The Doggie in the Window

by Rory Kress

  What actually happens when a companion animal becomes an agricultural commodity?

  To begin to answer this question, I speak with one of the most seasoned, undercover investigators of animal welfare cases out there. He asks me to call him Pete for this book instead of his real name. I agree. There are certain questions he won’t answer so as to not reveal the tricks of his trade and preserve his cover for future investigations, which is okay by me.

  Over the fifteen years he’s been undercover, Pete has investigated more than seven hundred commercial dog breeders. He’s worked undercover at several puppy mills as well as at every other type of farm and slaughterhouse under the sun. His hidden camera footage has been instrumental in shutting down some of the worst out there and in shedding light on the ugly but common practices at many of the rest. In fact, you’ve likely seen some of his footage on TV or in documentaries over the years, where his unprecedented access has been instrumental in raising public outcry. When it comes to comparing the day-to-day practices at commercial dog breeders to factory farms, there is no one better suited to illustrating the similarities.

  As you might expect, during an investigation, Pete is extremely careful to always keep his cover—even when he is working at a facility day in, day out for weeks or months on end. But he nearly blew it on one of the biggest investigations of his career, when he accidentally revealed just one small shred of his compassionate mind-set for animals.

  It was 2008. Pete had been hired by Kathy Jo Bauck to work at her notorious Pick of the Litter Kennel in Minnesota. With up to 1,351 dogs on the premises at the height of her operation, Bauck’s was one of the bigger USDA-licensed facilities out there. And to keep such a massive operation humming, Pete says she ran her business exactly like the factory farms he’d worked at before.

  “The practice from the word go in the morning was exactly like working at a factory farm,” Pete says. “In fact, I made an undercover mistake: I was the only person who called it a kennel. It was pointed out to me by several workers on a lunch break. They said ‘Kennel?… We’ve always just called it the farm. We’ve never called it a kennel.’”1

  This mistake was a rare one for Pete to make in the field. The strict vegan and self-described animal lover, who says he doesn’t even swat flies, knew he’d made an error. To call a breeding operation a kennel implies an expectation of humane treatment for the dogs. Many puppy mills even use the word kennel in their business names because the word is one that they know will sound familiar and comforting to pet owners. After all, many of us willingly pay good money to take our dogs to kennels to board when we go out of town or for doggie day care. But Pete should have known better—the workday at the Baucks’ was nothing like a kennel; it was all industrial-strength farming practices at their worst.

  “To [the other workers], it was a dog farm. And they’d worked on other farms,” he says. “It was a dog farm. You start in the morning, and you get the chores done. You don’t take care of the dogs; you get the chores done. You have to feed, you look for the dead, you’re going to remove the dead puppies. You’re going to remove the dead dogs, make notes about the sick ones that you may or may not treat. Then you’re going to go about fixing things. It is exactly like you do when you’re pulling dead at the broiler farm or at the egg farm or you’re pulling dead piglets at the hog farm. Or at a calf ranch—it’s identical… When I learned that’s how they viewed it, I quickly went in with that mentality, and it was pretty easy to get by with the work. But the way they would treat the animals too was with a callousness that I think would be shocking to most people or confusing to most people. But I had seen it before on farms.”

  The unbridled callousness seen at Kathy Jo Bauck’s operation is horrifying to hear recounted as Pete tells it to me. But it is another thing entirely to see it. The undercover video he shot there is harrowing: workers shoving puppies into wire cages or yanking them by a single paw to be moved; dogs with gaping open wounds across their jaws or ribs left to rot; a pug whose eye had come out of its socket and was never surgically removed to relieve his suffering; an emaciated, pregnant spaniel refused medical care; dogs simply lying dead in the cages where they’d toiled their entire lives.

  But when the dogs did not just die on their own, Pete says he watched Bauck’s husband, Allen, gather up the sickest for slaughter.

