by Rory Kress
“Believe it or not, during our Proposition B ballot initiative on puppy mills, Missouri Right to Life came out in opposition,” Baker recalls of his initial shock when Christian conservative groups joined forces to shoot down the voter-passed legislation to shutter puppy mills. Missouri Right to Life would later come out in strong support of Akin during his political spiral following the “legitimate rape” comments back in 2012 and stood by its PAC endorsement of his Senate bid. “We see this time and again up in the legislature, where these so-called Christian groups or family-values groups are opposing legislation to help the animals. And I can’t quite figure it out.”
When Baker and other animal advocates attempted to hammer out the compromise on Proposition B that would go on to become the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act in 2011, he asked the Missouri Right to Life leadership why they would oppose humane conditions in dog-breeding facilities.
“We’re talking about dog breeders who are raising dogs in inhumane conditions. How does helping breeders continue to raise dogs inhumanely help your cause of right to life?” he recalls asking at the time to no satisfying response. Eventually, he believes his question spooked the group into dropping its public opposition to reforming dog-breeding facilities, leaving the leadership to pursue their beliefs on the topic privately as opposed to using the mouthpiece of the organization.
“I did say, ‘I have a lot of friends that are very, very much pro-life and love animals. I mean, why are you crossing these issues?’” Baker recalls of his conversations with the Missouri Right to Life leadership. “But it does have a hold. And so it doesn’t even shock me that [former congressman] Akin—because he’s very much a Christian conservative—that he would take this stance also. And it’s a shame at how the animal abusers have won over these Christian conservatives. It’s beyond me. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s not even consistent with Christian values to mistreat God’s creatures, and this is what I try to argue with them.”22
But answering the question as to why Todd Akin had agreed to take up the crusade of the Ritters was only one part of the mystery, as far as I could see it. I wanted to know how the Ritters, dog breeders in a town with a population of 222 in rural Missouri, were able to get the attention of a six-term former congressman who had run for Senate. Public downfall or not, Akin was a powerful ally to have. Again, Baker was not surprised that a rural dog breeder was able to bend a powerful politician’s ear. He has seen it many times before.
“There is no doubt, [dog breeders] have great political connections,” Baker says. “They’re very effective lobbyists. They go in and they tell them [that reform] is going to lose them their business…that these laws are going to put them out of business. And I think they make a very compelling argument. Especially the rural legislators, they don’t have people clamoring the other way, so they [side with the breeders]… I think they use this to get the small farmers back who they’ve sold out over the years, by representing Smithfield Foods and the other big corporate [agriculture] groups. So this is the way of endearing themselves to the small farmers.”
Baker also notes that many of these breeders are closely tied in with the Missouri Farm Bureau.
“The Farm Bureau believes that if they draw the line in the sand on the dogs, the animal welfare people will never get around to attacking them on how they treat their farm animals,” Baker says. “And I think they much prefer to have the fight over the dogs than to have the fight over farm animal issues. Because they feel that if [legislation] does make it to the dog-breeding industry, you’re going to do the same to us on our farm animals.”
In the months since Lovey came home with Kristin’s family, the goldendoodle has not grown, topping out at forty-two pounds—right around the same weight she was the day Kristin first picked her up. Kristin sees this as yet another sign that the dog she purchased was, in fact, no puppy but rather a fully grown adult canine. But Lovey has shown marked emotional improvement. Now, Lovey sleeps with her head on Kristin’s pillow every night and has even inspired a bit of harmless jealousy in Skipper, the dog she was originally supposed to help keep company. But perhaps the most telling sign that Lovey is recovering is that she has finally started doing something most dog owners would take for granted.
“I didn’t notice her tail wagging for probably [the first] two and a half weeks. It did not wag at all,” Kristin recalls. “It was funny because one day, I was playing with her, and then her tail starts wagging. Like, it was thumping. She was lying on the couch or the floor or the bed, and I remember distinctly thinking ‘Oh my gosh, I think this is the first time I’ve seen your tail wag.’ You know, it just kind of hit me.”
With Lovey on the mend, I ask Kristin a question that both former congressman Todd Akin and Debra Ritter have asked her several times: Why not just drop it? Why keep pushing and dealing with all the time-consuming aggravation?
“I was always taught that when you know better, you do better. I know now that these people are doing this—and not just [to] me,” Kristin says of her decision to push for a change.
She says that even if the Ritters refunded her for every penny that went into purchasing and caring for Lovey, she would donate it all to an animal charity. Her fight isn’t about the money.
“Do you honestly think [Debra Ritter] believes in her mind… that every one of those dogs out there is totally fabulous, being totally cared for in the best condition…that they’re happy, healthy, [that she] couldn’t do any better? Could she really believe that?”
Kristin pauses for a moment and gathers her thoughts.
“There are plenty of people who breed dogs…and the dogs have a good life too,” Kristin says. “It can be done. Because it is done, and I’ve seen it done.”
