by Kim Kavin
All of which lines up, quite naturally, with wanting a dog whose marketing label includes the word pure, whose breed is clearly defined in a book of accepted standards and judged by people in positions of authority, and who didn’t come from a depressing shelter where who-knows-what might have been going on.
It is quite possible that all the purebred marketing, the organization and structure of dog shows, and the notion that breeders offer the best dogs because they’re the highest-priced taps into an evolutionary need within the more conservative among the population to feel they are making the safest possible choice. It doesn’t matter to some people which types of dogs might actually make the best pets for their lifestyle. Those who are conservative likely feel, in the marrow of their bones, that buying from the established purebred industry is just plain safer.
“It sounds very plausible to me,” Hibbing says, with the caveat that no data yet exists on the question of liberals, conservatives, and dogs. “The one thing I would add, in addition to the tendency of conservatives to dislike not knowing what they’re going to get, and not liking surprises, is also the concept of contamination and purity. People get nervous when you talk about this stuff, but there is evidence that indicates conservatives like things that are pristine.”
Smith and Hibbing are quick to add that people fall into far more than two categories, and that it’s unreasonable to paint all liberal-leaning people and all conservative-leaning people with just two brushes. (Gender may also play a strong role in choices. A PetSmart Charities study expected to be released in 2015 showed that an overwhelming number of women were open to the idea of getting a shelter dog compared with far fewer men.) Even so, the conservative–liberal tendencies are there in experiment after experiment done all around the world. Is it any surprise, really, that a conservative, authoritarian nation like Russia would come up with a plan to cull dogs in the streets of Sochi? Could anyone imagine that happening in, say, the liberal streets of San Francisco? Think about how, among their liberal friends, many people with purebreds are quick to explain, “Yes, my dog Cuddles is a purebred, but I got him from a rescue group, not from a breeder.” Among their conservative friends, many people with mutts are likely to note, “Yes, I did adopt this shelter dog Snuggles, but only after he’d been in a foster home and been checked out for a few weeks, so I knew there would be no problems.”
Such statements aren’t about the dogs. Either of those comments could be made about exactly the same dog who originated at exactly the same source, such as a dog auction. Working with a breed rescue group signifies the liberal tendency to be okay with surprises and to care about all dogs being given an equal chance. Acknowledging that a dog was previously fostered indicates proper attention to potential threats and some kind of orderly process. What’s being said with these comments is about the people and about what they’ve come to believe during the past two centuries about different types of dogs—that some are more worthy than others, depending on the worldview.
“These attitudes and orientations come from these really deeply embedded predispositions that are at least partially rooted in your biology, so they’re awfully hard to change,” Smith says. “It’s not impossible, it’s not deterministic. But these things are going to be more resistant to facts, to logical persuasion, because this is something that people almost literally feel in their gut. This is the right thing. This is the truth. People aren’t completely irrational, but with those attitudes that are reflexive, those are tough to change.”
In fact, what’s going on around the world today with anti–puppy mill campaigns may just be the first global example of liberal dog lovers finally, if accidentally, learning to speak the language of conservative dog lovers through the media—and making a sizable dent in the purebred industry’s pocketbook for the first time in at least a century.
CHAPTER NINE
THE UPSTART COMPETITOR
“Hell, there are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.”
—Thomas Edison
Bill Reiboldt is the kind of guy who can be counted on to wear a plain tie. He carries himself as one might expect from a Republican representing a conservative, agricultural district in the Missouri State House of Representatives: dark suits, neatly combed hair, and a frame that fits right in at American Legion steak-and-potato suppers.
Reiboldt is as much of a homegrown local as people can be in this part of Missouri, born in 1948 in Neosho, one of the communities he now represents in the southwest corner of the state. Like a lot of his constituents, he’s a farmer with years of experience in dairy, beef, and crops, and his farm today spans about five hundred acres. Reiboldt is a husband, father, and grandfather. He attends the local Hillcrest Church of Christ, and he signs off on his own website with “May God bless you.” He’s chairman of the committee on agriculture policy, whose work affects all kinds of farms, including those where dogs are bred in large quantities for sale. Part of his district is McDonald County, home to the Hunte puppy distribution company. If the community of Wheaton were a stone’s throw west of its current borders, then Reiboldt would represent Southwest Auction Service, too.
Reiboldt won his first two-year term in 2010, the same year a lot of people who share his political leanings took a beating at the polls in the form of a statewide ballot initiative, one put before voters based on petition signatures instead of by lawmaker action. It was known as Proposition B, the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act, and this is how it was explained to voters:
A “yes” vote will amend Missouri law to require large-scale dog breeding operations to provide each dog under their care with sufficient food, clean water, housing, and space; necessary veterinary care; regular exercise and adequate rest between breeding cycles. The amendment further prohibits any breeder from having more than fifty breeding dogs for the purpose of selling their puppies as pets. The amendment also creates a misdemeanor crime of “puppy mill cruelty” for any violations.
