by Rory Kress
Lola began to behave very strangely, thrusting her head onto the carpet and darting around the room with her skull pinned to the floor. Nancy knew that was terribly wrong.
“I had this gut feeling that something was really wrong with her,” Nancy says. “In one respect, I was in denial, because I didn’t want her to be sick or lose her. Then in the next respect, I was like, ‘Just come on. Something is wrong with her.’ She was a beautiful Chihuahua. But she would rub her face so hard, she would rub all the fur off.”
Back to the vet.
Now, the doctor told Nancy that four-month-old Lola’s tear ducts were drying up, an affliction the vet says she’d never seen before in a dog so young. Nancy followed the prescribed treatment: the pills and the eye drops. But soon, she began to realize the awful truth.
“She would run in the room, and we’d go, ‘Hi Lola!’ And she’d turn her head all over the place. I’d say to my husband ‘What is she doing?’”
Lola was going blind.
A few more months went by without answers from the veterinarian. All the while, she says, the pet store refused to listen to their plight or help with the mounting medical bills. Nancy and her son tried to get what’s known as an unfit letter from their first veterinarian, documenting that Lola was not healthy enough for the American Puppy Club to sell in the first place. Under New Jersey’s Pet Purchase Protection Act, a purchaser of a “defective” companion animal that receives an unfit letter from a veterinarian within two weeks of sale is eligible for refund or exchange from the pet store that sold it. Or the purchaser could be reimbursed for medical bills totaling up to twice the original sale price of the companion animal. The time window is somewhat longer for cases where the owner can prove the dog died of a congenital cause. As of this writing, there are twenty-one states with so-called puppy lemon laws that offer similar guarantees for health.3
But unfortunately for Nancy, it’s common practice for the pet shop to refer buyers to veterinarians with whom they have a relationship—our first vet for Izzie was one we were sent to in this way. In Nancy’s case, she says that this vet that she had been referred to by the pet store had unsurprisingly refused to write an unfit letter for Lola. By the time she’d gotten a handle on the situation, that two-week window from the date of sale had long since closed.
By Christmas 2012, Lola’s health crisis had escalated yet again.
“I’m wrapping gifts, and Rory, all of a sudden, she spun around and slammed her head into the wall,” Nancy says. “I screamed bloody murder, and she ran over to the door, into the corner, and she hid. I ran right over and grabbed her. My husband was downstairs, and I started screaming to him ‘Something’s wrong with Lola!’ We picked her up, and we ran right back to the vet.”
The vet ran a series of blood tests and referred Nancy to a nearby animal hospital. There, she put Lola on the floor, and in front of a team of veterinary neurosurgeons, the tiny puppy began manically circling. The doctors watched and delivered a damning diagnosis: necrotizing encephalitis.
“I just went, ‘Oh dear God, what the heck is that?’” Nancy recalls of her shock and bewilderment. “[The doctor] looked at me, and she said, ‘Your dog is dying. You’ll be lucky if you have four months with her.’ And I had an out-of-body experience. ‘I was like what the heck is going on here? I can’t even believe this is all happening to us.’”
The vets told her that the encephalitis was caused by a parasite called Neospora caninum, most often found to have been contracted from cows. The doctors told Nancy they believed that Lola had been infected when her mother ingested cattle feces at the breeding operation where she was likely born. While the parasite can often be treated if caught early enough, by the time it was diagnosed in Lola, it was far too late—both to save her and to get her declared unfit for sale under state law.
“The encephalitis eats away at the brain,” Nancy says. “She just got progressively worse. She started having seizures even on her seizure medicine. Then her back legs were locked up, and she walked with a really bad gait. It was all different things. It was the seizures, it was the blindness… So they put her in intensive care.”
By this time, Nancy says she was $6,000 deep in medical bills for Lola, and the dog was barely nine months old. The doctors offered to do an MRI, but with the diagnosis already clear and unequivocally terminal, the Sassos decided that another $2,000 to $3,000 for the test was not worth it.
