant animal shelters. In the shelters I visited in Bucharest, I saw many dogs that clearly belonged to someone, but that no one was collecting. Hard to tell if their owners were even aware that their dog was captured and had started a search.”

  Sochi’s four thousand strays also were nothing compared with the estimated two million dogs killed for food every year in South Korea, where officials were already worrying in 2014 about how their nation’s dog-meat restaurants would fare in 2018 during international news reports from the scheduled Olympic Games in Pyeongchang. The restaurants were banned in Seoul ahead of the 1988 Summer Olympics there, but enforcement is lax and elderly residents in particular keep up demand for the dog meat, especially in restaurants near hospitals, because they believe it gives people stamina and energy. Truly old-school restaurateurs inflict pain and suffering before cooking the dogs, thinking the meat tastes better if the dogs have high adrenaline levels at the moment they’re killed. Reports about beatings and immolations up the road from the Olympic hockey venue are not what Korean officials want to see at the top of the ESPN SportsCenter ticker.

  In Japan, the government-sanctioned killing is done behind closed doors in animal control facilities, where an estimated five hundred dogs and cats are killed every day. Even if only half of them are dogs, Japan is killing—every two weeks or so—the same number of homeless dogs the world cried out to save in Sochi. A lot of times, the dogs die in gas chambers sanctioned by the Department of Public Health. They call them “dream boxes” because, well, it sounds nicer than asphyxiation boxes. Time will tell if those dogs make the news the way the Sochi dogs did when Tokyo hosts the Summer Olympics in 2020, bu
t the odds are not good. When the killing is taken behind closed doors, not only do the cameras tend to ignore it, but even local citizens often fail to recognize its scope.

  That is the case in the United States, the most dog-loving nation on Earth. As in Japan, gas chambers are used across America—they’re legal in about two dozen states—and the numbers of dogs being killed outside the public eye typically shocks those who learn the truth. Long gone are the days when dogcatchers would do things like round up dogs from the streets of New York City, herd them into an iron cage, and sink it into the East River, in full view and earshot of the public—who eventually demanded change. Today, with America’s dog culling being kept behind closed doors, estimates suggest that taxpayer-funded facilities are killing as many as 38,000 dogs a week. That’s some 5,500 dogs every single day, more than the entire population of Sochi strays, every twenty-four hours.

  And it’s not primarily because Americans are moving to smaller homes or have roamers crowding the city streets. US residents have zero affinity for dog meat on restaurant menus, and they are not known for abandoning their Spots and Rovers during summer vacations. It’s also not because there are more dogs than people who want them in the United States. The notion that America’s homeless dogs face an “overpopulation problem” does not match up against the available statistics. Supply is not exceeding demand. Americans want about eight million dogs a year as new pets, while only about four million dogs are entering the shelters. America kills about two million of those shelter dogs each year while US dog lovers get their new pets from other sources. If just half the Americans already getting a dog went the shelter route, then statistically speaking, every cage in US animal control facilities could be emptied. Right now. And the United States would still need another four million dogs each year to meet demand. Americans want more pups than any other nation on the planet. In the United States, there are no extra dogs in terms of quantity. There are instead millions of throwaway dogs in terms of perceived quality.