by Rory Kress
But most animal welfare groups are wary of PIJAC because the organization works to protect the existence of retail pet stores as well as their supply chain. To wit, in 2015, PIJAC bestowed upon Hunte’s late founder Andrew Hunte its “Vision Award.” For what it’s worth, I also asked Bober if he could connect me with the Hunte Corporation for an interview. He never followed through on this request despite seeming amenable to doing so in our conversation and despite my follow-up attempts to spur him into action.
But when I spoke to Bober, I asked him why we even need retail pet stores at all. Why can’t consumers just adopt dogs and use pet shops for the supplies they will inevitably need? After all, the pet supply business is nothing to sneeze at: we spent $66.75 billion on feeding, clothing, entertaining, and caring for our animals in 2016 according to the American Pet Products Association (APPA).6 That’s billion—with a B. And by the way, those numbers are on the rise even as an increasing number of municipalities restrict the sale of puppies and cut into the profits of breeders and brokers like the Hunte Corporation. Since 2005, our spending on our pets has nearly doubled. But of that nearly $67 billion, only $2.1 billion went to “live animal purchases” according to the APPA—a number that includes all pet purchases, including cats, rabbits, hamsters, fish, lizards, and so on. So surely pet shops could more than stay afloat without selling dogs—or any live animals for that matter.
Bober doesn’t think so.
“Pet shops are actually more important to the public than [they are] to the industry,” Bober tells me. “I think that one of the key elements of lifelong relationships with pets is finding the ideal companion animal for your particular situation right off the bat rather than having a couple of false starts or, you know, looking for whatever happens to be available. You really owe it to yourself and any animal that you’re going to bring into your home to do the research and to identify the best animal for your situation. One of the things that retail pet stores offer is the ability to connect the individuals with breeders to whom they may not otherwise be able to connect, based on either geographic disparity or economic inability to travel to meet the breeder in person. This can be a real limiting factor for lower-income families, as well as families that have very specific needs due to things like allergies. So we feel that pet choice, which is enhanced through the existence of retail pet stores, really is an important part of helping people find that ideal companion animal.”
Not only does Bober see retail pet stores as vital to consumers, but he also sees them as necessary to support the USDA-licensed breeders over the illegal bad actors.
“The illegal breeders out there—those who should be licensed but actively flout the existence of federal law—they are the problem that we all need to work to address,” Bober says. “Passing a ban on retail sales in a jurisdiction doesn’t do anything to do that. It’s an emotional response to a legitimate problem, but it doesn’t do anything to advance the solution.”
I see Bober’s point here, and I certainly agree that a black-market puppy trade would be a terrible thing. However, his thinking on the bans on the retail pet shops assumes that dogs purchased from USDA-licensed facilities are being treated humanely. His reasoning is sound if the USDA is adequately enforcing regulations that actually account for the unique needs of these animals we love so much that we lavish billions on them annually.
The trouble is, the USDA is not holding up its end of the bargain.
THE DOGGIE IN THE BROWSER WINDOW
Until 2013, if a breeder sold his dogs online, he did not need to be licensed by the USDA. Consider this fact for just a moment. Until very recently—long after internet commerce was well established—breeders could operate online with no government oversight whatsoever. How? By claiming they were retail pet shops.
When the exemption from retail pet stores from USDA licensure was first created more than forty years ago, the agriculture agency envisioned it applying to brick-and-mortar pet shops or hobby breeders selling directly from their homes or farms. In a fact sheet published by the USDA, the agency explains its original reasoning: “Such establishments were not regulated under the [Animal Welfare Act] because it was assumed that customers were providing public oversight.”
Because of this exemption, depending on where you live, your mall’s local pet store selling puppies likely holds a business license and needs to stay up to code with the Health Department—not the federal government.
While it’s easy to find fault with the Animal Welfare Act’s minimal regulations that the USDA does impose upon its licensees, it’s even easier to find fault with the fact that breeders selling online were legally exempted from any USDA oversight at all.
Before the rise of the web, breeders were able to sell dogs directly to individual customers via ads in newspapers and magazines and achieve that retail pet store exemption. This, of course, didn’t guarantee humane treatment but at least was on a much smaller scale than the internet now facilitates. But as Sara Amundson, executive director of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, tells me with a wry laugh, she’s been fighting to end this retail pet store exemption since long before Al Gore invented the internet. However, time and time again, animal welfare advocates were unable to do so. You can hardly blame breeders for taking advantage of the gaping loophole to licensure the internet provides: it was just too good to ignore. By 2010, 80 percent of the worst breeders in the country were those who were freely going unlicensed thanks to this exemption, according to the USDA’s own internal investigation.7
Before the rise of e-commerce, breeders had been forced to rely on pet shops and brokers like the Hunte Corporation to handle wide distribution. Through the web, dogs could be shipped—for a fee paid by the buyer—unaccompanied on a crate in a plane’s cargo hold, and the buyer could then head to his local airport and pick up his brand-new pup. All this without ever meeting a breeder face-to-face, checking out the dog for sale in person, or seeing the place where it was born and bred.
