The Dog Merchants Read online

  THE DOG

  MERCHANTS

  Inside the Big Business of Breeders,

  Pet Stores, and Rescuers

  KIM KAVIN

  For all the ones who can still be saved

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  SETTING THE BASE PRICE

  CHAPTER TWO

  LUXURY PACKAGING

  CHAPTER THREE

  BRANDING, BY BREEDING

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FREELANCE PRODUCERS

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BIG PRODUCTION COMPANIES

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MEGA-DISTRIBUTOR

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MARKETING THE MESSAGE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  INDUSTRY WASTE

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE UPSTART COMPETITOR

  CHAPTER TEN

  REPACKAGING AND REBRANDING

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LEMONS VERSUS STEALS

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE GENESIS AND THE FUTURE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SMART SHOPPING

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CONSUMER INTELLIGENCE

  A NOTE ABOUT SPAY/NEUTER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  America’s Pet Registry, Inc. (APRI)

  American Canine Association (ACA)

  American Kennel Club (AKC)

  American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)

  Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI)

  Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)

  Monmouth County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MCSPCA)

  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

  Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA)

  Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA)

  US Department of Agriculture (USDA)

  “Money will buy a pretty good dog, but it

  won’t buy the wag of his tail.”

  —Josh Billings

  INTRODUCTION

  Buffalo steaks. That’s what put me over the edge.

  I was standing in the meat department at the grocery store, a package of ground turkey in one hand and my smartphone’s Google app in the other, struggling to determine whether the free-range, nobody-was-cruel-in-the-making-of-this-food-product label was actually a cover-up to get my money into the coffers of some multinational factory farm, when I glanced up and saw buffalo steaks. They were a new offering, and they seemed as exotic as wildebeest next to the chicken breasts and sausage patties. The buffalo label screamed “all natural,” too, right above a photograph of a big, open, grassy plain full of sunshine and fresh air, where the buffalo ostensibly roamed while the deer and the antelope played.

  Yeah, right, I thought. Maybe back in 1875.

  When I looked down the aisle again, it seemed different, almost as if I were viewing it through a fisheye lens. The moment felt a bit like vertigo, or as if I’d been sucked into The Matrix. Endless packages of chops and ribs and wings and thighs—all of it suddenly appeared to me not as food, but instead as a flowing river of neatly packaged cash. Somehow, even through my super-fandom of books including Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it was only in that moment that I truly understood the supermarket meat aisle is based not on food but instead on the smartly marketed products of a global food-producing industry.

  Not long after that day, I found myself sitting at the top of the bleachers inside a barn where America’s biggest legal dog auction is regularly held. I watched hundreds of Retrievers and Terriers and Hounds get sold to the highest bidders, many of them owners of large-scale commercial breeding farms (or, to use the more commonly applied term, puppy mills). The auction, at least for the people, was an upbeat and welcoming affair, with men, women, and children alike smiling and laughing, buying snacks and nachos from the concession room, and doing the math on whether any given dog could produce enough sellable puppies to justify owning and feeding her. To someone like me, who thinks of her own dogs as family, it was kind of like watching orphaned children being auctioned based on their looks. Need a blonde? Finding wiry hair easier to manage these days? Freckled complexion, coming up next at a cut-rate price!

  As the hours upon hours of auctioneering went on, I at first felt frustrated by the sight of the dogs being sold to the highest bidder, then disturbed by the fact that my own dogs (a couple of wonderful mutts) would be considered worthless in this room, and then, finally, resigned to the fact that dogs, like that big case of meat in the supermarket, are ultimately a product—a smartly packaged, endlessly varied product that is legally for sale all around the planet. As with food, though, most of us don’t think of the dogs that way. It simply doesn’t occur to us that so much effort goes into establishing and controlling the marketplace, or that so much time goes into packaging and promoting the end product for sale. We love dogs, we coo over puppies, and our thought process pretty much stops there. It takes a sight like a dog auction to drive home the point that dogs are in fact a big business, and to open our minds about the sheer scope of the industry that we buy into with every beautiful pooch we bring home.

  Like many people, I’m trying more and more these days to be a conscious consumer. Beyond reading grocery store labels, I’m carrying canvas grocery bags and eschewing plastic as if it’s dripping in Iraqi oil. I’m seeking out farmers markets and family-owned shops instead of running my credit card through the machines that hackers love to target at big-box stores. I’m buying fuel-efficient cars and Energy Star–rated home appliances. I’m trying to find affordable clothes that aren’t sewn by twelve-year-old girls in Bangladesh earning fifty cents a day. I’m tiptoeing daily through the minefield of meanings behind everything from “cage-free” to “humanely raised.”