  “Allen Bauck, the husband, one of the USDA licensees, was done with other chores during the day, but now was the time he was going to collect the [sick]. I had seen this at a variety of farms, especially a hog farm I worked at,” Pete says, comparing the Baucks’ practice specifically to the way hog farmers would hang their dying sows once they’d long passed the point of needing a quick and humane death. “Why don’t you take care of them properly from the word go? It just didn’t happen. It was the same thing with these dogs. So it’s time to start collecting the sick: there’s too many, and [Allen had the] time. We start gathering them, and we put them in a truck. This one mastiff in particular is absolutely at death’s door. Blood’s coming out of his mouth… he’s slowly dying. And Allen wants to take the time to wander off and go talk to someone who showed up at the farm and bullshit with the guy about fixing cars.”

  Pete watched and even recorded video to show just how long it took for Allen Bauck to return to the truck and take the three dogs he’d gathered to finally shoot them. He watched as the mastiff continued to suffer in agony for at least ten more excruciating minutes while Bauck chatted with his buddy about cars. Eventually, Bauck returned with his gun and finished the job.

  But as Pete tells me, death by shooting isn’t always the swift ending to a tortured life.

  “There was one dog that [Allen Bauck] had mentioned that he had shot in the past. It was a chocolate Lab. And when he shot the chocolate Lab in the head with a .22 rifle, [the bullet] bounced off the dog’s skull, and he said the dog just stood there panting and looking at him. It didn’t even move. So he put the .22 in the Lab’s ear and pulled the trigger in order to kill it,” Pete says.

  But Bauck’s way of recounting the story of the Lab’s death to Pete was somehow even more disturbing to him than the actual facts.

  “It was the way of discussing it: casually, matter-of-factly, almost bragging with a gallows sense of humor and kind of like a piqued interest in the grotesque and the morbid that I have seen among people who club calves to death with hammers and throw chickens in trash cans alive and bury them beneath their own dead. It was almost the same thing. And you don’t see that in [a USDA] inspection [report].”

  This is a point Pete repeats several times throughout our conversation: that the USDA inspection reports are not indicative of what can be found in the commercial breeding operations on any given day.

  Gibbens at the USDA oddly echoes Pete’s sentiment that the inspection reports are only a snapshot—and not a fully representational one at that.

  “We do ten thousand to eleven thousand inspections per year,” Gibbens tells me, including the eight thousand facilities that his department regulates under the Animal Welfare Act beyond just the two thousand or so dog breeders. “Do the numbers, right? Most places, we see once a year. So we don’t know what goes on 364 days a year at these facilities.”

  But this discrepancy between reality and what appears on the record can create a very ugly situation on the ground for those other 364 days a year.

  “When I work at a facility, I always, 100 percent of the time, find many, many, many violations that inspectors never see and never write them up for,” Pete says. “I am fully confident that every facility that I ever go to, that there are far many more things that are happening there than I can observe just by walking through it. And I get more statements from [the breeders] and see more than an inspector does when they go.”

  Having watched Pete’s undercover videos and compared them to official inspection reports, I can attest to the fact that he has pinpointed and recorded images of violations that do not appear on the record even just a few we
eks later. He’s not surprised when I point this out to him.

  “I have been involved in the process of gathering state and federal records for [dog breeders]. When I first started doing this work, what I would do was I would use those records to determine which kennels I would make a priority in visiting. I would also visit other kennels that had alleged violations if they were in the area. And what I consistently found is that, right or wrong, whether this makes sense or not, what I would find on previous inspection reports had absolutely no impact on what I would find at the time when I would visit a kennel. I would go to some of the worst actors on paper, and their place would be perfectly clean when I was there. Then I would go to places that had never received any violations, and I couldn’t fucking believe that they were allowed to have a license, it was so horrible. You know: veterinary care violations, open wounds, those kinds of things.”

  I ask him how this is possible—how an official, government inspection report can be so utterly misrepresentative of the truth on the ground. Pete has seen exactly how.