“So we brought her back home, and we tried to make her comfortable. She had her little pink bed, and we took shifts on the couch. And my poor husband, he’d just retired, and we spent months trying to care for this poor dog. I think the worst part was having to call my son up at college and tell him that his poor little puppy was dying. The poor kid, he was crying his eyes out. I mean, it affected everybody.”
By March 2013, it was clear to Nancy that the only humane option was to put Lola down.
“We didn’t want to put her down on her birthday,” Nancy says.
So they waited an extra week and then had the vet euthanize her.
“I told the vet that we want her [body] back. We want to bring her back [home].”
Nancy starts to weep.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, trying to get through her tears to finish recounting Lola’s story to me. “My son carried her in the backyard, and we buried her there. It was terrible. I’m sorry. It was really awful. We went through a lot with this poor dog.”
But while Lola’s short and painful life had ended, Nancy’s crusade had just begun.
“[The American Puppy Club] messed with the wrong person. I don’t back down. It affected my kid and my family. You know? And I saw what this dog went through and how much it hurt us. I was going to go to the end. And that’s what I did. That’s what I did.”
When I purchased Izzie, her paperwork gave me her breeder’s name and address along with the names of the dogs who sired her. Nancy, however, still has yet to learn who exactly Lola’s breeder was, and she will probably never have a definitive answer to that question. Instead, Lola’s paperwork bears only the name Abe Miller of Quail Creek Kennel in Ohio. And while he is listed in the document as “breeder,” Miller is in fact a USDA-licensed broker, meaning that his operation also moves puppies from breeder to buyer or pet store. As a result, it’s entirely possible he brokered Lola to the American Puppy Club and was not, in fact, her breeder. To wit, he is listed on the Humane Society’s 2016 Horrible Hundred list for buying “more than one hundred puppies from unlicensed breeders.”4
In 2012, just a month after Lola was sold to Nancy, a USDA inspector cited Miller for several violations. For one, he was found to be falsifying the birth dates of puppies so that he could ship them before the age of eight weeks, which the USDA prohibits. In that same USDA report, he was found to be acquiring puppies from unlicensed breeders.5 This information was uncovered in a 2015 investigation from CBS Philadelphia, which also found that Miller had been slapped with several other violations when operating his business under the name DML Kennel.6 But he wrote the USDA in 2012 asking to change his company’s name so it could continue on a better path, obscuring the document trail under the former business name. The request was granted, and Quail Creek Kennel was born.7
As for Nancy, she says that Miller had much better luck working with the USDA than she did.
“I’ve called the USDA on him numerous times, and they did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I talked to the directors at the USDA. I went up as far as you could go on the ladder. And they did nothing. They sent investigators. They said, ‘We’re pretty sure we know your dog came from him but…we can’t track exactly what puppy mill she came from,’” she says.
I asked the USDA about Nancy and Lola’s case, and the agency’s public affairs specialist, Tanya Espinoza, said it was not possible for the department to shut down a licensee like Abe Miller.
“If we receive a complaint, we look into that complaint to determine if there is an Animal Welfare Act noncompliance,” Espino
za told me in an email. “While it is unfortunate that [Lola] died, the death of a puppy would not necessarily be an Animal Welfare Act noncompliance.”8
As for giving Miller the green light to change the name of his business to potentially hide past dirty dealings, Espinoza says that’s permissible.
“Facilities are allowed to change the name of their business, as long as the entity that holds the license does not change, as there is no restriction in the Animal Welfare Act that prevents them from doing so,” Espinoza explained. “A name change does not obscure previous dealings, as the inspection reports are still listed for three years regardless of the name of the facility.”
The trouble is, if someone has only ever dealt with the renamed company, he won’t know to search for the inspection reports of the old one.
Naturally, Nancy was left feeling that her options with the USDA were exhausted. Perhaps that explains why Nancy was more than happy to help animal welfare groups throw down the gauntlet on the legislative side. When one group asked her to testify to help pass New Jersey Senate Bill 1870 to amend the Pet Purchase Protection Act, she was eager to do so in memory of Lola.