  And now, after considering what I’ve seen during several years of researching this book, I am seeking new and better ways to think about dogs as a product before I hand over another cent to anybody who is selling them, breeders and rescuers alike. I am applying my role as a conscious consumer to the dog industry because, given what I have learned, I believe that no matter how much all of us love our pups, thinking of them as products—just like so many of the sellers do—is the only way we can truly change the dog industry for the better.

  Most of us dog lovers, even if we’ve had pups all our lives, don’t realize the truly staggering scope of the global market we enter with every purebred or mutt we welcome into our families. The American sector is the most saturated, with about half the households owning a dog. Continental Europe and the United Kingdom are still growing as markets, with about a quarter of the households owning a dog. A reasonable estimate is that some thirty million pet dogs are brought home around the world every year. Dog lovers could give a home to every single dog who has been abandoned in every single shelter, and millions more pups would be needed annually to satisfy consumer demand. The money spent buying dogs as pets represents income to small- and large-scale breeders, pet stores, public shelters, and private rescue groups of somewhere in the vicinity of $11 billion each year around the globe.

  Now, those numbers are admittedly fuzzy; all numbers involving the buying and selling of dogs are estimates because no central databases exist (that’s one reason, perhaps, that no book like this has ever been written, because it is so hard to pin down exactly what is going on in terms of cash flow in the dog business). Still, given the statistics available, it’s reasonable to assume that the business of selling dogs has about the same value as the gl
obal IKEA brand. The sale of dogs generates the kind of money that all of Nevada, including Las Vegas, brought in on gaming revenues in 2013. Dog lovers spend as much to acquire pooches every year as Burger King paid in 2014 to buy Tim Hortons, creating the world’s third-largest fast-food conglomerate. It’s cash flow that people who own the action will battle to control, cash flow that leads to unscrupulous people starting cheap production facilities and smuggling operations everywhere from Missouri to Mexico to Poland, cash flow that leads to powerful marketing campaigns designed to sway our decisions as consumers. This is business income that entrenched breeding interests at the top of the dog market will fight to protect, and it is piles and piles of dough that nonprofit groups—raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations—want to keep collecting.

  In any business where such big money is involved, problems from capitalist greed to outright corruption always will surface, and those of us trying to be conscious consumers can feel overwhelmed about trying to make a difference. The reality is that an individual purchase usually won’t make the slightest dent in problems on a global industry scale. Take factory farms, for instance, and the conscious consumer’s search for beef and chicken produced by farmers who meet a higher standard of animal care. The scope of multinational corporate control over the meat supply can be paralyzing, so much so that it leads to Googling until one gets vertigo in the meat aisle. Trying to support the “good guys” who raise animals on small, open farms instead of in disgusting, cramped conditions can seem almost impossible in the stores where most of us regularly shop. The “bad guys” have already bought up and relabeled the more wholesome brands of meat in an effort to keep taking our money without us realizing where it is going.

  Here’s the good news that I’ve discovered: When it comes to dogs, the endgame is not so clear. What each of us does when it comes time to buy a dog really can make a difference. So many of the worst offenders are such small players in this big global web that if conscious consumers can learn how to spot them, we can end them—by voting with our wallets to buy mutts and purebreds alike from people who treat all dogs well.

  We buyers are an estimated $11 billion global force that is many, many times larger than any breeding operation or rescue organization anywhere on the planet. We conscious consumers are still far more powerful than every last one of the bad guys in this particular marketplace. We buyers can close the substandard puppy farms and empty even the highest-kill-rate shelters by giving money to responsible sellers of dogs. It can be done today if the majority of dog lovers become educated about the industry and spend our money accordingly.

  In the following pages, all kinds of people who are involved in the production, marketing, and sale of dogs are portrayed: small-scale breeders, large-scale breeders, show dog promoters, dog auctioneers, puppy distributors, public shelter workers, private rescue volunteers, animal law experts, dog-savvy marketers, and more. There’s reporting on a company that, at its peak, was selling as many as ninety thousand puppies a year. There’s an in-depth look at the life of a man who once auctioned a single dog for $12,600. There’s a deep-research tour of a shelter that went from high-kill to no-kill and now operates out of a $6 million facility. And there’s the discovery of precisely how much some groups are willing to spend to buy our votes when it comes to dog-related legislation.

  Each of these people, and many more in the following pages, offers another layer of understanding about the industry that generated the beloved dogs sleeping soundly in our living rooms. I’ve knit their stories together to create new understanding of the big picture of dog sales worldwide—where sometimes, unbeknownst to most of us, breeders and rescuers operate out of the very same room. Taken together, the stories in this book make clear that dog lovers, whether we care about purebreds or mutts or both, often have far more in common than we are led to believe by those doing the marketing, and we have a great deal more power than we ever imagined to mold the business however we’d like, for the good of dogs everywhere.

