The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Please tell me the dog’s price and how the money will be used. Better breeders will respond by talking about everything from the quality of dog food to the cost of genetic health tests. Better shelters and nonprofit rescuers will respond by discussing basic vaccinations, temperament testing, foster care, and things like transport expenses. Do not feel squirmy about asking a seller to defend the price of a dog. Someone charging a premium price should be able to explain why he believes he has a premium product.

  What breed is the dog? This is a great question to ask even if we’re not shopping by breed, because asking it can reveal as much about the seller as about the dog. Unless a blood or saliva test has been done, or a kennel club has registered the dog, there is no way to answer this question for sure. Study after study shows that judging a dog’s breed by his looks is rarely accurate—a recent study showed that more than 87 percent of dogs adopted out by shelters were mislabeled, with more than twenty-five types of dogs commonly mislabeled as Pit Bulls—and yet plenty of sellers try to market dogs as purebreds or mixed breeds without actually knowing anything about their genetic heritage. An honest answer to this question, without papers or blood tests, is something along the lines of, “We’re not sure, but he looks sort of like this and that, and let us tell you about his personality instead.” Also, never trust the breed mixes on adoption websites like Petfinder.com; the site’s input form forces rescuers to list breeds even if the rescuers have no idea what they are.

  What is your system for handling dogs whose sales do not work out? Everyone dealing in dogs has had at least a few dogs returned. It happens to breeders, shelters, and nonprofit rescuers alike. The job of the conscious consumer is not only to listen to the seller’s answer to this question, but also to ask to speak with any references who can verify the truth. We want to know more than what happens to us, and our money, if we return the dog. We also want to know what happens to the dog, because that tells us a great deal about the type of person doing the selling. Don’t ask only about policies. Ask to hear actual stories, and get the names of other people in those stories. Contact them, too.

  Why do you think this dog is a good choice for my family? People who truly care about dogs want every single one to enjoy a wonderful life, and they should be assessing us as buyers just as much as we are assessing them as sellers. The answer to this question should include information about the particular puppy’s traits and how they match our own lifestyle—not “Well, he’s a Schnauzer, and all Schnauzers are great,” but instead, “You mentioned you like to jog, and this pup is the most active dog in the bunch. He has plenty of energy and will be able to keep up with you, and he’s a good size for jogging the distance you described.” The second answer shows that the seller is trying to match the right personalities, human and canine alike.

  What is your live-release rate, and has it been going up or down during the past year? This is a key question to ask inside any shelter. If a shelter is killing more dogs than it saves, and if that has been the case for a number of years, then our money is likely paying the salary of a shelter director whose beliefs do not match our own. Our first call should not be to that shelter’s adoption coordinator; it should instead be to the shelter director’s boss, be it the city council or the mayor, demanding that he be replaced with someone who does share our belief in the worth of all dogs. A controversial, tough-love approach in this scenario is to forgo buying a dog directly from such shelters and to instead give our money to nonprofit rescue groups that are showing the community a better model for saving dogs’ lives. If we see a dog we want inside a high-kill shelter, we can call a local nonprofit rescue group and ask them to help us get the dog out in a responsible way—while still demanding that the shelter director be replaced with someone who shares our commitment to all dogs.

  The last, and perhaps most important, question everyone must ask before acquiring any dog is whether she fully understands what she is getting into, not just in terms of the industry but also in terms of her responsibilities as a buyer. As Donald McCaig, the defender of traditional Border Collies, puts it about people shopping for pooches, “They should ask themselves who they are and what they are willing to do for a satisfactory relation with a nonhuman animal who will live with them for more than a decade. If the answer is ‘not much,’ get a cat.”

  Everyone interviewed for this book from the rescue perspective—the people who see the result of mismatched dogs and buyers every single day—says the most important questions to ask are of oneself. All too often, the “problem dogs” are the ones who simply fail to meet unrealistic expectations, or misjudgments based on poor research and marketing hype. Some buyers think that if they spend enough money, a dog will turn out great even if he’s given no training, no exercise, and an hour’s worth of attention a day. That is just as crazy as believing the same would be true of a two-year-old child, which, according to some studies, has cognitive functions at a level similar to dogs.

  Dog buyers must ask themselves, especially if choosing a puppy, whether they are truly ready to welcome a toddler-level, attention-demanding, sentient being with feelings into their lives. Dogs take work. Dogs cost money. Dogs need attention. Dogs require schooling. Dogs demand time that owners need to be ready to give, no matter what type of pooch they buy.

  “Know what you can realistically handle with your lifestyle,” says Cortney Dorney, the trainer and shelter director at WAGS in California. “Know what kind of household you have. What is your activity level? Are there kids? Is there a park where you can take the dog to play off-leash? All of our caretakers, the first question after they greet the people is, ‘What are you looking for?’ If somebody comes in and says, ‘I’m looking for a dog I can take running, I have kids, and I have cats,’ well we’re going through all the dogs we have in mind. You can say you want a Beagle or a Chihuahua, but don’t come in wanting the look of XYZ. Those are always the dogs that get returned. Before you even step foot in a shelter or with a breeder, think about your lifestyle.”