Quite a few of Reiboldt’s constituents were outraged that the words “puppy mill” appeared in the ballot measure’s title and the text. They would have preferred something more neutral, perhaps along the lines of “commercial breeding facility” or “large-scale kennel,” which is how they describe the farms they run. After all, nobody calls the other farms in this region “cow mills” or “pig mills” or “chicken mills.” Calling some farms “puppy mills,” to them, seemed wholly biased, like a slur being made part of the official voting process.
Unfortunately for Reiboldt’s fellow farmers, they were up against a trend in syntax that, by 2010, extended far beyond Missouri’s borders. In just the two years before Proposition B made it onto the ballot, more than a dozen other US states had passed laws devised to crack down on large, substandard kennels, with headlines describing them as anti–puppy mill initiatives from coast to coast. In Britain, Europe, and beyond, the term is “puppy farm,” but with the same effect. Ireland’s newspapers reported the passage of an anti–puppy farm law in summer 2010, news that was similarly noted in other countries thanks to Ireland’s nickname at the time: the Puppy Farm of Europe. Down under in 2010, RSPCA Australia issued a bulletin titled “End Puppy Farming.” The folks on the farms in Missouri could be as offended as all get out, but the language had already made it into the global lexicon, and it had voters riled.
The image that puppy mill invokes in people’s minds is one of the main reasons Proposition B passed in Missouri, earning votes from Republicans and Democrats alike. The arguably liberal voters who cared about dogs as family members didn’t want them being treated like livestock, while the arguably conservative voters who cared about rules and order couldn’t stand the visual of filthy stacked cages. That’s the political magic of the term puppy mill. It offends just about everybody, even if for different reasons.
As far as Reiboldt was concerned, the phrasing of Proposition B was like a grenade being lobbed at the good people of farm country who had spent decades doing backbreaking chores in t
he kennels to satisfy consumer demand. He thought voters in his state had been at a minimum swayed, and more accurately swindled, by the people who worked hardest to get Proposition B on the ballot, people who didn’t even live in Missouri: members of the Washington, DC–based HSUS. He said the group spent $4.85 million campaigning for Proposition B. Other sources put the figure closer to $2 million, but either way, it was a hefty sum compared with the $500,000 that Missouri’s farm organizations had been able to muster in self-defense. In Reiboldt’s opinion, HSUS had parachuted into Missouri and bought up a bunch of votes as part of a broader effort to destroy farms throughout the nation. “Not only is HSUS seeking to limit our state’s legislative process and push themselves into our state’s animal agriculture business,” he wrote in Kennel Spotlight, “HSUS boasts of a $150 million budget to fund their agenda against animal agriculture in the entire United States.”
The outcry from the farms was so profound that Proposition B, despite having won 51.6 percent of Missouri’s vote, never became law. It took less than a year for Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, to succumb to lobbying from lawmakers in rural areas who said HSUS had hijacked the entire voting process by using the ballot petition initiative to foist a national agenda on them. The governor ultimately issued a statement saying both sides had worked out new language that protected both animals and the agriculture industry, and he signed into law a compromise version of Proposition B, one that was more favorable to the voters who lived in districts like Reiboldt’s. It was dubbed “the Missouri Solution” and removed the fifty-dog limit along with specifics for exercise and rest between breeding cycles. The words puppy mill also were scratched altogether, replaced with “a dog residing in a large operation.”
Even still, the close call on having to endure breeding restrictions flabbergasted a lot of Reiboldt’s dog-raising constituents. He and other lawmakers set out to pass a “Right to Raise Livestock” amendment to the state’s constitution, specifically prohibiting the ballot petition initiative from affecting the way animals are raised. The goal was to throw the future of large-scale dog breeders in with the lot of factory farms raising chickens and pigs on an industrial scale. That industry’s financial muscle, along with some new legislative lines drawn, just might stop groups like HSUS from messing with the dog-breeding business in the Show-Me State ever again.
The puppy breeders may have seemed a bit unhinged to everyday dog lovers reading about the battle, but in reality, the farmers in Reiboldt’s district saw the oncoming storm all too clearly. These longtime puppy producers had found themselves up against one of the most financially savvy, legislatively minded foes the dog-breeding industry has ever known—a group determined to reduce the market share of breeders operating worldwide, rural America’s traditions be damned.
To be clear, animal welfare advocates are nothing new. In America, they predate even the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show by eleven years. The beginning of the US animal welfare movement is often cited as April 19, 1866, which is the day the New York State Legislature granted a charter to a man named Henry Bergh to create the ASPCA. It was the nation’s first humane society, and it came into existence forty-two years after the formation of the world’s first animal welfare charity, which was Britain’s SPCA.
The HSUS had a much later start, and it has been making up fast for lost time, like a teenager with a new hot rod putting the pedal to the floor and the screws to all rivals. HSUS has existed only since 1954, but it was able to bring financial muscle to Proposition B in Missouri because it has figured out how to harness and deploy charitable donations in an unprecedented, politically minded way. While many dog lovers mistakenly think the HSUS operates lots of shelters, it instead describes itself as the nation’s leading advocate for legislation to regulate puppy mills, and it puts its money behind the lobbying effort in stacks and stacks that, if carried in cash, would require armored trucks to move through state capitals. In 2013, just fifty-nine years after being founded, the HSUS received more than $130 million in contributions, grants, and bequests, right behind the $140 million or so that the nearly 150-year-old ASPCA reported after a century-long head start on fund-raising. That’s the kind of “new money” that can buy market share in any industry and get a term like puppy mill to become part of everyday language, everywhere.
