by Rory Kress
I move on to the next cage. Lots number 438 and 439 are here, both female, Just Pups Lilly and Just Pups Tera respectively. They share a birthday with friendly Dozer in the next cage of April 15, 2014. I’m guessing they were littermates. They share Dozer’s excellent coat quality. But psychologically, they don’t seem to have Dozer’s bounce. One is nervously eating her own feces from the bottom of the cage. The other hides in the back, avoiding eye contact with me.
I circle back to the auction block to check on the latest lot up for bid. Standing off to the side, anxiously smoking a cigarette is Theresa Strader, the founder of the National Mill Dog Rescue who took me on her rescue trip across the heartland several months back. I’m not surprised to run into her here: the dog that first inspired her to start her rescue operation came from an auction like this back in 2007. She tells me in a low voice that there are several other rescues represented here today in addition to hers. We part ways quickly—being seen talking to a well-known rescuer could raise suspicion about my presence and see me booted from the premises. Theresa’s a known quantity around here, and her longstanding relationships with breeders allow her to avoid the typical ire they hold for rescuers. But I can’t bank on being able to share in the goodwill she has cultivated.
Later, Theresa will demand that I strike her quotes and rescue from my story, angry that I spoke with breeders on her trip and thereafter despite my insistence from our earliest conversations—in person and in writing—that interviewing both sides was an essential part of my investigation. However, it is not within the standards of my profession as a journalist to strike quotes after they’ve been knowingly and willingly offered on the record. Still, her change of heart reflects the challenge of covering this story—I’ve run into people on both sides who are not comfortable with a fair investigation. Both sides often wish to be accepted and supported without question.
Here at the auction, I take a seat in the back bleachers to get a better view. A pair of women sitting nearby start lobbing rapid-fire questions at me. They ask what I’m bidding on and what I think of the much-hyped golden retriever puppies in the large-dog area.
“Not sure. I don’t know much about golden breeding,” I say.
“You buying anything else then?” the younger one asks. Her teeth are red from years of chewing tobacco.
“I don’t think so.”
I mention that I may be heading off after this to visit another breeder, and they pounce.
“Does she have goldens?”
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully.
The older one leans in close. “Well, we’re rescuers. But we only do goldens. But don’t tell anyone that we’re rescuers.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” I say.
“How much you think they’ll go for?” the red-toothed younger one asks me.
I shrug.
“Do you have Facebook?” the older one asks a little too brightly. “What’s your full name? I’d love to add you.”
I excuse myself abruptly but as politely as possible to get away from the conversation. I’m doubtful that they’re actually rescuers. I get the sense that they’re baiting me to see if I’ll out myself as a rescuer because they’re breeders who know who Theresa is and saw me talking to her. Or because I just don’t seem to fit in. I’m not sure which.
If, in fact, they are rescuers, I feel a twinge of annoyance at the notion that they “only do goldens.” I understand breed affinity, as I was guilty of it myself in purchasing Izzie. However, I personally find the notion of saving only a certain breed to be a bit at odds with the philosophy of a rescue. Besides, if they’re dead set on walking out of here with a golden, they’re going to be paying thousands of dollars to “rescue” one of the ones here today.
The Southwest Auction Service is running today’s show. The Hughes family has operated the company since 1988. It’s one of the last auction houses in the country that serves the dog-breeding community and has long roots in the industry going back generations. Ultimately, they deny my requests for an interview. But Southwest Auction Service’s own promotional materials tell at least part of the story. On its website, the company boasts that it has sold many dogs for more than $5,000 and once even sold a single dog for $12,600.9 With all the attention that the goldens are getting today, it’s clear they won’t go cheap. Rescue operations, particularly breed-specific rescues, have been known to show up at auctions like this one, paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the dogs on the block. To her credit, Theresa says that when she goes to auctions, she only ever pays small pittances for the dogs that are not attracting any breeder’s interest: the sick, the malformed, the dying. In short, the ones who will be put down if they can’t fetch a few bucks on the block. But according to Pete, my undercover puppy mill investigator contact, rescuers who buy up the unwanted ones are in the minority among those who go to these auctions. He has witnessed the odd ecosystem in which the rescues pay the breeders for their stock at auction—often at top dollar, funded by the donations of well-meaning supporters. This then funds the breeders looking to replace their old dogs, purchase new ones, and continue their operations.
“I have watched the rescues bid against each other, whether it was knowingly or not,” Pete tells me. “Half of the people who go to these auctions are activists who are buying the old, spent breeding stock. And they are filling the pockets of puppy millers to be able to replace their breeding stock. So as a breeder, you know that once a dog is done, the people who hate you are going to pay you to replace them.”
Seems like any way you slice it, an auction block is no place for a dog. If only the Animal Welfare Act mandated a cap on breeding frequency and cycles and created a path to adoption. Then maybe breeding would be a lot less lucrative for bad actors to get into. And less of a breeding ground for side industries like the auction trade. As I’m seeing, as round after round of dogs are called to the auction block and sold, when breeding becomes a profit-driven business, the dogs will always suffer.
