The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Yet another example is in Costa Rica, where the Territorio de Zaguates shelter had nearly all mixed-breed dogs while adopters primarily wanted purebreds, so it worked with the San Jose–based creative agency Garnier BBDO to launch a marketing campaign around the idea of “unique breeds.” Instead of calling the dogs mutts, they followed the same branding convention long used by breeders, labeling the dogs as things that sounded surprisingly like kennel club–recognized Dandie Dinmont Terriers and Finnish Laphunds: Chubby-Tailed German Dobernauzers, Fire-Tailed Border Cockers, Alaskan Collie Fluffyterriers, White-Chested Dachweilers, and Brown-Eyed Australian Dalmapointers. (Is it really any different from inventing a German Blabrador?) Watercolor artists painted renderings that mimicked the design of the purebred standard drawings, then added the unique breed names in a highfalutin, royal wedding–worthy typeface. The posters created a visual way for people to process the message that breed names, when it comes to choosing a pet, are often no more than a line of marketing copy.

  By the end of the Territorio de Zaguates campaign—“When You Adopt a Mutt, You Adopt a Unique Breed”—the shelter’s dogs had received more than $450,000 in news and public relations coverage. More than a half million people had discussed and shared the dogs on Facebook. Adoptions went up 1,400 percent, and the shelter got sponsors who now cover the whole of its operating expenses.

  All in all, the teams in Costa Rica and Germany experienced the same thing organizers of the Human Walking Program saw in Australia: working with professional marketers and designers made a huge impact on people’s perceptions about the dogs, who were suddenly in demand and welcomed into people’s homes en masse—even though the pooches themselves hadn’t changed at all.

  “We have been inundated with interest from shelters from South Africa to the USA, which leads us to believe that shelters across the world generally share the same priority of changing the public’s perception of shelter pets,” Coro says from Melbourne, “and now there is a tried and tested plan that can help us all do that.”

  Mike Arms was lying in the street, somewhere between consciousness and death, when he had the first of two epiphanies that would save millions of dogs’ lives.

  Born and raised on a farm in Kentucky, Arms decided as a youth that he didn’t want to work long hours in the fields for little money, so he got an accounting degree and headed off to New York City to make a life different from the one his father and grandfather had known. A recruiter told him about a number-cruncher opening at the ASPCA. At first, he thought the acronym stood for a business firm, something like IBM, and he figured he’d do just fine there earning a paycheck as an entry-level bean counter.

  He barely survived seven months. What he saw inside the ASPCA facility several decades ago left him so shaken that he lost twenty-five pounds in half a year. He developed insomnia. He couldn’t stand watching every type of dog imaginable, from eight-week-old mutts to purebred Golden Retrievers, being killed to the tune of 140,000 dogs a year, within twenty-four hours of entering the building, inside high-altitude decompression chambers that sucked the oxygen out of the dogs’ lungs—a dozen or more dogs at a time.

  Arms gave his two weeks’ notice and was headed to a much more civilized office environment, with just six days left in his ASPCA tenure, when a call came in for a dog who had been hit by a car in the Bronx, a borough that, at the time, was riddled with gangs trying to prove which dude was the most macho. No drivers were available, so Arms took off his suit jacket, put on an ASPCA jacket, and drove the ambulance himself. When he got there, the hit-and-run driver was gone and the tan-and-black mutt was on the ground, bent almost backwards in half and quaking in pain.

  Arms lifted the dog up to his chest. The terrified pup’s gaze shot straight through to his soul.

  That’s when three guys came out from a nearby building and asked him what he thought he was doing. They had a bet going about how long it would take for the dog to die in the street, and Arms was screwing up their game.

  Arms exchanged a few words with the thugs and then reached for the ambulance door handle to get the dog to safety. The guys jumped him from behind and stabbed him, leaving him to die in the street with the pup.

  Dazed and in shock, lying on the ground, Arms made a promise to God: if he was allowed to live, he’d help the animals. He swore it. And he meant it.

  Soon after, that dog died. Arms has since helped to save more than nine million others, and he’s not even close to being finished.

  His success is in large part due to the second epiphany, which Arms had while talking with a vacuum-cleaner inventor named Alexander Lewyt, whose claim to fame was that his machine, sold door to door after World War II, would not interfere with the reception housewives received on their big-box radios or black-and-white televisions. Lewyt had become involved with North Shore Animal League on Long Island, New York, in 1969, when his wife talked him into donating $100. He wanted to know how his money would be spent, so he visited the twenty-five-year-old shelter, which was closed more often than open, had one full-time employee, and barely had enough cash flow to keep the lights on. Lewyt, using his business acumen, worked with Publishers Clearing House and, in a single direct-mail campaign, raised the equivalent of about $67,000 today. The shelter’s staff grew to twenty-five employees. Its hours of operation increased to every day of the year. “We have the same concept as bringing any product to the public,” Lewyt told the Wall Street Journal in 1975. “We have our receivables, our inventories. And if a product doesn’t move, we have a promotion.”

  He added, “Most animal shelters are run by well-intentioned people who don’t know anything about fund-raising or running the place like a business. The only reason they don’t go broke is that a little old lady dies every year and leaves them something.”

