The bill was enacted, and Ted’s offense was that he was, as a dog breeder, actively supporting HSUS-backed legislation to crack down on puppy mills. Since the hearing he’s basically been black-balled as a judge, and members of the dog fancy promised they would not show their dogs if Ted was in the chair.
“I was deeply saddened by the sharp reaction from breeders I know in Oregon,” Ted said. “Yet I recall seeing this type of reaction forming among dog breeders many years ago—as various pieces of legislation began to surface around the country to curb excess breeding and puppy traffic,” which he argued “contributed so much to the overpopulation of dogs in the United States.”
The AKC is not best known for its political lobbying, but for its role in the sport of dog fancying. Founded in 1884, a few years after the Kennel Club in the United Kingdom, the AKC pledged “to do everything to advance the study, breeding, exhibiting, running and maintenance of purity of thoroughbred dogs.” It is the largest and best known of the breed registry organizations, although there is an alphabet soup of them now, such as the UKC, or the United Kennel Club. At official shows, dogs are judged on how they conform to the standards set forth in the official registry of the AKC. The group recognizes 167 breeds, and partially recognizes about a dozen others, breaking breeds into seven major classifications, including sporting, working, terrier, and toy groups.
For all of the investments AKC members make in breeding dogs, the payoff is recognition within the fraternity through competition at show events across the country. By securing “best in breed” or “best in show,” breeders can then sell the offspring of championship dogs and make money. For most of them, it’s a hobby, with the proceeds from the sale of the offspring typically not offsetting their investments in the animals. At some level, it’s more sport than business, and these people certainly admire their dogs and often give them top-of-the-line care. The Super Bowl in the world of sporting dogs is the acclaimed Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York, and for several nights each year, millions of Americans tune in to watch pampered dogs and their anxious owners or handlers prance around the floor of a sold-out Madison Square Garden.
Even though AKC papers are no proof that a dog has been humanely treated, much less pampered, the club in recent years has committed to several animal-welfare programs. It gave money for the rescue of dogs during the Katrina crisis, and it has a kennel inspections program for high-volume breeders. As far back as 1995, the AKC Canine Health Foundation began contributing to research in breed health problems and now donates about $1 million a year.
For all of that, however, the AKC doesn’t welcome outside opinion on matters relating to the care and breeding of dogs. They think they’ve got it all under control. As they see it, the least concession to animal-welfare standards from outsiders will only invite more and more regulations, inevitably bringing an end to their entire industry. If you think the NRA has mastered the “slippery slope” argument, you ought to hear the executives and lobbyists at the AKC.
The club and breeding groups have opposed just about every legislative effort to address puppy-mill problems in a serious way or to establish minimum humane breeding standards. In recent years, lawmakers in Connecticut, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and other states have considered and passed bills relating to puppy mills, and in each case the AKC opposed reform. They not only opposed a ballot initiative in Missouri that pretty closely mirrored the Oregon reform—the one supported by Ted Paul—but actually worked with agriculture groups on a countermeasure in the state legislature. That proposed amendment to the state constitution would have affirmed “the right of Missouri citizens to raise animals in a humane manner that promotes the health and survival of the animals without the state imposing an undue economic burden on their owners.” The term humane manner in this language is just a throwaway line, and in practice it would have meant that animal-use industries could operate as they pleased, with any real attempt at reform disqualified as “an undue economic burden.” It would have reduced all issues of animal welfare to a calculation of costs. It would not only have prevented the puppy-mill measure or any subsequent reform of factory farming, but also nullified the state’s anti-cockfighting law approved by voters in 1998. And fortunately, the AKC’s opposition was not persuasive to voters considering Proposition B, the Missouri ballot measure to impose humane standards on large-scale dog-breeding operations. Voters approved it by a comfortable margin in November 2010, enacting reforms for the care of dogs in the state that has one-third of the nation’s puppy mills and churns out perhaps one million dogs a year for the pet trade.
