The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  “I hear so often, ‘Oh, they must have been abused,’” she says. “Well, yes and no. Animal beating isn’t as common as most people think. Really, where the abuse usually lies is lack of socialization. They’re acquired and left in a back yard, never to experience anything. That’s where you get aggression. It’s not because they’re born this way. It’s because their owners made them this way. It’s like a child: if you never take them anywhere, they’re going to have socialization problems.”

  She adds, “The number one thing we see here are the dogs that sheerly lacked the socialization they needed in the first sixteen to eighteen weeks of life. That’s when their window is open and they’re not afraid of anything. They’re spongy and adventurous and want to discover. Once they’re four or four and a half months old, that window closes and they’re afraid of everything, and you have to go backwards in time and show them that things aren’t scary, instead of doing it right when they’re babies. These dogs that people call lemons, it’s really a lack of socialization.”

  As the 90-plus percent save rate at WAGS shows, almost all of them can be brought back around with time and training, but the handful of dogs WAGS kills does include the ones who, after making every effort, still cannot be trusted as manageable out in the community.

  “We had one dog this year, Nina, a beautiful Pit Bull, and we worked with her for months,” Russillo says. “She came in scared to death, we finally got her comfortable and we were doing the adoption to a family with kids, and they backed out, and another family came in to adopt her, and right when they were coming to pick her up, we started to notice that she’d been with us so long that we had lost verbal control of the prey drive. We had to make the hardest decision ever. We could not place her with a family where she would ever harm a child. We as a group sat and wept. It was the hardest thing.”

  Russillo knew, though, that it was the right thing for public safety. “We go to the farthest end, but if a dog is truly vicious, it’s going to harm a child. That’s the line I draw.”

  Half the battle in the city of Westminster, Russillo says, is that it contains the largest number of Vietnamese people beyond the borders of Vietnam. By some estimates, the culture encapsulates at least a third of the city’s population, and older residents of Little Vietnam or Little Saigon, as it’s known, are like their contemporaries in Southeast Asia when it comes to animals as pets: The concept is completely foreign. Spaying, neutering, training, socializing, microchipping, and keeping dogs indoors simply aren’t ideas that enter the owners’ thought process.

  The result Russillo sees is a predictable rhythm of intake, with a flood of Chihuahuas and Pit Bulls (dogs of choice in that culture) showing up at WAGS every June, July, and August. Nearly all of them are intact and found running loose, producing more puppies and developing behavioral issues that make them challenging to place in homes without at least some basic training.

  “Realistically, a pet needs to have rules,” Russillo says. “It needs to know it’s not the alpha dog, especially when it’s a powerful dog. If people just throw it in their back yard and don’t train it, there are problems. It’s bored. It does have a tendency to want to go after small things. You have to have voice control. People are irresponsible owners. They don’t spay and neuter them, and they don’t train them.”

  Just two towns over, she says, owners do whatever it takes to find missing dogs. They’re microchipped. They’re searched for—intensely. With much of the population in her city, she says, people make a half-hearted effort, give up, and buy another dog. It’s an education problem WAGS is starting to work on, and it’s why no dog leaves WAGS without a microchip that notifies the authorities that the dog should be returned directly to WAGS if there’s ever a problem in the future.

  With the dogs who show up as manageables, either one time or repeatedly, the first adoptions aren’t always successful, but WAGS keeps working on whatever challenges exist until the right home can be found.

  “If we get a returned dog, the person really didn’t think long and hard about what the needs are of that dog. We’ve had them come back: big ones, little ones, great ones,” Russillo says. “I would guess it’s a dog who had a management issue the person couldn’t handle.”

  The treatables, on the other hand, are usually a breeze. WAGS has found homes for dogs with one eye. For dogs who need wheelchairs because their back legs are lame. For dogs like Hopalong Cassidy who have broken bodies but stellar souls.