  “[The kennel workers] would be literally a minute ahead of an inspector. They would be cleaning things up and hiding things and putting them right back. Such as putting mats in cages for puppies and then taking them right up. Or trying to clean up moldy feed just right in front of the inspector while someone else tries to delay the inspector. Common sense would tell you people would be more careful than that, and they would have a better plan than that. But the reality was like something out of a bad TV show. And it worked. It worked every time,” he says.

  But those were just the violations that the breeders were able to slip past investigators. Far more insidious are the violations that investigators actually witnessed and chose to let slide. The USDA has repeatedly and publicly said that educating the breeders is a vital part of their mission—hence the teachable moment policy. And while the controversial teachable moment policy would allow for investigators to document these violations without slapping them onto the official inspection report, Pete says he witnessed even this permissive tactic being thrown aside.

  “What many breeders would tell me is there would be a violation that they felt was nondirect…such as peeling paint, or there is mold in this area, or there is a structural problem, or you have rats, or something like that. Okay. And [the inspectors] would say, ‘If you would just take care of that, I will just look the other way and I will just let that go,’” Pete says. “These are supposed to be teachable moments, where they get written up and then it goes off [the record] after a certain period of time. But what the vast majority of breeders are telling me is that it doesn’t even get written up; it’s just a verbal instruction of please do this. And they realize that if they do it, there won’t be any problem with the inspector later on. And the inspector will just let the whole thing go.”

  “So much for transparency,” I say.

  Pete lets out a low, dark laugh.

  It may seem like a small concession for an inspector to make. What’s so bad about peeling paint or rust on a cage joint? When we think of puppy mills, it’s the serious types of violations that Pete witnessed and documented at Kathy Jo Bauck’s operation that seem to be the ones these inspectors should concern themselves with. Fair enough. But the trouble is that the teachable moments system is already in place to handle these smaller concerns in an informal way so that breeders can learn from their mistakes. At least in recent years, with the formalization of the teachable moments policy, these smaller violations would be available by FOIA request so that the public could evaluate just how minor these missteps were when they failed to appear in the primary inspection reports. But if nothing is being documented and it’s all agreed upon in off-the-record conversations, how can anyone other than the breeder and the inspector be sure what’s happening? And worse yet, if it’s up to the inspector to leave something entirely off the record, who’s to say that the violations would stop with peeling paint and not something more serious? Well, in short, there’s no way to know.

  Pete also points out another problem with the inspection system. At many of these breeders, the same inspector will go out to the same property year after year—you can see proof of it in the signature at the bottom of every report. As a result, the breeders and inspectors become collegial, and it gets harder for the government agent to remain unbiased.

  “You have a system where you have federal inspectors. So that sounds great on its head, right?” Pete begins. “But you have inspectors who have to go out and see these people day in and day out. And human nature is to be nonconfrontational. So what do you do when you have to, every year, you have to see the same people, and you don’t want to be the bad guy, and you don’t want to be confrontational? You let things go. You start to side with them. And from what I’ve personally seen, the USDA gets mad at inspectors who rock the boat. [The USDA doesn’t] want to pull licenses; they don’t want to complain about cruelty. So I think that when you see that someone has a lot of violations, that doesn’t necessarily reveal what their place would be like on the day that you go to visit them. And if you see that a place has no violations, in my personal experience, there is an equal chance that is because they are actually following the rules as it is that they are ignoring the rules. The inspector is just so corrupt that he or she does not care at all and never writes them up.”

  As familiar as he is with the USDA’s inspection system across various types of agricultural operations, Pete remains somewhat perplexed as to why the agency is tasked with oversight for commercial dog breeders. He believes the USDA’s involvement, in part, enables the factory-farming mentality that many of the breeders have in place. As he’s seen, many of the commercial dog breeders are former cattle or hog farmers who have previously worked with the USDA inspection system in their prior livelihoods. As a result, Pete says it should come as no surprise that the bulk of puppy mills can be found in the Midwest, where most of the nation’s agriculture industry is clustered.