“It passed unanimously through the senate and the assembly,” Nancy says with pride. She recalls one animal welfare advocate telling her that state legislators had gotten sick of seeing the same organizations showing up to testify. Hearing the personal story of someone who had previously no notion of the battle to fight puppy mills was able to wake them up. “She said to me ‘Nance, if you didn’t come testify, this would have never flew… When you got up and spoke, they all were just staring at you. Your whole story made a difference.’”
The bill passed in early 2015 and was signed into law, prohibiting stores from purchasing animals from breeders who had received one direct violation or three lesser, nondirect violations on past USDA inspections. Similar legislation was also passed in six other states, New York City, and a few surrounding counties. The hard-won law Nancy fought for in Lola’s name also mandated that pet stores put placards on the cages of cats and dogs for sale listing the names, addresses, phone numbers, and USDA license numbers for the breeders they came from along with instructions on how to visit the USDA inspection report database online—making it yet another state law that was severely handicapped by the Trump administration’s deactivation of the public database.
As for Nancy, she holds Lola’s legacy of unconditional love close to her heart. She remembers her as a dog who adored her human companions despite the pain that our species had inflicted upon her.
“All she wanted to do was be with us. She curled up in a ball on top of us every night. She was the sweetest, the cutest—you would have loved her. She was a doll,” Nancy says, her voice breaking. “I have a niece who’s handicapped. She can’t walk. And when we first brought Lola in, Lola jumped right in her lap and curled up in a ball. My niece loved her. Lola would just lick her to death, and we’d all be laughing. She licked everybody. She loved everybody.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Science vs. Common Sense
It’s a question many dog owners take for granted: What’s the best way to care for a dog?
Izzie has a certain level of care that Dan and I maintain on a daily basis. She gets a minimum of three walks a day. Her food bowl is always clean and full of hypoallergenic (read: expensive), prescription kibble that must be purchased through her vet to keep her from having stomach distress. Her water bowl is always full, often with crushed ice, which she seems to enjoy. She has her own bed in every room of the house, although she prefers to sit in Dan’s recliner or to sleep in our bed. Small baskets of her toys are kept in tidy corners, always available to her day and night should inspiration strike her. If we have to leave the house for a few hours, she receives a treat to distract her as we dart out the door and lock up. In the evenings, after her dinner sends a jolt of energy through her scrawny frame, my husband or I will indulge her in a game of tug-of-war or catch, depending on which of her favorite toys she wishes to abuse on any given day.
This is our standard of care. Through some trial and error, these are the things Dan and I have learned make for the healthiest, happiest—and hopefully longest-lived—Izzie.
Throughout our neighborhood of dog lovers here in Denver, there is a wide range of care for animals that I observe daily. Our neighbors, for example, used to keep their dogs largely outdoors and unattended. This was distressing to us when we first moved in. The dogs, though large boxer–pit bull mixes of some sort, have very short hair and barked and brayed day and night when forced to remain outdoors for hours on end, even in the snow. While eventually we had to plead with them to do something about these dogs being outside all day—and to their credit, they did—it’s clear that they love these animals. Would Izzie survive even a day in the snow, locked outside in our yard? No. Both mentally and physically, she is not equipped for that type of feat. But our neighbors’ dogs ultimately seemed physically no worse for wear—although they appear to be much less anxious and bark significantly less when they are allowed to come and go as they please through a doggie door on the back of the house.
Other dog owners have different priorities. There are the tattooed CrossFitters who complete two long daily runs past my door with their dogs, rain or shine. There is the pair of retirees who dress their Airedale terrier in a little red jacket when it’s cold out. There’s the mother who strolls her baby in a carriage while her three-legged dog hops along off-leash up and down our block so the pup can enjoy a little bit of freedom after cancer robbed her of a limb. Izzie doesn’t discriminate and still gives the dog a gentle chase when she spots her.