  Michelle Russillo at WAGS asks buyers to think about their lifestyle with as much detail as possible.

  “What size house do you have, and what is your level of energy?” she asks. “Allergies are the second thing we think about so we don’t have the dog coming back. It’s tolerance to [the buyer’s] lifestyle that’s more important than them thinking they know the right dog for them. The other piece is: Do they understand the level of commitment in owning a dog? It takes a minimum of $500 to $1,000 a year to take care of a dog properly. Are they willing to do that instead of upping their cellphone plan? They’re cute, but they’re going to need medical care just like kids do.”

  Janis Bradley, who synthesizes dog research for the National Canine Research Council in the United States, says more and more studies are showing that the buyer’s nature is ultimately more important than most dogs’ nature at the time of purchase. Buyers are right to evaluate dogs and their sellers, but buyers also have to evaluate themselves with the same degree of skepticism and honesty.

  “Most of what figures into whether or not the relationship is going to be successful, the lion’s share of it falls on how you live with the dog,” she says. “The single biggest watershed we’re finding in dog behavior right now is, does the dog live as a family dog—in the house, with the people, with multiple opportunities for interaction every day—or does it just kind of live as a resident on the property? If you want a dog that’s going to be happy and fit in with your family, then you’d better figure out how to integrate it into your family life. Most of the time, most of the dogs take care of the rest.”

  Mike Arms of the Helen Woodward Animal Center says finding the right dog is akin to finding a spouse. The decision, when made well, happens in a similar way.

  “I see it all the time,” he says of buyers. “They go in with something in mind because that’s what they think they should have, and then they look into the eyes of some dog that wasn’t even on their list, and those are always the
best adoptions. In our lifetime, why is it we meet thousands of people but there’s one that all of the sudden it clicks, they become our mate for life? It just happens. Let that happen when you want to get a pet, and keep in mind that this is a fifteen- or sixteen-year commitment. This is not something to play with today and discard tomorrow. Don’t even go looking for a pet unless you’re willing make that commitment. Then just let it happen.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CONSUMER INTELLIGENCE

  “There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

  —Sam Walton

  Bill Reiboldt, the Republican state lawmaker who battled against Proposition B in Missouri, took a break in March 2015 from writing about puppy farms and uploaded an article to his website titled “Condemning California Egg Regulations.” It stated, “Production and marketing of eggs is big business, but now egg-producing farmers with new technologies and practices are coming under attack by animal rights activists, led in part by the well-funded, radical Humane Society of the United States.”

  It may have seemed odd to some of his constituents that he was focusing on a legislative battle taking place nearly two thousand miles away, but the people who own the puppy farms in Missouri cared quite a bit. If California were to succeed in passing stricter standards for how egg-laying hens must be treated, then its state law could lead to a new national standard that would force Missouri’s farmers to change, too. Hens, like puppies, had become animals to which the public responded on a political scale—and had already caused a shift in business that dog breeders didn’t want to see on their own farms, a shift that continues to affect some of the biggest brand names on the planet. This business reality makes the story of eggs a tale worth knowing for anyone interested in seeing life change for dogs.

  In 2007, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck committed to buying eggs from cage-free hens. His switch came at least a decade into animal welfare group efforts to raise consciousness about the stresses of industrial henhouses, with everyone from the HSUS to RSPCA Australia and various groups in Britain and Europe educating consumers about the way many egg-laying hens go through life, including living in cages so tiny the birds cannot even spread their wings (a practice called battery farming in most parts of the world). Puck made the switch to buying cage-free eggs about six months after the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream brand had done the same thing. And while the move was a public relations boon for the culinary star, the problem that Puck immediately faced—and that all of the major food players who came onboard afterward would also encounter—was that there just weren’t enough cage-free eggs to go around.

  “It’s not easy to find all the eggs you’re looking for,” Rob Michalak, a spokesman for Ben and Jerry’s, told the New York Times soon after Puck’s announcement. “The marketplace is one where the supply needs to increase with the demand.”

  At the time in America, cage-free eggs cost an extra sixty cents per dozen wholesale. Chicken farmers, who had long raised hens in cages, figured the cage-free craze might be a fad. They weren’t about to toss out their cages—which they saw as a capital investment in equipment, similar to dog kennel enclosures—nor were they interested in paying for infrastructure improvements like ventilation systems to house hens cage-free without spreading disease. They hoped the cage-free trend would be a passing fad.