  “They may take longer, but there are people out there who want those special-needs dogs,” she says. “There’s a population of adopters who want to step in and do more. It’s not everybody. Some people may not have the pocketbook to do it. But some people are more like special-ed teachers: They have the heart.”

  Twitter went live in 2006. Facebook has been online since 2004. Teri Goodman was well ahead of them both, putting the Senior Dogs Project out on the World Wide Web in 1997, the same year the domain name Google.com was registered. She, too, hoped to change how people understood the world, and maybe make it a better place for older dogs who were far too often considered unadoptable.

  It was a time when the senior dogs not only would be among the first killed in shelters, but when they sometimes wouldn’t even be allowed through the front doors. Everybody wanted puppies, and the aging pooches with gray muzzles were an adoption nightmare. They lingered in the cages. They missed their homes, grew confused, and became depressed. Some shelter directors where Goodman lives near San Francisco often couldn’t even be bothered to try. They’d turn them away, to whatever other fate their owners decided.

  The attitude offended Goodman to her core. She’d been in the dog biscuit business, which involved a lot of travel, so instead of having her own dog, she would watch over friends’ dogs when they needed a sitter. A cousin with a ten-year-old Golden Retriever named Misty took her up on the offer, and Goodman and her husband ended up keeping Misty for the last four years of her life. Misty was just plain happier living with them, and they couldn’t have asked for a better dog—one who was already house-trained, had manners, and was long past the urge to chew up everything in the house. Misty had been a wonderful find and had given back every ounce of love the Goodmans gave her.

  All of which got Goodman to thinking about how silly it is that so many people pass by dogs like Misty when looking for a great pet to bring home. Senior dogs, to her thinking, are an awful lot like the treatables and manageables. Might they have some medical issues? Sure. Is longevity in the cards? Not always. But those things can also be true of a brand-new puppy—and with an older dog, a buyer really can see the finished product and know what she’s getting before taking a dog home.

  “My purpose is raising consciousness,” Goodman says today. “I started with an idea to do a book on older dogs, just vignettes, and then I built the website. I did do some hands-on going to the shelters and pulling dogs, and there were many adoptions over the website. As the years went on, more and more shelters and agencies started websites themselves, so I figured I’d done my job, and now I link to them.”

  In her nearly twenty years of focusing on senior pooches, Goodman has seen more people than she cares to remember abandoning perfectly great dogs for surprisingly common reasons. A first baby is on the way, and though the dog would love to meet the kid, too, the parents decide there’s no time for both dependents. A work schedule changes and it’s too much hassle to hire a dog walker for a few months. The teenagers went off to college and the adults decided to travel. Dad likes to jog, and the dog can no longer keep up. It’s just too much aggravation every night, carrying the aging dog up the stairs at bedtime because his hips are a little sore.

  “This is a very materialistic society. If you buy something and then you don’t want it, you throw it out,” she says. “I was walking on the street with Misty one day, and there was a woman who said a woman up the block wanted to get rid of her older dog. I said, ‘What’s the problem? Is the dog unhealthy? Is there a problem
with finances?’ And the woman said she was selling her house and moving to an apartment, and she had a garden and could let the dog out, but at the apartment, she’d have to walk her. The dog was fourteen. She’d had her from a puppy. Now that I’ve been in this senior dog world for a while, that’s not an uncommon story. People think of a dog as a commodity, that you can get rid of it if it’s inconvenient. It’s incredible that people will behave that way, but on the other hand, there are many people who will take these dogs and give them great homes.”

  One of Goodman’s favorite people is Cari Broecker, who, along with a woman named Monica Rua, founded the Peace of Mind Dog Rescue to serve California’s Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito Counties. “We had both been doing rescue work, and we were both on the board of directors for Animal Friends Rescue Project,” Broecker says. “We’d done that for twelve years, and we were taking a break from rescue, and an acquaintance of mine had a dog, and she was dying of emphysema. I would take her dog to hospice to go and visit her, and the doctors were clear with her that she had maybe a few weeks to live, and the main thing on her mind was what was going to happen to Savannah, her Sheltie mix. She knew Savannah had some socialization issues and she wasn’t going to be easy to adopt out at nine years old, and the woman thought she might have to put her down. I left that visit and came up with the name: Peace of Mind rescue. We knew from Animal Friends that we were so focused on rescuing the shelter dogs on the euthanasia list that we couldn’t even address these kinds of calls from the community. I knew it was a niche that needed to be filled.”

