by Rory Kress
“USDA licensure means absolutely nothing because there’s no enforcement,” Blome says.
But the story behind the fight to pass the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act tells a far more nuanced tale of the way that the dog-breeding industry intersects with Big Agriculture. Initially known as Proposition B, an earlier version of the legislation was floated to a Missouri ballot initiative in 2010. It narrowly passed with a little more than 51 percent of the vote.6
This initial ballot initiative called for raising the bar for the care of breeding dogs while also capping the number allowed per facility at fifty. With many facilities in the state breeding anywhere from 100 to 750 dogs at a time, it’s clear that this numeric cap would have forced an enormous change for the industry. But it wasn’t just the dog breeders who gnashed their teeth at the number. That fifty-dog cap sent the far more powerful agriculture industry into a tizzy, and as a result, lawmakers began to bow to pressure to repeal Proposition B even after voters had passed it.
Animal welfare advocates were furious to see the will of the voters undercut as legislators worked to create what they dubbed “the Missouri Solution”—a compromise that would weaken Proposition B.
“Lawmakers should never have substituted their judgment for the people of Missouri and gutted core provisions of Prop B,” President and CEO of the Humane Society Wayne Pacelle said at the time. “The so-called compromise was not about protecting animals. It was about placating agri-business.”7
Blome agrees.
“Make no mistake—make no mistake,” Blome says adamantly. “Puppies are considered an agricultural commodity by the agricultural community. Any move to improve the regulations and improve the circumstances of puppies is absolutely viewed as a direct attack on all agriculture.”
As Blome’s office and its partners worked to hash out this compromise, the national farm lobby marched into the fray.
“I’ve never been more breathtakingly astonished than I was… when the compromise was happening, to see national pork, national beef, and national poultry interests flood Missouri with money and messaging in order to stop regulations that were meant to improve the lives of dogs in puppy mills,” Blome recalls.
Brian Klippenstein remembers the fight against Proposition B as well—but from the other side. Before his ascent to the transition team leader for Trump’s USDA, Klippenstein was the executive director of Protect the Harvest, a farmer and animal owner’s rights advocacy group started by Forrest Lucas, founder of Lucas Oil. In that role, Klippenstein was instrumental in battling Proposition B on behalf of big agriculture.
“What they cleverly did was try to eliminate dog breeding—but they don’t say that: they say you can’t own more than fifty dogs,” Klippenstein says of the fight over the fifty-dog cap. “Anybody in the business of breeding—anybody responsible, and not all of them are—will tell you that you can’t make a living with fifty. It drives you into some other field.”8
Klippenstein explains that, fearing for their livelihoods, licensed pet breeders approached their better-funded allies in agriculture to help fight the legislation.
“There is a kindred spirit among those who work with the land, the people who work with animals—most of whom would say they’re God’s creatures. To some degree, as the Allied Forces and NATO say, we should consider an attack on one of us an attack on all of us. Not necessarily an attack on a bad actor, but just when they go after one group, the other groups should care for several reasons. One is they should know they’re going to be next,” Klippenstein explains of the reasons behind the farm lobby’s battle against the Proposition B legislation. “[Forrest Lucas] came in with enough money to do some radio and TV ads to tell the competing side of the story…and that fifty number disappeared.”
Surprisingly, Blome herself was ultimately instrumental in removing the cap of fifty dogs from the legislation to forge the compromise on Proposition B that became the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act.
“The ones who wanted puppy mills abolished wanted to keep that fifty-dog limit. That’s where I came in and said, ‘Look, give us enforcement authority,’” Blome says. “You can have the best regulations. You can have the best standards for care in the world. But [it doesn’t matter] if they’re not being enforced… They gave the attorney general’s office that authority so that we could actually make a difference. So the puppy mill opponents agreed, and we traded away the fifty-dog limit for enforcement authority at the attorney general’s office.”
Klippenstein’s argument against the fifty-dog limit provides a window into what exactly is at stake for the agricultural community and the farm lobby in the fight over dog breeding.
“If there’s a number that separates responsible ownership from irresponsible ownership for dogs, then it would only be logical that there would be [a number] for swine, bovine, and equine,” Klippenstein explains. “There are irresponsible people out there but…it’s not because they’re small or big. It’s because of what they’re committed to doing. Often the bigger ones have highly trained people, more modern practices, more oversight, and more regulatory scrutiny. If it’s bad, it’s bad.”
Compromise in hand and fifty-dog cap stricken from the legislation, the regulations formerly known as Proposition B were revised and signed into law as the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act. For the care of breeding dogs, these new restrictions made some real changes: requiring constant access to outdoor exercise areas, increasing cage sizes, and mandating that veterinarians have hands-on visits to these facilities at least once a year. The law also added funding to hire three small-animal veterinarians who could respond to violations or illnesses reported on-site. Before the law was passed, the USDA exclusively employed large-animal veterinarians for this purpose—workers trained only in the care of pigs, cattle, and other traditional farm animals.