  Arms and Lewyt became friends, and Lewyt’s wife, Elisabeth, kept bringing Arms all the homeless dogs she could find. “I would tell Babette I had room for five dogs,” Arms recalls, “and she’d say, ‘Okay, fine,’ and come back with fifteen. I told Alex, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it.’ He said, ‘Don’t look at me. You’re just lucky she doesn’t love whales.’”

  Lewyt’s ideas about marketing dogs differently, combined with Babette’s incessant flow of dogs needing help, persuaded Arms to articulate a new way forward, something different than he’d seen inside the ASPCA, something that made sense to his accountant mentality. “When he was talking to me, it just clicked,” Arms recalls. “It really is a business. If we want to save these lives, we can’t do it from the heart. We have to do it from the head.”

  Arms started working for North Shore Animal League in 1977, increasing adoptions from 50 to 850 per week and generating an advertising budget of $1 million a year. He has since moved on, but the operation has flourished beyond what many dog lovers might think is even financially possible when it comes to dealing in homeless dogs. As of 2012, the organization had annual income of more than $36 million and its president earned nearly $350,000 per year. His salary was about the same as the one given to Wayne Pacelle, the president and CEO of the HSUS, and it was less than half of the $713,166 in annual salary and other compensation listed in the ASPCA’s 2013 tax return for its president and CEO, Edwin Sayres. (In summer 2014, Sayres left the rescue segment of the dog business to become president and CEO of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, whose board of directors includes Ryan Boyle from the Hunte Corporation as well as men affiliated with Petco and Petland pet stores.)

  To put those dollar amounts into perspective, the annual salary of the president of the United States is $400,000, or $569,000 with travel and other expense accounts included. The similar six-figure lifestyles these leaders of the dog rescue community enjoy—while their nonprofit organizations continue to solicit donations from the public—has led to a new phrase, retail rescue, that breeding advocates hope to make as well known as puppy mill in the popular lexicon, casting some of the negative spotlight off themselves and onto their most financia
lly successful competitors, including smaller nonprofits that typically operate with far less public scrutiny. “This year of 2014 has been horrendous with regards to total lack of sanity in the dog world,” as one blog post on the Yankee Shelties website put it. “It has become acceptable for someone to call themselves a rescue, remain totally unregulated, and proceed to pillage and profit.”

  So far, attempts to rebrand financially successful rescuers have not stopped business-minded advocates like Mike Arms, who continues to save dogs without making any excuses for raising their value along with the professional value of the people working alongside him. Since 1999, he has been president of the Helen Woodward Animal Center in California, where he tripled adoption rates while charging some of the highest dog adoption fees in America and recruiting employees for their business and marketing savvy. (As of 2013, according to an independent auditor’s report, the center’s management salaries and benefits totaled $373,420. Arms’s pay was not itemized.) Nobody can buy a dog from the center for less than $399. A couple of Labrador puppies sold recently for $500 apiece, and a six-month-old Goldendoodle went for $1,000 not long ago. Arms has no problem telling adopters they should pay fair market value because his dogs have just as much intrinsic value, and make just as fabulous pets, as the purebreds going for similar prices from breeders. “Why is it,” he asks, “that somebody can go out and spend $2,000 or $3,000 on a pet and after thirty days realize it’s not for them, and they take it to their local facility, and the minute it crosses that threshold, the value is gone?”

  His approach leaves many shelter operators with mouths agape, especially the ones who can’t even give their dogs away for free. Arms believes that their failure has nothing to do with the quality of the dogs, but instead with the quality of the dogs in people’s minds, which he sees as the job of shelter directors to manage. The problem isn’t the dogs. The problem is the marketing.

  “I’m getting more and more frustrated with my peers as I get older,” he says. “It just seems like they’re going backwards in time now. They think the way to increase adoptions is to lower fees and come up with gimmicks. That doesn’t increase adoptions at all. All that does is devalue the pets. How in the world can we change the public’s perception of these beautiful pets if we’re the one doing this?”

  The root of the problem with homeless dogs and pricing, he says, goes back to the way many rescue organizations got started. It’s usually a woman who finds a puppy in the street and gets him into a loving home. The woman likes the feeling of having done right by the pup, so she helps more dogs, and then more dogs, until she decides to form an organization along the lines of a humane society. “They weren’t getting paid for it,” Arms says. “They just liked doing it as a hobby. So they felt, ‘If I’m not doing it for pay, nobody else should be doing it for pay.’”

  Try telling a breeder she should care for all the dogs for free and give them away out of the goodness of her heart. Rescuers often have a completely different mentality, Arms says, one that devalues their own worth as well as the worth of the dogs.

  Arms regularly finds himself standing on stage in front of a room filled with rescuers who fit that mold, most of them women, even today. He tells a particular story again and again, one that seems to make the message clear. It starts when he asks them what they would do if they were invited to a formal dinner banquet at a high-end restaurant. What is the very next thing you’d do, he asks, after you accepted the invitation?