In early November 2016, several months after I attend the kennel dispersal auction in Missouri, LoSacco pleads guilty in a Paramus, New Jersey, courtroom to four health code violations. These violations stemmed from the sixty-seven puppies found stuffed in a freezing van outside his Paramus store in April 2016. While he originally faced hundreds of charges for this violation, the vast majority are dropped in a plea deal. He is ordered to pay $19,000 over the course of two and a half years to an animal control contract service as restitution.10
A week after this, a New Jersey couple sues LoSacco for selling them a dog that was unfit for sale. The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Cuddles died within a month of having been purchased from Just Pups and spent more time in the veterinary hospital than it ever got to spend at home. The plaintiffs seek reimbursement for the $10,000 they spent on the dog’s medical bills plus damages.11
But with hundreds of dogs sold at the auction I attended for well north of $1,000 each, LoSacco could easily have earned the money within an hour or two to pay off both of those sums.
On February 3, 2017, a red sign appears on the door of LoSacco’s East Hanover Just Pups, indicating that the New Jersey State Department of Health has shut it down for failing a sanitation inspection. This East Hanover location is LoSacco’s last remaining brick-and-mortar pet shop. The Health Department launches a probe, the results of which will determine whether LoSacco can ever reopen. Interestingly, a coalition of other pet shop owners bands together to formally distance themselves from LoSacco, issuing a statement through trade group PIJAC calling his actions “extremely disturbing” and not reflective of the industry as a whole.12
On March 6, 2017, the East Hanover township council unanimously votes to revoke LoSacco’s operating license.13
I attempt to contact LoSacco through his attorney, seeking comment or an interview. My requests to connect are never answered. While I wish I could have heard LoSacco’s side of the story, I think that the most uncomfortable questions that I ha
ve to ask aren’t for him at all—they’re for the USDA.
Namely, why in the world did the USDA green-light LoSacco’s license in July 2016?
Once again, I meet with Dr. Gibbens at the USDA campus. This time, I bring with me a stack of LoSacco’s Missouri state inspection reports along with printouts of the news stories documenting the charges against him—including the New Jersey State attorney general’s fraud complaint against him, along with its companion press release time-stamped just days before the USDA granted LoSacco his license. Before I can even present it to him, Gibbens begins talking about how rigorous his department’s prelicense inspection protocol is and how much time his agents spend with license applicants to educate them before granting them their paperwork.
“If we find that there’s been an animal cruelty charge—we’ve found that before and then denied the license,” Gibbens explains. “Or if we’ve found that [the license applicant has] broken some other state law or county law, we’ve just denied their application. We have to go through court to do that too, but we’ve successfully done that. Do I wish we could do more? Sure.”14
I pull out the LoSacco file I’ve compiled, hand it over to him, and walk him through the timeline of events: the hundreds of charges against him, the dead dogs in the freezer, all the forced store closings that took place before the USDA granted him his license. Gibbens explains that LoSacco must have had a clean inspection report on the day that the announced prelicense inspection was conducted, even though state agents found multiple critical violations on their unannounced inspections within days of this visit. But, he concedes, that discrepancy does not surprise him, because all prelicense inspections are announced. Gibbens even offers that it would be foolish for a bad applicant to not hide any wrongdoing before federal inspectors show up.
He excuses himself to search his computer for more information. He pulls up LoSacco’s file and then informs me that LoSacco is now under investigation by the agency, so he cannot comment on it further. Of course, Gibbens acknowledges, this investigation had to have been opened sometime after the license was granted.
So again, why was this person given a license in the first place?
“If we’d had some of this information and this had taken place before we issued the license, we would have pursued rejecting the application,” Gibbens says simply, paging through the file I’ve given him—including stacks of Missouri state inspection reports, replete with horrible violations.
“But these stories made headlines,” I remind him, showing him, yet again, the dates on all the news items and state inspection reports, predating his department granting LoSacco a license.
“It may point out a problem with our system,” he says. “We get a license application for somebody in Missouri, our default is not going to be to go to New York to see if there are any problems.”
“But put this guy’s name into a Google search—that’s it,” I say, incredulous. “There’s nothing good that pops up. Just even of his name. Immediately, it’s all there, that’s all, it’s blanketed.”
Gibbens returns to the stack of news stories I’ve handed him. He points out that at the time when the USDA granted LoSacco a license, the hundreds of animal cruelty charges against him had not yet been tried in court and adjudicated. Without that final, legal determination, his agency has not typically been successful in pulling a license.
So why not just delay granting the license? What was the rush? Why not hold the application until the courts decide? Then, once they do, either accept or deny the license application?
Gibbens agrees that his agency does have the authority to delay the licensing process until more information comes in. He says that the USDA has done this in the past. So why didn’t the agency at least try to delay licensing of Vincent LoSacco, perhaps the most publicized, infamous pet store owner in the country at the time?