And I’ve seen it too.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Raise Them Right
Gladys and Delaney dash to the front door with a clatter of nails on linoleum to welcome me in. They pirouette and leap with their front paws in the air, jumping up to my thighs. I guess it’s true: the so-called wheaten greetin’ is universal with this breed. No wonder I haven’t been able to train Izzie not to jump up after all these years. But other than that and a passing physical resemblance, there is not much else these purebred wheaten terriers have in common with my Izzie. They’re clearly born of a thicker, heartier stock, their frames so square, as mandated by breed standards, that I could use their backs for coffee tables. Their coats are long and wavy, their hair lush and full where Izzie’s is thinner and more feathery, prone to mats, and sparse at the knees. The girls buzz around the kitchen, parading their tails, docked at least three inches longer than Izzie’s tight nub. They stick up straight behind them like the poles on the backs of amusement-park bumper cars.
Patrice Chevalier and Robert Bergman push past the retired dogs to welcome me into their home in Centennial, Colorado. They are the owners of Heirloom Wheatens, a small breeding operation that produces an average of one to two litters a year. They run the business right here from their home on a sprawling property in a rural subdivision with views of rolling hills, mountains, and the city of Denver far off in the distance. The house is spacious but cozy, filled with plenty of hints that true wheaten terrier aficionados live here: from the bronze statuettes of two wheatens at play on an entryway table to the sign in the garage that reads SECURITY PROVIDED BY WHEATEN TERRIER.
Patrice welcomes to me to sit out on their patio, overlooking a large, grassy expanse where Gladys and Delaney are chasing each other. A dog barks in the distance from a neighbor’s house. The girls stand at attention but do not bark back. I’m impressed: with Izzie’s hair trigger, that kind of distant but unseen barking would raise a ruckus and send my house into chaos. When we settle in to chat, the dogs freely dart back up to the patio to eavesdrop and steal a pinecone before cycling back down to their fenced, open space so they can run.
Patrice and Robert initiated their work with wheaten terriers back in 1985 when they began showing their first f
emale in dog shows. Back then, they were more interested in training and obedience competitions with no inkling that breeding would be in the cards for them. But by 1990, they took on a second female and began working with other colleagues in the wheaten terrier show world to co-own and source studs and begin breeding. Since then, they have bred and placed around 150 puppies for owners throughout Colorado and nationwide. Of those, they estimate only four have been returned to their operation for rehoming.
“It’s a pure passion project,” Patrice says simply of her nearly three decades breeding and showing wheatens. “We got into the breeding aspect as much to experience it and to be able to get an understanding of what creates a dog for obedience and agility.”1
“You can study all the genetics you want. But if you breed and see the outcome of that, it teaches you a lot afterward,” Robert says, picking up Patrice’s thread as he often does—the two speak as one much of the time. “I’ll say, ‘Okay, I thought that we might see that trait in these puppies,’ and we sure did. You know, something that maybe was passed down from the stud, you see it come to fruition.”
“Are we talking about physical traits? Personality traits? Both?” I ask as Gladys insists I stroke the top of her head, positioning her jawbone purposefully on my thigh.
“Both,” Robert says.
“It’s personality. It’s their thinking process,” Patrice continues. “It’s their attitude toward new things, different things, strange things. It’s how they think through problems: Are they persistent? So they give up easy? How quick do they catch on—”
“How driven are they to please? Versus can they just be themselves—” Robert jumps in.
“Are they real needy? Are they independent?” Patrice says. “So [breeding] was an extension of wanting to understand the dogs better.”
This self-described passion project, while clearly quite consuming and fulfilling for them both, has not been the focus of their careers: Patrice is a project manager for Denver Health, and Robert is a retired consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers and also worked for IBM. For them, their breeding operation is no get-rich-quick scheme or even a lucrative side gig. Given that they typically sell their puppies for around $2,000 each, I figure it can’t be too hard to eke out a living from it. I ask them if this passion project could have been their full-time source of income if they’d so chosen. They look at each other and laugh.
“Doing it like we do?” Robert says incredulously. “No. It’s a loss.”
“So don’t go into breeding for the money?” I ask again.
“Not at all.” Patrice is emphatic. “We’ve put more money into this than we’ve ever gotten out. Even when we’ve had a litter of ten and a litter of nine.”
By way of example, she details a litter she had last year of only two puppies. Just to get those two puppies, she had to pay a $2,500 stud fee to another breeder whose stock she knows and trusts, have that frozen semen shipped in at a cost of $800, and then pay an additional $500 to have her female inseminated. The year before, she’d gone through the same process with the same female and the same stud—with the same hefty costs—and the female did not produce a litter at all. Selling each of the two puppies sold from this pairing for $2,000 a pop, Patrice could barely recover even half of her costs.
“Puppy mills don’t do the testing. They don’t do any of the health stuff, you know,” Robert says. “People always ask me. ‘God, you must be making a ton of money, selling a dog for $2,000.’ So then I send them a list of all the costs that go into breeding, testing, and all the way through the process.”
Patrice continues. “And people will say, ‘Oh, but you had seven puppies!’ Well, last time, we had one. Time before that, we had two. We’ve had three, we’ve had four. You know, you gotta average it out.”
Even if Patrice and Robert have made peace with the fact that Heirloom Wheatens is not a cash cow, they say they are proud to be thoughtfully developing a healthy and happy line of wheaten terriers for the posterity of the breed and for their ability to compete across various types of obedience and training shows.