“[The large-animal veterinarians] just didn’t know exactly what would rise to the level of abuse or neglect in a companion animal, because what they see on a daily basis is comparable to the way we treat pigs and cows and chickens,” Blome explains of these vets who had not been trained to work on the delicate anatomies of dogs and cats.
As you may recall, the USDA inspectors who are tasked with evaluating these facilities are not required to be veterinarians—the agency’s Dr. Gibbens told me that only about 60 percent of them are.9
But Blome believes that the most important change that came with the new regulations was the way dogs began receiving access to water in Missouri.
“Missouri now requires constant access to potable drinking water, whereas the federal regulations require watering twice a day, and that’s it. Or as often as needed, it says. So, if it’s 115 degrees…and the water dries up, they still don’t get any water until that evening. I mean that’s crazy. That’s crazy that that’s the rule in every state but Missouri,” Blome says.
With new enforcement authority and tightened regulations, Blome and her team went into action. In 2010—before the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act—1,414 USDA-licensed breeders were up and running in Missouri.10 By 2016, that number had dropped to 678.
But there’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done in Missouri. The state still topped the Humane Society’s “Horrible Hundred” list in 2017 with the highest number of bad breeders in the country for the fifth year in a row.11 This even as commercial breeding operations continue to go out of business on their own because they are unable to conform to the new regulations. But with its work still very much unfinished, the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act is on tenuous ground in Missouri: every year, the battle rises anew, and animal rights advocates are forced to defend the legislation. And the battle is not likely to get any easier. As of this writing, the director of the Missouri Department of Agriculture is fifth-generation hog farmer Chris Chinn. Chinn has openly admitted to using controversial gestation stalls for sows on her farm. In 2010, she spoke to National Hog Farmer magazine about her fears that reform to pet breeding in Missouri would negatively impact the liveli
hood of the state’s farmers.12
But farmers’ allies within the agriculture department aren’t the only threat to the legislation. There are also independent groups that have sprung up in outraged response to Proposition B and the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act. Mindy Patterson, together with her husband, founded perhaps the most prominent of these organizations, called the Cavalry Group, back in 2010. Her group’s stated mission is to protect and defend animal enterprise. Patterson is a vocal proponent of private animal-ownership rights and sees dog breeding as falling under that umbrella. Her group works as a liaison between attorneys and commercial breeders she feels are in need of a good defense. Often, she speaks on behalf of the industry when stories about bad breeders arise in the press.
“Prop B had much more to it than met the eye. The definition of ‘pet’ within the legislation was ‘any domesticated animal living near or around the house.’ So it set a precedent. If it was about dogs, then why didn’t it say ‘canine?’ It said ‘pet,’” she explains.13
She’s right: the ballot measure known as Proposition B did originally define pet as “any domesticated animal normally maintained in or near the household of the owner,” although the legislation did only refer to “pets” contextually as the products of breeding dogs. Still, Patterson and other farmers’ advocates successfully argued that this type of regulation on the books would lead to a slippery slope wherein any farm animal could come to be defined as a pet. The revised Canine Cruelty Prevention Act that was ultimately signed into law ended up revising the definition of a pet as “any species of the domestic dog, Canis lupus familiaris, or resultant hybrids, normally maintained in or near the household of the owner.”
“So you know, [Prop B] could have easily been amended or expanded to regulate cattle, pork, pigs, chickens. I mean, that’s the thing: [the Humane Society] doesn’t do anything without setting a precedent to come back for more,” Patterson says. “If the government can tell you how many animals you can own, then you’re a breath away from government telling you how many cars you can sell a year. We have got to get away from government telling us what we can and cannot do in every little aspect.”
In spite of her vehement opposition to Missouri’s Canine Cruelty Prevention Act, Patterson says she believes that reform to the dog-breeding industry should come at the state level—just not the way it was done in the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act. Fair enough. But Patterson’s argument against government overregulation quickly becomes contradictory and leaves me somewhat perplexed.
“You know, we have regulated the textile industry out of our country…just by tightening the regulations so that people give up, and they take their companies to other places. Personally, I am very worried about what is happening—and dog breeders are one thing, okay? But they are doing the same things to our food producers, and they are going to regulate farmers and ranchers out of existence, out of America, and we are going to be importing all our food like we do oil and energy. And I don’t want to buy food from China. I don’t want to buy food from other countries that have looser regulations,” Patterson says.
I point out to her that her argument is contradictory. She wants less regulation here in the United States. But at the same time, she doesn’t feel comfortable purchasing goods from countries with laxer regulations than the United States. She responds by clarifying that the regulations in place on breeders now are based on emotion, not science, and they are tailored to putting people out of business.
To wit, Patterson takes issue with the USDA slapping breeders with violations for problems that are not immediately impacting the health of the animals—rusty cages or peeling paint in the kennels, for example. She says these measures are impinging on the breeders’ right to do business unmolested. So I ask if she would defend a breeder who has violations on his record from the USDA that directly impact the health of the dogs on his property. It’s worth noting that she has done just this, speaking to the press in defense of breeders who have wound up on the Humane Society’s Horrible Hundred and have been blasted in the media. I ask her why she would be willing to protect these bad actors, and I list a few examples of what I’ve seen on the USDA reports of Horrible Hundred facilities: bloody stool, rotten teeth, dead puppies left in cages with their mothers.