Brick-and-mortar pet shops, already becoming sullied by their reputation as the end point for puppy mills, were no longer even necessary in the puppy purchase transaction. Suddenly, the doggie in the window became the doggie in the internet browser window. And like most things we buy online, there was no guarantee that the dog you clicked on to purchase was, in fact, the dog that you would receive. After all, a beautifully composed stock image of Pomeranian puppies cuddling their mother in a velvet-lined wicker basket is a much easier sell than the real puppies that are actually being offered: traumatized, miserable dogs clinging to each other in a wire cage, their exhausted mother covered in sores and excrement. Now, there was no need to even bother obscuring the truth, because as we all know, on the internet, the truth can be so easily replaced with fantasy.
For years, online sales grew virtually unabated and entirely unregulated by the USDA. New websites launched to aggregate available puppies for hungry buyers: NextDayPets.com, PuppyFind.com, MyLittlePuppy.com, to name a few. These aggregator sites, which effectively operate as brokers, remain largely unregulated by the USDA to this day.
“By gosh, every one of those [aggregator] websites should be turned in to the USDA, because they are brokers, and they should be licensed—no ifs, ands, or buts. It is that simple,” Amundson of the Humane Society Legislative Fund says of this ongoing problem.8
While of course there could have been responsible breeders posting on these sites, there was no one to ensure that that was the case in an official capacity. Finally, in 2013, the USDA was forced to contend with the issue of online pet sales. At that point, the USDA revised its definition of what constituted a retail pet store to exclude anyone selling puppies “sight unseen” to buyers. Now, to qualify for the exemption from being USDA licensed as a breeder, three parties must meet in person for every sale: the buyer, the seller, and the dog. Anything less, and the seller must obtain a USDA license and undergo routine inspections.
This clarification of what exactly defines a retail pet store was
the most recent change to the Animal Welfare Act concerning commercial dog breeding, and it did not even require an amendment. Instead, it required Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack under President Obama to agree to the revision. That’s it. Simple enough, right? Well, not quite.
Amundson says that animal welfare advocates began the battle to make this change as early as 1997 when the Doris Day Animal League, a nonprofit now absorbed into the Humane Society, submitted a petition to the USDA to change the definition of what constitutes a retail pet store. The secretary of agriculture at that time, Dan Glickman, declined to change the definition, prompting the Doris Day Animal League to lead the charge up through the nation’s judicial system until it landed in the U.S. Supreme Court in late 2002.
In the landmark case Doris Day Animal League v. Veneman, the organization fought for then-Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman to specifically remove the exemption from any breeder claiming his residence as a pet store. Given that so many breeders live on the property where they work, much as traditional family farmers once did, this change could have had massive implications for the industry.
“The secretary of agriculture had absolute discretion to make a decision to proactively cover those folks on the basis of that retail pet store exemption being written into regulation. It did not require amending the [Animal Welfare Act]. What it did require was a secretary of ag with the will to make that happen,” says Amundson, who was working for the Doris Day Animal League during the Supreme Court case.
When the decision came down in early 2003, the Supreme Court allowed the exemption to continue, explaining that the Animal Welfare Act never defines what exactly constitutes a store.
“One usually thinks of a store as a business open to the public and engaged in the sale of goods. But not all stores are open to the public, and not all stores are located in shopping malls or other typical business locations,” the decision reads.9
With this reasoning handed down from the Supreme Court, it’s easy to see how the exemption was allowed to apply to internet sales of dogs for so many years. Although the decision in this case did not specifically mention the internet at all, it did offer one window of hope for animal welfare advocates by reiterating that the secretary of agriculture has the power to change the definition of a term appearing in the Animal Welfare Act—a power that the secretary of agriculture at that time, Veneman, declined to use, citing a lack of resources for what would be a large uptick in enforcement efforts. The court found the secretary’s decision to focus the agency’s resources on wholesale breeding facilities instead of these other sellers claiming the retail pet store exemption to be in “the best interest of animal welfare.”10
But even though the Doris Day Animal League did not win this battle, Amundson saw the hidden opportunity in the decision. Now she just had to find a secretary of agriculture willing to make the change.
“We sort of went administration by administration, trying to make the case that we needed to rally the resources in order to realize the merits of the case. But that’s tough. And it really was not until serious discussions with the Obama administration where they said, we may not have 100 percent, we may not have 75 percent, but if we don’t start somewhere, we’re not going to be in a position to ever tackle this issue,” Amundson says of the nearly twenty-year journey to change the retail pet store definition. “It’s always going to be an excuse that we just don’t have the resources. So [the Obama administration] took a leap of faith to a certain degree and just made a decision that they were going to start to regulate these folks. It may be that the [USDA] only had so many dollars that could be allocated to that function, but at least they were going to honor the merits of that case.”