The registration fees that the AKC gets for new litters of puppies explain in part its reluctance to crack down on mills. Every time the group registers a litter of puppies, it collects a fee, and this arrangement accounts for a large share of AKC revenue. A puppy producer can use the AKC papers as supposed evidence of a superior breeding operation, but the papers mean little more than that the breeder knows the lineage of the animal—the parents, grandparents, and other forebears. The papers do nothing to guarantee the animal is healthy, or that the breeding occurred in a high-welfare setting. There are no meaningful health standards for the breeds in the AKC registry. The standards relate to the outward physical appearance of the animals, known as the conformation, not to their overall well-being or fitness. “The best use of pedigree papers is for house-breaking your dog,” says veterinarian and animal behaviorist Michael Fox, for many years a staff expert at HSUS. “They don’t mean a damn thing. You can have an immune-deficient puppy that is about to go blind and has epilepsy, hip dysplasia, hemophilia and one testicle, and the AKC will register it.”
Not a thing in AKC papers on a dog provides the least assurance that the animal is not the product of a puppy mill. Although the group says it’s tough on substandard mills, they don’t back it up with much. In fact, several of the major mills raided by law enforcement and the HSUS had dogs registered by the AKC. And even if the AKC denied registration to a mill, the owners of that operation will simply turn to another respectable-sounding registry for their “papers,” without changing a single thing to benefit the animals. If the AKC’s inspection program were as sound and serious as its leaders insist, then why do ten thousand or more puppy mills exist in America? And why, when local police and HSUS emergency personnel raid these mills, do they invariably find miserable, squalid, and cruel conditions?
One basic problem here is that the AKC is a captive to its revenue model. Any real standards and enforcement would disrupt the whole profitable enterprise. The AKC wants the money, the mill operators need the stamp of approval, and supporting them both are millions of Americans duped into thinking that the registry is meaningful and that the mills are humane.
It used to be that the AKC was the only breeder registry that anybody paid attention to, and the only brand that mattered. But now there is a long list of other registries, and all of these groups compete against one another for registration fees. The result is a kind of race to the bottom, in which competition doesn’t raise standards but lowers them. It’s become strictly business for the breed registries, with no one wanting to offend or lose fee-paying breeders, and the proof can be found in those thousands of mills that the AKC has sought to protect from even the most modest of reforms.
With the AKC and other such groups doing so little to protect the welfare of dogs in the commercial pet trade, one might think that at least federal regulators are doing their part. Under the federal Animal Welfare Act, the USDA is supposed to conduct inspections of large, licensed commercial breeders. It turns out that more than half of the ten thousand mills are not required to get a license and thus are not inspected by USDA at all. A loophole in the regulations exempts breeders if they sell dogs directly to consumers right from the farm or through a website, rather than selling them through a pet store, and thousands of operators have been quick to exploit this loophole. So if you go shopping for a dog from a commercial breeder on the Internet, chances are you’re dealing with
a seller operating free of any inspection process at all, unless state law has a requirement of its own.
Even for licensed breeders, however, it doesn’t take much to clear inspection. There is a requirement for clean water and proper sanitation, but no prohibitions on lifelong confinement in small wire cages, cage stacking, overcrowding of the dogs, denial of exercise or socialization, or unrelenting breeding of the females. If you kept your own dog in a small wire cage twenty-four hours a day, month after month, in every extreme of heat or freezing cold, and gave her no company and human affection, but did once a day drop some food and water in the cage and clean up her mess now and then, you would meet the federal standards that apply to puppy mills.
It’s hard to believe, but a large percentage of licensed breeders cannot meet even these minimal rules. The inspector general of the USDA, in a 2010 report on examining the department’s inspection program, seemed astonished by the widespread disregard for basic standards of humane care, and by the casual treatment of repeat offenders. As the Associated Press described the USDA audit: “The investigators visited 68 dog breeders and dog brokers in eight states that had been cited for at least one violation in the previous three years. On those visits, they found that first-time violators were rarely penalized, even for more serious violations, and repeat offenders were often let off the hook as well. The agency also gave some breeders a second chance to correct their actions even when they found animals dying or suffering, delaying confiscation of the animals.”