  After five years, Peace of Mind has developed a network of foster homes that allows the group to save sixty to sixty-five senior dogs at a time. They don’t have a minimum age, per se; a five-year-old German Shepherd could be considered a senior dog, while a five-year-old Chihuahua would not, because the smaller dog can live as long as twenty years. “Most of our dogs are ten years and up, and we’ve taken in some that are seven or eight,” Broecker says. “In the shelters, if you’re over three, you don’t get looked at very often. The puppies, the one-year-olds, the two-year-olds, they’re everywhere, but with the five- or six-year-olds, it’s hard to get them adopted.”

  Broecker and her team have done a great job of changing the fate of the senior dogs, in part because their nonprofit group is so narrowly focused. An older dog in a shelter, sitting surrounded by bouncy, energetic puppies, can look even worse than she actually is. She can be ignored altogether, which only compounds the emotional trauma that probably led her to the shelter, often because the person she trusted has died or become too ill to care for her. The dogs, having known human affection and companionship all their lives, become depressed. Some of them will no longer even lift their heads.

  Many shelter directors see the correctable problem but lack the time or ability to handle it, which is why people like Broecker step in. When she gets the dogs out of the shelters and into foster homes, almost always, they turn right around. As she puts it, the dogs get younger. They’re back to being treated the way they know they’re supposed to be treated, and they respond by letting their personalities shine, often for quite a few more healthy years.

  These are the stories for which Peace of Mind Rescue has become known. People going to Broecker’s website to adopt don’t see the older dogs as less worthy than puppies. They don’t see puppies at all. They see a rescue agency trying to show senior dogs in their best possible light, doing serious health testing including blood work for things like common thyroid and liver problems in older dogs, fully disclosing any issues that are found so that buyers understand what they are getting, and prescreening buyers to ensure financial resources will be available to care for the dog as he or she ages. The senior pooches are sold for $100 to $300 apiece unless they have monthly ongoing expenses, such as thyroid medication, in which case Peace of Mind adopts them out for free.

  “We did just bring a dog from Washington State. Someone had passed away, and the family contacted us,” Broecker says. “It was a twelve-year-old dog, and the local rescue up there said it was impossible for him to get a home. He was a Papillon. We put him on our website, and within three days, we had an application for him. It is possible. People go to our website expecting to get an older dog, whereas up there, the rescue group was dealing with younger dogs, so this dog was being overlooked. It’s about going to the right market.”

  Broecker believes the future is nothing but bright for senior dogs, especially as the overall population of US residents is aging. The market share for these dogs previously considered unadoptable, she thinks, is going to grow. It’s partly because people are watching parents and grandparents live well into their eighties and nineties, and are understanding the needs of seniors plus all they contribute to a full life. It’s also partly because, as specialty rescue groups like Peace of Mind become more prominent, quite a few dog lovers are realizing a puppy may not actually be the right choice for a pet in their home.

  “People are starting to understand the benefits of getting an adult dog or a senior dog,” she says. “They have less energy, which means shorter walks. They’re mature. You know who they are, so there’s no adolescence where the dog you thought you had as a puppy turns out to be another dog as an adult. They’re usually pretty well trained. More and more people are starting to understand the value of taking in a senior dog, not just for their own benefit but for these dogs. If you’re a ten-year-old dog, you weren’t in a shelter for ten years. You were somebody’s dog, and something happened. You were attached to people and some life situation lands you in this shelter, and you get depressed. Some of them completely shut down, they face the wall, and the shelter will say they think the dog is dying—but we get them out and into a home with proper care, and they get younger and younger. They’re happy again. They’re bouncing around. They turn around. We’ve seen it again and again and again.”