  To a person, they answer that they’d go out and buy a new dress. “Now, human nature is that a lot of people will put a budget on what they’re going to spend on that outfit,” he tells them. “You go out in the department store and start trying on outfits and none of them fit you right. The color’s not right. You get depressed and you’re going to walk out, and then on your way out you see a dress that’s a hundred dollars more. And it fits. And you buy it. You’re willing to spend three hundred or four hundred dollars on that dress that you’re going to wear three or four times, but you’re not willing to spend it on a dog. What are we teaching the public about value?”

  Arms loves dogs just as much as the rescuers in the audience do, but he treats the pooches far more like products than most of his colleagues might—because he believes that’s what gets them into homes. He’s had courtesy shoppers from the department store Macy’s come through his shelter to tell him what he can do better in terms of staffing and displays. He brought in BMW salesmen to train his staff. (“Nobody is a better salesman than a car salesman,” he says.) As of this writing, Bruce Nordstrom, former chairman of the upscale retailer Nordstrom Inc., was scheduled to do training at the center, all because Arms believes the sales techniques in the dog rescue business need a swift reboot into the modern era of retail sales. He wants to be the BMW of the used pooch industry, the place where buyers can go and know they’re getting a top-quality product worth every penny of the extra money, not unlike a pre-owned luxury sedan.

  “They can call it adoptions or rehoming or whatever they want,” Arms says of rescuers, “but they’re in the business of selling used dogs. And they’d better be good at it, because those lives are on the line.”

  Arms has been invited to speak to shelter directors everywhere from British Columbia in Canada to multiple cities in New Zealand, preaching the philosophy that shelters should be run by the savviest marketing and sales people, raising their prices and preaching the overall value of every great pup. Shelter directors should have a heart for dogs, but first and foremost, a mind for business—because that’s the only thing that breaks through stereotypes and helps dog lovers understand what they’re really getting for their money.

  “We have to change the public’s perception,” he says. “The public believes the pets in pet facilities are there because there’s something wrong with the pet. We have to teach them that the pet is there because there’s something wrong with the person who had the pet. That’s the reality.”

  No less than the Westminster Kennel Club is starting to come around to this same idea, that if it wants to gain the business of all dog lovers in the world, it has to start doing a little repackaging and rebranding of the mutts, too—and maybe, just maybe, a little admitting that the dogs shouldn’t have been singled out as different in the first place.

  Instead of calling them Fire-Tailed Border Cockers or White-Chested Dachweilers, Westminster’s organizers settled on the label All-American Dogs. Same marketing concept, different choice of words. The pooches were allowed to compete among the purebreds at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in 2014, for the first time since the show began in the 1800s, as part of the inaugural Masters Agility Championship of running, jumping, and obedience skills.

  Westminster’s purebred experts heralded the event as welcoming the mongrels in a measured way, calling it “the opening act” of the long weekend’s traditional show program. “Agility dogs are not designer dogs, or they don’t have to be,” the longtime breeder and Westminster show chairman Tom Bradley told reporters. “Westminster honors the diversity of the dog with the addition of agility, and therefore the diversity of all dogs,” the Westminster media director, Karolynne McAteer, explained. “We’re very excited about the fact that Westminster can play a leadership role in embracing, really, the sport of dogs,” the Westminster president, Sean McCarthy, said. They also created a special award, Best All-American, either in keeping with the mentality of categorizing all dogs as purebred versus those ineligible for registration, or in keeping with the marketing plan to ensure a mutt with a ribbon would be available to the media even if the purebreds ran through the tunnels and jumped over the bars faster.

  The agility competition featured sixteen mutts comprising 7 percent of the 228 agility entries (and about 0.5 percent of the more than 2,800 entries in the overall Westminster show that year). By all accounts, the atmosphere in the agility rings was festive and energetic, but that portion of Westminster was not shown on mainstream television channels during prime tim
e like the two-day conformation event based on looks. Agility was instead shown on a Saturday on Fox Sports 1, a new twenty-four-hour network with a far smaller viewership. The winner turned out to be a purebred Border Collie named Kelso, while Best All-American went to a Husky mix named Roo. Both had their names prominently mentioned in the official postshow Westminster announcement.

  Really, the mutts had been kept squarely in their place as fewer than one in ten dogs competing in a sideshow event, but it was hard to deny that public pressure had encouraged the purebred glitterati to reconsider the image the show was sending around the world, one that more and more often contradicts the increasingly savvy marketing on behalf of all types of dogs, including mixed breeds sitting in animal control facilities. Westminster’s organizers are business-savvy people who know enough to trim the yacht sails a little differently when the wind direction shifts. The more dog lovers bring mutts into their homes, and the more time they spend getting to know them instead of the stereotypes, the more people are realizing that claims of the ideal dog are as ludicrous as any other form of segregation—a reality kennel clubs are going to have to figure out how to embrace in the long run if they want people to keep buying the message they’re selling.

  “By seeing the great worth in all dogs, perhaps the AKC will get its priorities on the right track,” as the veterinarian Debora Lichtenberg put it in a column for PetAdviser (now Petful.com). “I mean, if this great country can embrace marriage equality, repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and continue to work on equal pay for equal work, maybe there’s hope that dog snobbery and elitism can wear a more inclusive muzzle, too.”