  “The vast majority of [my investigations have] been across the Midwest…which has also been a hotbed of animal agriculture. So it’s no surprise that dogs are part of that ag,” he says. “Puppy mills are animal agriculture. They are farmed dogs. I have been to so many places, so many puppy mills, where they used to have a hog farm and they converted the hog farm into a dog kennel because you could have a larger number of head in a smaller amount of space with a higher price per head for that type of livestock—that livestock being puppies. And then [the breeders] already understand the USDA because—for some fucking reason—the USDA is supposed to handle chickens, cows, pigs, and dogs and cats.”

  It seems to me that Pete has earned the right to question the USDA’s capacity to inspect the welfare of companion animals over his long career in the field witnessing and documenting the holes in the system. There’s no doubt that he’s seen the worst of the worst, enough to make his outrage with the USDA understandable. But to gain that access to these breeders, Pete’s hands are not entirely clean. In order to maintain his cover and gain unprecedented access to these farms and breeders, he’s had to do work that he admits he’s not proud of. Animal welfare advocates, the people I’d expect to be his kindred spirits, have not always been fans of his work and have, in fact, been some of his biggest critics.

  “Some of them liked me, and some of them thought I was the worst person on earth. One person called me the next ‘Son of Sam’ on social media,” he recalls of the backlash he faced on his first puppy mill case. “The case lasted five and a half months, and I had to do some really bad things to maintain my cover, but I was reporting the evidence to a U.S. attorney’s office… I would go and take this evidence to law enforcement, and then law enforcement would use it to shut down this target and save over six hundred dogs and over one hundred cats. Ultimately, I got a civilian medal from the federal government.”

  Pete says that this memory of receiving an honor from the government gets him through the darkest moments of working undercover side by s
ide with unscrupulous breeders and farmers, witnessing the horrors that he does.

  “Fifteen years later, that really has stuck with me. There is a place for all people to do all kinds of things. I realized that I have an ability to compartmentalize my emotions and to place more of a value on withstanding suffering than just trying to be happy. If I can do that, I may not be saving animals personally. I may not be personally running around getting people to be vegan, making people adopt instead of buying puppies from puppy mills. But in my role, I can assist all those efforts. And the reason that has been easier for me is because I’ve seen the fruits of this labor from my first case,” he says.

  But I have to ask: How can an award from the federal government mean so much to him when he has seen firsthand the way that the federal regulations and inspectors fail these animals time and time again?

  “I’ve always said I have kind of a punk rock mentality of, you know, ‘Fuck the government for the terrible regulations,’” he admits. “But how do you measure success in fighting puppy mills? By how many lives you’ve saved? Or do you measure the success by how many puppy mills are shut down and how much adoptions are increased at shelters? Because those two things may be mutually exclusive.”

  But perhaps his biggest frustration lies in the Animal Welfare Act itself—the very legislation that the USDA is charged with enforcing. Without the right regulations, even the best enforcement is not enough. In particular, there is one omission in the Animal Welfare Act’s regulations for dog breeding that troubles him above all. And this omission, in Pete’s estimation, is subjecting dogs to even worse conditions than some factory-farmed animals.

  “There is nothing listed in the Animal Welfare Act regarding the psychological well-being of dogs. And that is the most frustrating thing to me,” Pete says. “My work in the last few years has been focused on factory-farm animals. I have worked at three egg farms, and I personally hate egg farms more than anything on earth. But I think about egg farms all the time when I go into a puppy mill, because we are pushing for a cage-free country right now [for eggs]. And it is completely related to the psychological well-being of hens. And yet there is nothing in the Animal Welfare Act regarding the psychological well-being of animals who unwillingly devote their entire lives to produce our pets. That’s the biggest problem that I see in the system.”