  I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m tired of feeling dizzy and manipulated while trying to shop responsibly. I’m beyond the naïve belief that one side of an argument is grand while any other viewpoint is inherently evil. With this book, I am trying to move the conversation forward so that all dog lovers can understand exactly what we are buying into, no matter which dog we choose as our own. I’m not on the side of the breeders, and I’m not on the side of the rescuers. I’m on the side of the dogs.

  If you, like me, are interested in applying the rationale of a conscious consumer the next time you add a dog to your family, then please, read on. Together, we really can change the world. Dogs are an industry where, thank heavens, smart shopping still can make a major difference.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SETTING THE BASE PRICE

  “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

  —Peter Drucker

  Two signs, one on each side of the road, greet everybody who drives southbound into Wheaton, Missouri. The first one, to the right, is the official green rectangle marking the municipal border along state Highway 86. It announces the population of this place as 696 souls. The second sign, on the left, proudly proclaims the half-square-mile city as the home of the 1996 state championship high school softball team, the Bulldogs. It most likely was erected without the slightest hint of irony.

  There was hardly a car in sight driving past these signs just before ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday, October 5, 2013. That could’ve been because of the gray storm clouds fast closing in, or maybe the highway is pretty much empty for miles on most days of the week, what with the nearest city of any real size being more than an hour or two away to the northeast, up in Springfield, or to the west, out in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And odds are this stretch of road was a lot more popular a couple of hours earlier, especially the mile or so of it that led to a third sign on that morning. This one was temporary and small, the kind of sign Realtors use to announce an open house on a street corner. It stated, simply, that there was an auction that day. If drivers didn’t already know it, then they would have had no idea this sign had anything to do with dogs—or that they were driving into the heart of one of the biggest dog-breeding regions in the largest dog-buying nation on Earth—but it’s the sign that everybody who had gotten up before dawn that morning had been watching for since they’d driven away from their homes with a hot cup of coffee and the hopes of making a little money or of scoring some good deals.

  The arrow on that small sign pointed right, directing drivers to three side-by-side green barns past the intersection with Highway 76. That’s where all the vehicles were on this chilly, rainy morning, in what otherwise seemed like the middle of somewhere that was about as close to nowhere as a person can get in the United States of America. A mess of sedans and pickups and SUVs and trucks towing trailers was parked scattershot all along the dirt driveway and grass leading up to the barns, much as they’d be if their drivers had arrived excitedly and wanted to be first through the gate to enjoy a day at a town fair. The license plates were from Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and Arkansas and Iowa. Some of the drivers, given the distance, had probably driven the night before and booked a room for about $50 at the Booneslick Lodge in Neosho, the nearest place with motels, about a half hour away.

  Just before ten o’clock, a few stragglers hustled over the mud puddles and held the middle barn’s door open for one another, as polite strangers do. Inside, the lights were bright and the mood was bubbly, sort of like the atmosphere before the opening notes are strummed at a concert. Four sets of metal bleachers surrounded a fenced-off area to the right, where a folding table, the kind you’d see at a bake sale, was beneath a podium branded with the Southwest Auction Service logo. In the space close to that fenced-off area, closer than the bleachers allowed, a good number of people had opened their own lawn chairs and settled in to ensure an unobstructed view. One might say they’
d scored the best floor seats. There were families, some with kids in tow, as well as a number of couples. Most wore jeans, sweatshirts, and flannel. One or two of the men had on overalls, and nearly every face in the building was white. A few of the men draped their arms over the shoulders of the women sitting next to them, as comfortable as they might be on one of the countless Baptist or Methodist church pews in the area. Maybe a half dozen of the men in the bleachers, a minority sitting clustered together, wore button-down shirts, suspenders, hats, and beards suggesting that they might be Amish.

  Green paw prints painted on the gray concrete floor led attendees from the doorway past the bleachers to the left, where six or seven people waited in line at the registration counter. Women behind the counter took their information: the person’s name, address, and driver’s license number or, if he had one, his USDA license number. The women did all of the paperwork with a smile and, when they could, used the first names of returning customers for a personal touch.

  A stack of programs sat atop the counter for the taking. Each thirteen-page copy, stapled in the corner, had a bright orange cover and white pages printed on both sides with descriptions of the nearly three hundred dogs scheduled to be auctioned that day. Some people sat at nearby tables, drinking sodas purchased from the concession room and poring over each dog’s listing the way quarter horse bettors scrutinize race cards at the track. Others simply handed over their information, got their numbered bidding card, and moved on, walking past the framed poster that so many dog lovers know from veterinarians’ offices back home, the one that shows all of the recognized dog breeds in neatly ordered rows.