Beyond the meticulous and expensive process of breeding these dogs, the work that goes into vetting and choosing the right buyers for their puppies is almost equally painstaking.
“You’re always looking for the correct homes. As breeders, we have a two- or three-page questionnaire that people fill out—it’s not just that you come and pick your puppy. And Rory, I don’t know how you got your [wheaten terrier], but you have to come meet us. We let our dogs do crazy things when people are here, you know, jumping up on them,” Patrice explains of how she scrutinizes potential customers to see how they’ll react to the breed’s natural exuberance. “It has to be someone we feel comfortable with long term, because we want to know if [the dogs] develop problems. We want to know if they’re lost. We want to know those sorts of things, because it all goes into the computer; it all goes into understanding what the heck we have besides what you can see. We’re looking for patterns. Part of it is for health, because not everything we have in the breed has a genetic test.”
Patrice and Robert have devoted years of their lives to breeding responsibly. They’ve traveled the world to attend conferences and shows as far away as New Zealand and have even brought back a new breeding dog from Finland to enhance their line and extend their educations into breeding.
But just as it can be with humans, even an obsessively watchful eye to the lineage may not be enough to ensure perfect health. While Patrice says she’s been able to breed for health and temperament in her wheatens over the years, sometimes health problems pop up all the same. Cheerio, a fifteen-month-old puppy, is currently still living in the home, unable to be sold after Patrice and Robert discovered she had a rare, genetic skin condition that they say had never before been documented in any wheaten terrier. When I meet her, she is a new and impressive burst of energy now that Gladys and Delaney have gotten used to my presence. She jumps and flirts with me, begging for my constant affection. Her bold eyes and pink tongue are so bright and vivid, she looks like a cartoon puppy, too happy and lovely to even be real. But after traipsing around behind Patrice and me for a bit, she stops dead in her tracks to scratch ferociously at something hidden beneath her flowing, honey-colored coat.
“We’re still deciding whether we’re going to have to put her down,” Patrice says quietly, as if Cheerio might hear us. Cheerio just keeps scratching at her skin lesions. Her discomfort is so acute, it’s as if both Patrice and I have completely disappeared. When she’s able to return to us from her scratching spell, I pet her, and I can feel the lesions lurking under her hair, a rippling threat just below the surface.
It’s clear in talking to Patrice that Cheerio’s case distresses her. However, when she speaks about it, her frustration manifests analytically, as if it is a math problem she should have gotten right but could not have possibly accounted for some unknown variable.
Patrice takes me on a tour of her combination home and breeding facility with Gladys and Delaney tagging along. Because she and Robert are not currently expecting any imminent litters, many of the areas that would usually be devoted entirely to breeding now lie fallow or have been overtaken by human activities. In a small side room of the home’s den is the birthing room. It used to be Robert’s beer-brewing room, Patrice tells me. But when a litter is due, Patrice and Robert sterilize it and shut it down to the other retired dogs like Gladys and Delaney, who have happily followed us in to inspect it. Both were born right here, eight and eleven years ago respectively. Patrice shows me drawers filled with medical equipment in sterile pouches, identical to much of what I recognize from Izzie’s vet visits with the exception of several apparatuses that are aimed at helping mother dogs nurse.
“I sleep on the floor in here when a litter is due,” Patrice says with good-natured exhaustion. “Because they always seem to give birth in the middle of the night.”
For the first three weeks of their lives, the puppies are kept in thi
s small, sterile space with their mother to nurse.
“Once they’re born, you’ve got to get them through the first twenty-four hours, and then you’re down here, checking constantly, even after being up all night to deliver. It’s like being a new mom,” Patrice says.
“We really try to quarantine them for three weeks,” Robert says.
“So you’re changing bedding, because the bitch is still dripping, you know, from delivery,” Patrice says. “You’re checking the puppies, putting warm compresses on their [docked] tails or whatever, so they don’t get infected—”
“And you have to be watching the female all the time, to see if she’s showing any signs of anything going on,” Robert continues, detailing the round-the-clock efforts that go into birthing these litters.
But Patrice takes particular pride in describing the painstaking work she begins with her new puppies at just three days old, providing them with special neurological stimulation exercises she learned at a conference with AKC judge and puppy-development researcher Dr. Carmen Battaglia.
“We do these stimulation puppy exercises to develop their ability to handle stress. So it stimulates the vascular system and the neurological system, the brain, and all kinds of nerves,” Patrice says.
These exercises are derived from Dr. Battaglia’s research into the so-called Super Dog program pioneered by the U.S. military in the 1970s. The Super Dog program—also known as the Bio Sensor program—found that these early stimulation exercises could hold a range of benefits for the lifespan of the dog, including an improved cardiovascular system and a higher resistance to stress. While not universally accepted as being the one-size-fits-all solution to creating healthy, socialized animals, the Super Dog exercises certainly involve plenty of human, hands-on care, attention, and socialization at the earliest stages of life and, at the very least, demonstrate a studied and enthusiastic approach to thoughtful breeding practices.