“We do not defend those who do not abide by the law. And if they are not upstanding in their industry, then how can you possibly defend someone legally or otherwise that’s not exemplary in their industry?” she insists.
But those are exactly the types of breeders she has defended in the media. For what it’s worth, she’s blasted the Horrible Hundred list as “nothing more than a fundraiser” for the Humane Society.14
The Humane Society is a frequent target of Patterson’s ire in our discussion. She says that the media panders to the Humane Society and other like-minded groups and bemoans the fact that animal welfare advocates have the stronger emotional argument but that no one reports the other side—hers and the breeders’ side—of the story. So I ask her, in the interest of fairness and getting her side of the story out in the media, if she can hook me up with one of the breeders in her membership who she considers to be exemplary. I tell her that I will be more than happy to report in my book that breeding can be done on a large scale without harming the dogs if that’s actually the case. I explain that, to date, I’ve only seen hobby breeders who are able to bring dogs into the world humanely—and they are not able to do so as a primary source of income. I do want to show both sides of the story, and in order to do so, I would need to go see for myself the facility she selects and review their USDA inspection reports. In short, I won’t be able to simply take her word for it. She can pick a breeder anywhere in the country—I will be happy to travel anywhere at any time. Patterson says she has many breeders in her membership that immediately come to mind and would be more than happy to demonstrate to me that dogs can be humanely and commercially bred in a large-scale facility. She just has to check with them and get back to me. I circle back with her in the weeks that follow our initial conversation, asking if she’s found a breeder who is doing right by their animals that I can visit and interview. She responds that she is working on it. But a breeder she believes is doing great work that I can visit for myself never materializes.
Maybe Patterson is right, and there is a great commercial breeder out there somewhere. But for Izzie and me, the damage may have already been done. She was born in Missouri in 2010, before the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act was signed. But to truly comprehend the value of state regulations, I have to go deep into the heartland. I need to make the comparison for myself, to see how Missouri’s additional laws impact its breeding dogs while its neighbors adhere to the Animal Welfare Act alone.
CHAPTER NINE
On the Rescue Run
Melissa* is sitting in the open back hatch of her dusty SUV, whispering to an apricot-colored corgi in a cage. She’s a dog breeder in her late thirties and has her black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She wears a Bluetooth earpiece and faded jeans. Her car bears bumper stickers from Protect the Harvest and slogans like My other auto is an AK-47. Melissa has met us at her mother’s house outside Lebanon, Missouri, where both she and her younger sister have come to give up a few longstanding members of their breeding stock to a rescue—the more humane form of retirement. They followed in their mother’s footsteps, continuing the family breeding business. The younger sister opens up her car to reveal two rambunctious Boston terriers and several Pomeranians in a separate cage. The rescue team approaches her car first, careful to avoid the emotional outpouring coming from her sister Melissa with the corgi.
“Will you guys keep in touch and let me know where they end up?” the younger sister, Jamie, asks. “Maybe even send me a picture of them with the families they go to?”
“Of course,” one of the rescuers says as she takes a pair of Pomeranians in her arms and makes her way to one of the two Sprinter vans filled with nearly one hundred rescued dogs.
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p; Jamie approaches the van cautiously and looks at the cages of dogs stacked and tethered together all the way to the ceiling.
“People are really going to adopt all these dogs?” she asks incredulously. “Like, they’ll all get homes?”
“Some might take a while longer than others, but yes. Eventually, they all will,” Theresa Strader, the head of the National Mill Dog Rescue, informs her plainly. Since 2007, her Colorado-based organization has rescued, rehabilitated, and found homes for more than ten thousand dogs from breeding facilities. She’s agreed to let me tag along on one of her monthly rescue trips across the heartland.
“Melissa is really struggling,” Jamie whispers to us, nodding toward her sister, now openly weeping over her ten-year-old corgi’s cage. “I don’t know if she’s going to give him up.”
With the corgi as the last remaining dog on the list to rescue at this stop, Theresa approaches Melissa with a tenderness she typically reserves only for four-legged animals.
“I don’t think I can let him go,” Melissa says, brushing her tears into her slicked-back hairline. “He’s my lapdog.”
“I know,” Theresa says as gently as she can. But she knows that this corgi has never been and never will be a lapdog as long as it stays here. “It’s time he got to retire and enjoy his life as a dog.”
Melissa slowly opens the cage. Instead of handing him over to Theresa’s waiting arms, she pulls the animal awkwardly into her own cumbersome embrace.
“He’s Corn-Husk. That’s his name,” she says, attempting to rock him in her arms. He blankly allows the gesture, his bat ears brushing against her cheek.
“That’s a perfect name for him,” Theresa says, trying not to telegraph her impatience, as the team has several more stops to hit and about fifty more dogs to rescue before midnight. “He’s going to be so happy in his new home. I can promise you that.”