  Not everyone is willing to take in a “less than perfect” pooch, and though more and more shelters and nonprofit rescue groups are helping people see that dogs previously considered lemons are really fantastic steals of a deal, more and more lawmakers are responding to dissatisfied purebred puppy buyers by creating laws that relegate the dogs to the status of broken merchandise. It’s the entirely opposite mentality, and it’s fast becoming more prominent.

  The idea that dogs can be akin to defective products has exploded in recent years with the passage of “pet lemon laws” in various US states. (In Britain, dog purchases are covered under the Sale of Goods Act, while in the European Union, laws vary on a nation-by-nation basis.) While “pet lemon laws” usually do not apply to shelters or nonprofit rescue groups, breeders and pet stores nowadays are being forced into financial accountability if something goes wrong with a puppy. Even if a veterinarian says a problem is a quirk of fate, totally unpredictable, the seller of the dog can be liable for thousands in cash. Some breeders build this liability into their sales predictions, considering it a basic cost of doing business.

  In America, the laws began to appear in the early 1990s, and as of mid-2014, the American Veterinary Medical Association listed twenty-one states, nearly half the nation, with pet purchase protection laws. Interestingly, the laws are common in the Northeast, where demand for dogs as pets is high, while the laws are nearly absent in the Midwest and South, where many large-scale breeding operations are located.

  All of the laws are consumer-protection statutes that give dog buyers legal recourse if a puppy from a breeder or pet store has “disease or defect.” Buyers usually have one to three weeks to file a claim of illness, and sometimes as long as two years to file a claim of congenital or hereditary problem. Breeders and pet stores can be liable for everything from a refund to reimbursement of veterinary expenses up to a given amount, depending on the state, and they may be required to offer a replacement puppy, just like a manufacturer replacing a wristwatch that ticks a little too fast. In some states, including Florida, the law even applies to misrepresentation of bre
ed. If somebody hands over big bucks for a purebred Norwegian Buhund and the dog turns out to have something else in her DNA, the breeder or pet store can be on the financial hook, held accountable in a court of law if he fails to make good.

  The ultimate problem with these laws, of course, is that once a committed dog lover brings home a puppy and gets to know her, that person would no sooner return her like a broken toaster than he would chop off his own big toe—and the puppy will be nothing but confused and scared, being tossed aside after believing she had a loving home. Countless dog buyers have experienced this wrenching moment of decision, standing in their veterinarians’ offices with their children in tears, fearing for the health of the newest member of their families. That’s when the vet says: “Please take a seat. We need to discuss the cost of the surgery.”

  In 2008, when the Los Angeles Times ran an article about puppy lemon laws, the outpouring of reader mail was so overwhelming that a second article was published to feature stories from people who had endured huge financial loss and emotional trauma. One reader, Brenda Stang, had spent about $650 in six months on treatment for a congenital knee problem in her $1,500 Toy Fox Terrier, Dinkee. The law would let her return Dinkee and avoid the $5,000 surgery to correct the problem. “How could we possibly give her back?” Stang told the reporter. “What would we be telling our children? Dogs are disposable?”

  Even John Grogan, the author of every Labrador lover’s favorite book, Marley and Me, has been put in this position. When the movie based on the book was being filmed, his eleven-year-old daughter fell in love with a fifteen-week-old puppy cast as young Marley. He was a happy, playful boy, so Grogan brought him home, and the family named him Woodson. But in short time, Woodson started having trouble doing normal puppy things, like jumping up onto the couch, hopping up into the car, or making his way up the stairs. The culprit turned out to be a crippling birth defect: Woodson’s rear hips had disconnected balls and sockets. The breeder offered to take Woodson back and give Grogan’s family their pick of the next litter, a clean dog-for-dog exchange.