The report describes one case, at an Oklahoma puppy mill, in which a USDA inspector found twenty-nine violations of the law, but imposed no penalties. A subsequent inspection at this same facility found five dead dogs, while surviving dogs had resorted to cannibalism. USDA still took no enforcement action and left the dogs behind. It took the deaths of twenty-two more dogs before the USDA finally revoked the breeder’s license. The government’s investigation of USDA’s program found that problematic dealers were repeatedly violating the law because the department took little or no enforcement action. As the inspector general reported, “At the re-inspection of 4,250 violators, inspectors found that 2,416 repeatedly violated AWA [the Animal Welfare Act], including some that ignored minimum care standards. Therefore, relying heavily on education for serious or repeat violators—without an appropriate level of enforcement—weakened the agency’s ability to protect the animals.”
This indictment by the department’s own inspector general is only the latest of four similar audits on animal-welfare enforcement problems dating back nearly twenty years. And it completely discredits the pet trade’s last-resort defense that at least they are “USDA approved.” When the puppy-mill operators are not holding out their AKC or UKC papers, they’re proudly displaying their USDA certification. Among pet store owners, likewise, “We only use USDA-licensed breeders” is the standard assurance when a customer asks if the dogs on display came from a puppy mill. We now know what a USDA license is worth, because the USDA inspector general has told us for the fourth time—exactly nothing.
Nothing Fancy: The Costs of Reckless Breeding
MANY MEMBERS OF THE AKC and of other breed clubs obviously are fascinated by their dogs, and they certainly have genuine affection and pride for them. It’s their version of the human-animal bond, and it’s real enough. But they seem to lose sight of the bigger picture—valuing their own convenience and satisfaction over the larger problems within the field. They pamper their own animals, but stand in the way of a more universal approach to protecting dogs. They’re like those puppy-mill operators in Quebec, attentive to their own pets on the first floor of the house while somehow remaining indifferent to all of the miserable, mistreated creatures crowded in the basement.
It is not just their tolerance for puppy mills that is a problem, but an absolutely obsessive focus on conforming to the standardized breed type, which results in inherited disorders and congenital health problems that beset almost every breed. These inherited diseases, disorders, and body malformations are one of the most significant companion-animal-welfare issues there is—not as bloody as dogfighting, not as plainly obvious as abuses on puppy mills, and not as final as euthanasia. But in a different way, they are every bit as detrimental to the well-being of dogs because of the duration of the suffering, the shortening of their life span, and the ubiquity of problems among the many purebreds with inherited disorders.
Each of the breeds has its alluring qualities that attract the interest of fanciers. Many terriers are efficient hunters, able to dig out prey. Border collies herd sheep. The Labrador retriever swims out and returns birds shot by hunters. In looking at the physical diversity of dogs, it’s hard to believe that a tiny, hairless Chihuahua and a Great Dane descend from the same common ancestor—the wolf. A study in the American Naturalist compared the genetic diversity among dogs across the entire order Carnivora. The researchers found more difference between the skulls of a Pekingese and a collie than between those of a walrus and a coati, a member of the raccoon family native to South America.
One thing purebreds all have in common, to a greater or lesser extent, is a long list of physical problems afflicting them. These troubles are the result of a remarkable degree of inbreeding, with brother and sister or father and daughter bred to achieve “the perfect look” and to match the standard of the registry. It would be unthinkable to countenance this sort of incest in the human community, partly because of the detrimental genetic consequences. “We have allowed some breeds to become too heavy, some too short-faced, some too heavy-coated, some others short-legged, others too short-lived,” says historian David Hancock, “all in the pursuit of cosmetic points, not sound anatomical points.”