The effect of this change cannot be understated.
With this new rule finally in place, if a breeder was selling dogs online without the buyer physically present, he now had to get a license, keep his facility up to snuff with the USDA, and submit his facility to unannounced inspections just like everyone else. Brick-and-mortar retail pet stores remain exempt from USDA oversight and regulations even now. As the USDA states, in these cases, the consumer provides his own oversight.
But before we agree that a consumer can provide his own oversight, consider the following example.
A customer walks into a pet shop in New Jersey. The dogs look fine enough. She purchases one and goes home with her puppy, never the wiser. But the store’s owner bred this puppy at his own facility more than one thousand miles away to be sold exclusively at this shop. Along the way, the store’s owner never needed to be licensed by the USDA or adhere to any of its regulations—even at his remote breeding facility across state lines. In a case like this, it’s hard to argue that the customer has provided any oversight into the conditions at the facility where her puppy was bred. But this example still qualifies as a valid exemption from USDA licensure. How? Because all three parties were present at the time of the sale: the buyer, the seller, and the dog. This example is not hypothetical and, in fact, is exactly the way that the now notorious Just Pups operated until its owner, Vincent LoSacco, was charged with hundreds of counts of animal cruelty. But more about LoSacco later.
Not surprisingly, unscrupulous breeders without a brick-and-mortar pet shop have still found loopholes to the new retail sales rule. While the new rule requires licenses for online sellers who transport their dogs to buyers without ever meeting in person, many breeders now circumvent the regulation by selling within driving distance of their facilities. As in the example raised by the ASPCA’s Rickey, often these breeders offer to drive to a mutually convenient, neutral location to finalize the sale of the dog. I’ve seen parking lots as the most frequent site of choice for these transactions: outside a Walmart, a Cracker Barrel, a motel, or a strip mall. To my eyes, none of these locations look like a retail pet store, but hey, according to the USDA exemption, that’s what they are. These dogs, purchased online, are not then being sold sight unseen. All are present and accounted for: breeder, buyer, and dog. As Rickey mentioned, this tactic is a classic red flag that a buyer is likely working with a puppy mill and not a responsible breeder. A responsible breeder should have no qualms about allowing a prospective buyer to visit his facility and decide for himself if it is maintained in acceptable conditions. A puppy mill operator will be less comfortable allowing a buyer to see his facility with his own eyes. But these perfectly legal transactions give the consumer no ability to come to his own conclusions about the condition of the dogs at these unlicensed operations.
But leaving this troubling loophole aside, the glaring question remains: Why did it take so long for the USDA to address the rampant issue of unlicensed internet puppy sales? To only enact a revision in 2013 seems a bit late given that e-commerce is nothing new. As early as 2009, the USDA had already stated publicly that internet sales constituted a “massive loophole” for breeders looking to cash in on that retail pet store exemption to the Animal Welfare Act.11 So what was the hold up?
In large part, it took the agency’s internal Office of the Inspector General (OIG) audit in 2010 to finally make it clear that action on this issue was overdue. In addition to showing that 80 percent of the problematic breeders included in the investigation were enjoying the retail pet store exemption, the audit report found a number of glaring deficiencies in the department’s handling of “problematic dealers.” Among them, the internal investigation found that the “enforcement process was ineffective,” “inspectors did not cite or document violations properly to support enforcement actions,” and—of course—“some large breeders circumvented the Animal Welfare Act by selling animals over the internet.”
Three years and a stalled legislative act in Congress later, Secretary Vilsack finally closed the loophole on his own by revising the definition of what constitutes a retail pet store.
So I asked the USDA directly: Why did it take so long to rein in the issue of unlicensed breeders selling on the internet?
“I have no idea. No idea
,” Gibbens says. “The process itself is long. When you’re in the animal welfare world, to propose a rule…it can be a matter of years. Because the animal world is so controversial—or maybe not controversial. Maybe that’s a bad word. It’s that you’ve got really strong feelings on polar sides of the issue that you’re writing the regulation for. And so, it takes a while to get it through the political system.”12
“Hi there! My name is Rex, and I just know that we are meant to be.”
It’s a pickup line that immediately draws me into Rex’s online profile. Rex is family-oriented, loving, and more than ready and willing to settle down for a lifetime commitment. But no, Rex isn’t the man of anyone’s dreams, and this isn’t an online dating profile. Rex is a six-week-old Morkie—a cross between a Maltese and a Yorkshire terrier—posted for sale on internet puppy seller PuppySpot.com. And Rex can be yours for $1,995 as soon as he’s eight weeks old.
“I have been dreaming of coming home to my new family, and I sure hope that it is you! I promise that we will have lots of fun together. We can spend all day playing if you’d like. Whenever you get tired, I will be right there to cuddle up by your side,” Rex’s profile continues, again making promises that go far above and beyond what most online daters could ever hope for.
But it’s this little endnote that makes one promise I’m not sure Rex can really stick to.