  Fast forward to 2014, just seven years later, and the companies joining Puck and Ben and Jerry’s in demanding cage-free options included McDonalds in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe; Burger King, Denny’s, Red Robin, Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts, Au Bon Pain, Whataburger, IHOP, and Sonic restaurants; Walmart, Safeway, Marks & Spencer, and many other grocery chains; Hellman’s mayonnaise; Sara Lee desserts, Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, and Barilla pasta; Kraft Foods, ConAgra, Aramark, Nestle, and General Mills food manufacturing giants; Royal Caribbean and Carnival cruise lines; Virgin America Airlines; and Hyatt and Marriott hotels. These multinational businesses are not making the switch to cage-free eggs out of the goodness of their hearts. Their choices are about money. They’ve figured out that getting consumers to keep paying for their products means treating the egg-laying hens with respect.

  As a result of this consumer-driven push for animal welfare, the percentage of hens living cage-free lives has more than doubled from 3 percent to 7 percent across America, and it’s still going up. For some egg farmers in America, cage-free has grown to comprise 10 or 12 percent of their annual business. In the United Kingdom, free-range and organic eggs are now outselling eggs from caged hens altogether, having garnered 51 percent of the British market as of 2012. Though cage-free eggs still cost more, conscious consumers are continuing to show that we will buy them in greater and greater quantities. We are willing to pay an extra buck or two if we believe the hen who laid the eggs will have a better life. We are putting our money behind our values, and we are moving the market.

  “This is a massive step forward for animal welfare, especially when you consider in 1995 that more than eight out of ten eggs [in Britain] were laid by hens kept in cruel barren battery cages,” Alice Clark of the RSPCA told the Daily Mail. “Shoppers who buy cage-free eggs deserve a heartfelt thank you.”

  That type of continuing market shift worldwide is the only thing that could get the attention of farmers like Greg Satrum, who is the egg industry’s equivalent of some large-scale puppy farmers in places like southwestern Missouri. Satrum is the third-generation co-owner of Willamette Egg Farms, Oregon’s largest egg producer. In early 2013, Willamette announced it was doubling its cage-free production and building two new henhouses that would hold a total of eighty thousand birds. Not only would the new henhouses be cage-free, but they also would be more energy efficient with features such as LED lighting.

  “Building the new housing and increasing our cage-free flock to this degree is a significant investment,” Satrum told the Oregonian. “We wanted to be proactive and get ahead of the curve, to be able to meet both the industrial and consumer demand in the years ahead.”

  Listen to what he’s saying: His business made the switch because of consumer demand. He would never have said it, and none of the other businesses would have done it, if not for the egg buyers. Every stitch of progress started with producers and sellers wanting to keep customers happy.

  Conscious consumers can next make it our business to see all sellers of dogs and puppies, all around the world, treating the dogs with the respect we demand. We already know we can do it, in part, through our individual purchases. We are proving it with the hens.

  Here are two ideas for how we can all work together to get every seller’s attention when it comes to our pooches.

  It’s a great time to be a buyer of anything in this world, because crowdsourcing is the most powerful force of consumer information the planet has ever known. From Amazon.com to Hotels.com, we sit at our computers in Boston and Bonn and Brisbane, and we share what we know with one another, for the good of us all. This product worked as-advertised. That customer service was great. This refrigerator repeatedly breaks down, so don’t waste your money. That hotel room is convenient but could use a quieter air-conditioning system. Gathering our opinions into a usable, helpful format on this scale was impossible in decades past, but today, thanks to technology, we rate everything from products to plumbers online. We give them one to five stars, we explain our experiences, and, as a whole, the system separates the wheat from the chaff.

  Companies that continually earn just one or two stars don’t stay in business for long. Suppliers of everything from lawnmowers to honeymoon suites are being forced to improve their offerings as well as their policies for ensuring customer satisfaction. If they don’t, we’ll let their other potential customers know and business will dry up fast.

  At the same time, we consumers are able to be far smarter shoppers because the information at our disposal is exponentially greater than ever in human history. If we
choose to be diligent in our research, we really can spend our money in ways that support our values thanks to our fellow consumers worldwide who share their experiences online, too.

  All of which makes it so hard to understand, with so many of us dog lovers out there, why we have not yet applied this crowdsourcing concept to pooches. They’re a multibillion-dollar global business, with breeders and rescuers alike operating across state and national boundaries. What is stopping us from using the same approach to sharing what we know and putting the worst sellers out of business everywhere?

  Perhaps we’ve not thought to crowdsource what we know about the sellers of dogs because, in our hearts, we don’t think of our pets as products. It feels weird to rate them, or where they originated, the same way we’d rate the durability of their beds or the adjustability of their collars or the nutritional content of their food. It honestly doesn’t occur to many of us to do it.

  Perhaps we haven’t crowdsourced our knowledge because some keepers of breed standards don’t want us sharing what we know on a global level and have encouraged us to do other types of limited “research” instead. Until now, they’ve been able to carve us up into controlled markets. Many kennel clubs have not been willing to release public lists of problem breeders, even the ones they know are the worst. It doesn’t take a doctoral degree to see that if the AKC or Britain’s Kennel Club distributed a public-access ranking of the worst offenders, other breeders would likely pull their financial support for the groups, which are supposed to be defenders, not exposers, of the people offering purebreds for sale.