German shepherds too frequently have hip dysplasia that cripples the animals early in their lives. Greyhounds seem the model of strength and fitness, but as they get older they develop cancers with unnerving frequency. My little West Highland terrier Randi was beset by skin problems and allergies, as are so many others of the breed. Cavalier King Charles spaniels have an inherited heart disease and a skull malformation called syringomyelia, a condition in which fluid-filled cavities occur within the spinal cord near the brain. The condition causes intense pain, and sometimes “a dog’s brain swells beyond the space provided by her skull.” Some 30 to 70 percent of Cavaliers develop this condition.
English bulldogs “may well be the most extreme example of genetic manipulation in the entire canine world.” They are susceptible to any or all of the following problems: cataracts, demodicosis (a skin disease), elbow dysplasia, entropion (an abnormal rolling in of the eyelid), hip dysplasia, hypothyroidism, neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (a congenital disease where fatty pigments are deposited in the brain and cause brain dysfunction), and von Willebrand’s disease (a type of bleeding disorder caused by defective blood platelets). In short, these animals are suffering because breeders are pushing in their noses, extending the length of their backs, narrowing their hips, compressing their skulls, and doing so many other things to them for cosmetic show purposes.
In the United Kingdom, Crufts is to the Kennel Club what Westminster is to the AKC. The BBC ceased broadcasting the show in 2009 because of the Kennel Club’s failure to establish standards to prevent inherited disorders. One recent winner at Crufts, a pug named Danny, had to lie on an ice pack as his owner was conducting a giddy victory interview. Danny had overheated from the limited amount of walking he had to do in the show competition. His face was so flat that he could not pant enough to cool himself, and to help him breathe better Danny had undergone surgery to clear his palate of excess skin. That’s a heritable disorder that would likely pass on to his offspring as a prized Crufts champion.
“When I watch Crufts, what I see is a parade of mutants,” Dr. Mark Evans, the top veterinarian with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), told the BBC. “It is some freakish, garish beauty pageant that has nothing frankly to do with health and welfare. The show world is about an ob
session about beauty and there is a ridiculous concept that this is how we should judge dogs.”
Until very recently, the AKC and the Kennel Club have had no health and welfare standards in their judging contests, just conformance standards for the breeds they recognize. For instance, Rhodesian ridgebacks get their name from a distinctive ridge on their back that is thought to be a mild form of spina bifida. Yet if the dog does not have that characteristic, the animal is disqualified from shows, and some breeders are not sentimental about what to do with them. Breeder Ann Woodrow told the BBC that the culling of ridgebacks without the ridge was getting tougher. “We do have trouble nowadays with the young vets who tend to see everything in black and white and won’t put them down,” said Woodrow. “Usually we have to go to an old vet that we’ve known for years and just quietly put him to sleep.” So all of these dogs are killed for the simple reason that their ridges weren’t quite up to show specifications. And by her reckoning, a quick and quiet death administered by the older vets, who understand how these things are done, is preferable to putting the dog “in the hands of the fighting people, who are appalling.”
In the wake of the BBC exposé Pedigree Dogs Exposed, the Kennel Club and the Dogs Trust, an animal-welfare group, jointly commissioned an independent inquiry led by Cambridge professor emeritus Sir Patrick Bateson. That report affirmed the findings of the BBC broadcast and a similar report commissioned by the RSPCA. In response, the Kennel Club has since banned registration of puppies from closely related parents and revised some of its breed standards. The AKC has taken no similar steps, for all of that research they’ve funded through the Canine Health Foundation.
Reform in the world of breed fancy in the United States is long overdue. The gene pools of certain breeds must be infused with new genetic material, and freakish conformity standards must be overhauled. King Charles Cavaliers, for instance, descend from just six individuals—and the situation for these dogs continues to get worse with every successive case of inbreeding. Indeed, most breeds today descend from just a few founder animals, and as they breed relatives together, they further shrink the gene pools. Shows must recognize not just body type, but health, agility, and certain functionality. The focus on appearance has been a disaster for dogs.
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