Still, as I’ve learned, dog parents can be no less judgmental of other dog parents than human parents can be of other mothers and fathers.
But who’s right?
The quality of care that a dog receives as a companion animal in a home is generally not policed unless it falls into the territory of animal hoarding or cruelty. In Denver County, where Izzie and I live, the rules are fairly open to interpretation. It’s against the law to “needlessly beat, inflict violence upon or kill, overwork, torture or mutilate, or to otherwise treat in a cruel, dangerous, or inhumane manner, any animal, or to cause such acts.”1 I have to wonder who decides when beating a dog is or is not done “needlessly” and what circumstances would ever necessitate beating a dog.
Other rules ban leaving dogs in unventilated cars unattended and give the city the right to impound any animal showing signs of neglect, but beyond the example of malnourishment, the rules do not further specify what qualifies as neglect. The most black-and-white rule among them all is the ban on owning more than three domestic dogs per household. Not much room for interpretation there.
These are local laws and are enforced by the police or animal control, not the USDA. They’re fairly standard with some minor variations for most of the country. But according to these laws that define what constitutes cruelty to animals in my neck of the woods, it’s fairly plain to see that if I were to keep Izzie in conditions identical to those upheld by the USDA standards that govern commercial breeders, a Denver police officer could either arrest me, fine me, or confiscate my animal—or all of the above.
This divide between how most of us would treat our dogs and how the animals are treated in a breeding facility is at the heart of the debate on how to regulate the industry. There’s the common sense camp: those who believe that regulations for dog breeding should take into account what seems obvious about dogs and their needs. Then there’s the side that insists that more science is needed to determine exactly what is best for the dogs.
Gibbens at the USDA is one of those on the proscience side, as is Mike Bober, president and CEO of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council (PIJAC). Firmly on the other side of the debate are those often lumped into the category of animal welfare advocates who say that many in the commercial pet industry are hiding behind science as a way to avoid making the kinds of common sense changes that would
easily alleviate pain and suffering for dogs in breeding facilities. After all, Dan and I are no dog experts. We ourselves have come to our conclusions on how to care for Izzie based on simple observations and common sense. The same goes for most domestic dog owners in this country; these animals don’t exactly come with a training manual.
For the pet breeding and selling industry, common sense regulations incite concern. Because here’s the problem with common sense: it tells us without a shred of hesitation that a dog does not belong in a cage without any human contact. And of course, large-scale commercial breeders can’t make a business on lovingly breeding litters whenever a pair of dogs chooses to mate.
John Goodwin at the Humane Society is one of these voices calling for the industry to make immediate changes without waiting for peer-reviewed studies to tell them what is already apparent.
“I think research and studies can be insightful, good, and useful provided that they’re correct. So that’s good. Though I don’t need science to tell me that a dog should be able to put her paws on solid ground and take a run around a backyard,” Goodwin tells me. “And I am put off by some in the pet industry who seem to take a page out of the tobacco industry’s playbook in that they won’t make any reforms until the science is more clear. That’s the exact same thing that cigarette companies said. We have to see more science to be sure that smoking causes cancer. We have to see more science that says that dogs need a cage size that’s more than just six inches larger than their bodies. You don’t need science for that. You just need three brain cells to figure that out.”2
Gibbens at the USDA, who is himself the owner of several pet dogs and cats, still finds that there is an essential role for science to play in the determining of national standards that his agency can enforce. I asked him to explain his proscience position.
“It’s the society that we live in, I think, that directs this. We’re at a point now in society where things are not really going to get changed without some science,” Gibbens says. “We can put our qualities and how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about our golden retriever at home on dogs, because that’s how we would think about them. But from a commercial standpoint, I think the best thing to do is to have some science, and that will withstand a lot of challenges. You may say, ‘It’s intuitive, dogs need ten hours of sunshine a day.’ And your neighbor may say ‘No, six is fine.’ So I think science is important.”3