And while HSUS has been amassing a powerful financial coffer to deploy in the world of politics, the most public defender of US breeders, the AKC, has been struggling to match the sheer dollar power. The same year HSUS brought in that $130 million in donations, the AKC had consolidated total revenues of $64.6 million. The contrast was stark: AKC’s supply of capital was almost exactly half of that at HSUS, putting breeders, for the first time on the historical arc since purebreds had become popular, in a position of being outfunded, outlegislated, and outmatched by the people trying to disrupt their business model.
The level of frustration this change of balance engenders in the dog business is matched only by the level of vitriol in comments like the ones Reiboldt penned after the Proposition B battle, calling out the “radical animal-rights extremists” at HSUS, criticizing “their attempt to handcuff the Missouri General Assembly,” and adding—in language sure to get the attention of anyone who eats eggs and bacon with a glass of milk for breakfast—“Their long-range goal nationwide is to cripple and then destroy all animal agriculture by placing unrealistic regulations and restrictions on meat, milk, and egg industries. HSUS got its foot in the door in Missouri by attacking pet breeders.”
What he didn’t mention, but what his constituents intuitively knew and why they are now so scared, is that if global trends keep going the way they’re going on anti–puppy mill laws, it’s going to cut deeply into dog breeding’s bottom line. They’ll no longer be able to fund their way of life back at home on the farms, no matter how well they treat their puppies. The campaigns are arguably the most devastating salvo to hit breeders since the purebred business began its global rise in stature during the mid-1800s in Britain.
Remember the statement that America’s shelters could be emptied if just two in four Americans already getting a dog today chose to rescue, instead of going to breeders? That shift in spending would mean more than just the saving of homeless dogs’ lives. It would, without question, put more than a few breeders out of business. If the average price paid for a purebred puppy is, say, $600, then the shift of that many American dog buyers to shelters would mean a financial loss to breeders of about $1.2 million. If the average purebred price is $800, then breeders would lose about $1.6 billion. If it’s $1,000 per purebred pup, then the hit to the breeders’ pocketbooks would be a cool $2 billion.
Now that’s an upstart competitor to watch.
Tracy Cotopolis can only dream about the kind of funding the HSUS has at its disposal. She thinks what HSUS does is important—somebody has to come at the problems affecting dogs by lobbying to tip the legislative scale—but she also sees the result of donation dollars being siphoned away from local shelters where she lives in Ohio. For eight years around the early 2000s, she volunteered at a progressive shelter that worked hard to find homes for dogs instead of killing them, and she did everything from cleaning the kennels to helping with fundraising to working at adoption events. “I thought everybody was doing that,” she says today, almost incredulous about her early naïveté. “I was extremely fortunate. I didn’t realize it at the time.”
One day, a woman she knew said there was a dog in Pennsylvania who had been offered a home in Kentucky, and who needed a ride through Ohio. “I said, ‘Okay, I can do that,’” Cotopolis recalls. “I had no dog crates. I had nothing. I knew nothing about it. There was this man and his partner, and they had rescue magnets all over their car, and they showed me how to tether a dog in a car using a seat belt.”
Cotopolis had unwittingly become among the first members of what today is an interstate and sometimes international network of cars, trucks, and planes moving dogs from high-kill shelters to homes by the hu
ndreds of thousands. Where shelters say they cannot get the job done, more and more nonprofit rescue groups are stepping up and proving it is possible; transporters include everyone from individuals like Cotopolis to major organizations like PetSmart Charities, whose Rescue Waggin’ has transported more than seventy thousand dogs since 2004. Just as puppy distributors like the Hunte Corporation use the Internet to upload photos of their dogs so pet store owners nationwide can place orders, nonprofit rescue groups and shelters are using the Internet to upload photos of the dogs they have so everyday dog lovers can offer them a home well beyond any shelter’s immediate neighborhood. Petfinder.com has become the hub of the click-to-adopt phenomenon in America, with about thirteen thousand adoption groups listing available animals and some five million unique page views a month. Petfinder is the modern-tech equivalent of newspaper classified ads: the place where more and more people look first when wanting to get a dog.
Often, all the dogs end up needing is a ride to their new homes, but Petfinder doesn’t arrange the adoptions or the transports, which is how people like Cotopolis find themselves ferrying cars full of dogs from point A to point B in bucket-brigade style. She joined a Yahoo group called the Dog Rescue Railroad and began to drive dogs for a transport coordinator in Michigan whom Cotopolis felt was particularly on the ball—which is important, since she’s heard all too many tales about well-intentioned rescuers piling vans full of dogs from multiple shelters in varying degrees of health, stacking crates one atop the next with no consideration of disease prevention, and semitrailer trucks creating filthy conditions. “They’re not stopping for water breaks, they’re not cleaning out the crates,” Cotopolis says. “There are horror stories all over the Internet if you look.”