“We didn’t have the information,” Gibbens says. “I wouldn’t be the person who researched it. That would be our licensing staff. At the time, I don’t know who did what. But whatever was done, we obviously didn’t have this information when we processed his application.”
We can argue that the USDA is understaffed. We can argue that it is bureaucratic. We can even argue that it’s difficult to coordinate with the state agencies to find out what they have on the record. But it’s terribly hard to argue in favor of an agency that failed to run a simple Google search on an applicant’s name before granting his license.
As of this writing, all LoSacco’s stores are shuttered. But through it all, he still holds onto his USDA license under the Just Pups business name, allowing him to keep breeding and selling to anyone in the country.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pet Shop Problems
Most of the time, when Dan and I look at Izzie, we feel that we’ve dodged a bullet. Especially knowing what I know now. There’s no denying that she’s been far from perfect through the years. Her health has had its ups and downs, but thankfully—thus far—she hasn’t presented with anything that can’t be fixed with a course of antibiotics or a change of diet.
As loving as she is, Izzie is quite neurotic—but then again, so are my husband and I. It’s hard to blame her personality flaws on anyone but us. But as Dr. Overall has suggested, some of Izzie’s anxieties may also be genetic or inborn—damage done to her mother before she was even conceived. It’s just one example of how, in purchasing a dog from a breeder, Dan and I and everyone else who shells out cash for puppies are taking a high stakes gamble.
“Risk is the flaw in the puppy mill thing. It’s what everyone counts on and what the consumer counts on without knowing it. What [commercial breeders] are doing is they’re doing risk [assessments], and they don’t understand risk,” Overall explains of the way that large-scale breeders play with the genetics of their dogs without fully understanding the game. “The average human does not understand risk and randomness. They want a guarantee. They don’t understand that there is uncertainty involved in everything… So you could get a perfectly good puppy mill dog. We may not know what those distributions of dogs look like. But somebody’s going to get a great one. Because somewhere, there is a dog that’s going to survive that and excel. And some [humans] have come out of horrendous experiences and done brilliantly. Because we’re resilient, and we’re survivors, and we’re overachievers, and we do that. Dogs exist like that as well.”1
But of course, these special dogs who can survive the trauma of birth in a puppy mill and go on to thrive are few and far between. As consumers, we cannot bank on the fact that the puppy we purchase from a pet store or online will be that special dog. And as we know, even Izzie has apparently not emerged unscathed—her noise phobia a case in point.
But this is an animal that was so important to us that my maid of honor snuck her into our black-tie wedding. The reception hall had even warned us in advance that we’d be in violation of the health code if Izzie tried to crash the party—but just a moment of her paws on our dance floor was worth the admonishment. Her flaws are now just a part of the dog that we love, and we unconditionally accept them. We even mold our lives around them, so I guess she’s trained us. But we are lucky. The marks of her breeding could have been much uglier: a life of disease or even a life cut short in puppyhood. A pet-store puppy purchase remains a risky investment. So far, we have nothing but happiness to show for ours, while others have had nothing but heartache.
NANCY AND LOLA
Nancy Sasso had never owned a dog before in her life. She was a part-time store manager living in Holmdel, New Jersey, fifty miles south of New York City. Her husband had just retired as a lieutenant after forty-one years as a police officer. It was in spring 2012 that she got a call from her college-aged son Michael who was at the American Puppy Club in nearby Middletown with his girlfriend. They’d spotted a Chihuahua, and it was love at first sight.
“He says ‘Mom, come down here. I need a credit card to pay for her,’” Nancy recalls. “So I went over there. I k
new nothing about this store. We’d never had a dog before. And [the pet shop staff] started throwing all these papers at me. I’m going ‘What am I signing here?’ And they’re going ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s just for the care of your dog. No big deal.’”2
Nancy estimates that she paid a little over $1,200 for the tiny puppy that day. They took the dog home and named her Lola. She weighed less than a pound. Immediately, the problems began.
“She starts coughing, hacking, throwing up. I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’” Nancy says.
She took Lola to the veterinarian and was given a diagnosis of kennel cough, also known as infectious canine tracheobronchitis. It’s a common but treatable respiratory ailment typically seen in dogs kept in close quarters—hence the name. Nancy brought Lola home, but the puppy could not shake her cough. She took the puppy to three more veterinarians, some of whom Nancy was referred to by the pet store. Meanwhile, Nancy’s son began to get curious about the American Puppy Club. He searched online and found a flurry of negative reviews.
“There were all these people who bought dogs from this store, and they were writing about all the problems they had with their dogs, and I’m like ‘Oh my God,’” Nancy recalls.
While the American Puppy Club has since closed, I reached out to the store’s owner, Lorin Kislak, through his new pet shop: the Breeders Club of America, just half a mile down the road in Middletown, New Jersey. My request for comment was never returned.
In the meantime, for Lola, things were getting worse.