The Dog Merchants Read online

  Some people stopped to chat and browse at the two folding tables near the bathrooms, tables staffed by APRI, and a dog supply company offering everything from ear cleaner to syringes. Most of the attendees, though, found their seats without delay. A girl in a pink sweatshirt and sparkly matching headband climbed up the bleachers to sit next to her parents, munching on nachos and looking appropriately put-upon for her teenage years, no doubt wishing she could instead be out somewhere with her friends. A woman nearby carefully laid down her seat cushion, the kind that are common at college football games, obviously anticipating a long day of trying to stay comfortable on the metal bleacher seats. Some sixty or seventy people were inside the barn as the auction was about to start, and the crowd would keep growing all day, sometimes to the point of creating a standing-room-only section. Everybody who had arrived early and staked out a good spot needed to mark their territory.

  Down at the podium by the folding table, Bob Hughes, the owner of Southwest Auction Service, cleared his throat and took the microphone. His voice reverberated through the big speakers hanging from the barn’s roof, bouncing off the walls and drowning out most of the barking that was coming from behind the closed door to an adjacent room. The crowd instinctively hushed, with some folks sitting up a little straighter and leaning forward to listen. Hughes seemed happy and calm, welcoming his customers with a smile just as he always has since starting out as an auctioneer back in 1988.

  There was no way to know whether this day’s auction would top his best sale to date, which, according to his marketing materials, brought in $514,371, or whether any of the dogs waiting in cages in the back would go for a better price than the most expensive dog he ever sold, an English Bulldog who went for $12,600. But the crowd seemed good, he recognized many of the faces, and he knew there was probably a fair bit of money in the room, so he got right down to business.

  Several men helping out that day brought items to the table for display one by one, then acted as spotters, scanning the crowd for anyone who held up an auction number to bid on the prices Hughes called out in staccato succession: Two hundred . . . two hundred . . . two hundred . . . do I hear two hundred . . . now two-fifty, two-fifty, over there for two-fifty. . . . Among the spotters was Hughes’s adult son, Chadd, wearing a pink, long-sleeved Oxford shirt with SOUTHWEST AUCTION SERVICE embroidered along one sleeve. He was a bit more stylish than his dad, having adorned his blue jeans with a belt covered in bling. “Ho!” Chadd shouted and pointed when he saw an auction card raised into the air. “Yah!” other spotters hollered and pointed as more bidders joined in, raising the prices as they competed from around the room to win the best deals.

  The first items that went up for bid could’ve been at any garage sale or flea market. Plastic dog bowls, stacks and stacks of them, were fifty cents apiece. Brand-new nail trimmers went for two-fifty a package, pet carriers for ten bucks, and space heaters for six dollars. Sellers offered up everything from wire-coated panels—“They’re great for building playpens,” Hughes told the crowd—to boxes of HomeAgain microchips. Rubber-backed carpet squares, used feed boxes, and bags of almost-expired Greenies treats came and went from the folding table. A few random piles of stuff seemed to have been hauled straight out of basements or attics, like a box of Easter decorations and stuffed animals. Hughes found buyers for all of it, at whatever price the market inside the barn would bear.

  After about an hour, more helpers emerged from the door to the adjacent room, the one that contained all the dogs. The barking echoed louder throughout the barn as the helpers swung the door open, revealing rows of stacked cages, then was muffled again when they shut the door behind them, so the dogs could no longer be seen. Some of the helpers were women, some were men; some were middle-aged, others were teenagers. They wore clothes they didn’t seem to mind getting dirty, everything from a football jersey to a green sleeveless T-shirt printed with the British-inspired catchphrase “Stay Calm and Graduate from College.” They lined up folding chairs, seven of them in all, along the inside of the fenced area. Then they went back through the door and reemerged a few minutes later, each holding one dog in his or her arms. There was an American Eskimo—dog number 1 in the day’s program—along with a Beagle and five Chihuahuas, all brought out in alphabetical breed order. All of the handlers petted the dogs they held, trying to maintain quiet and calm.

  Hughes had the crowd going pretty good when he saw the first of the dogs come out, spotting them from the corner of his eye and then turning his head and shoulders with acknowledgment. He had been sitting behind the podium, comfortably leaning forward on his elbows to call prices into the microphone while the bid spotters paced the floor in front of him, but now he held the mike in his hand and stood fully upright, making his presence known.

  “Okay, everybody,” he said, slowing his pace of speech from the rapid fire of an auctioneer to the distinct clarity of a schoolteacher. The crowd, abuzz from the action, settled down to listen. “We’re about to start with the dogs,” Hughes said, “so let’s go over some rules.”

  A sign on the wall behind him, clearly posted, stated that no cameras or recording devices were allowed. It’s the same warning that is printed on the promotional fliers Hughes sends out before auctions, only on the fliers it’s in all caps and comes with an added warning:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY!! ABSOLUTELY NO CAMERAS, VIDEO CAMERAS, CELL PHONE RECORDING OR ANY OTHER TYPE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC DEVICES ALLOWED WITHOUT THE PROPERTY OWNER’S WRITTEN CONSENT! VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED FOR TRESPASSING AND DAMAGES FOR SLANDEROUS INTENT!

  Hughes now wanted to make sure those notices had been brought to everyone’s attention and explicitly explained. He held his own iPhone to his ear and said, “If we see you talking like this, that’s okay.” Then he pointed it to the ground, as one might when typing a text message. That was all right with him, too. Then he held the phone out in front of him, as if searching for a signal—or surreptitiously aiming a camera. Anybody doing that, he said, would get a visit from a Southwest Auction Service employee, who would look through the photographs stored in the phone. If any of the photos made management uneasy, he said, the phone would be deposited with local law enforcement. He added that he attended the officers’ charity events each year, as any well-respected, well-connected local businessman might.

  When the crowd was sufficiently forewarned, Hughes held out his empty hand, palm facing down, as if to calm anyone who might be feeling threatened. “Listen,” he said. “We welcome everybody here—buyers, sellers, rescues, vets, whoever. This is the United States of America. You’re entitled to have your own agenda. But you are on private property, and these are our rules.”

  Hughes then motioned for dog number 1, the American Eskimo, to be carried to the auction table. The fluffy white female was listed in the program as being four years old and a good mom when bred in the past, with official purebred papers from APRI. Her name was Alice, but it wasn’t used; all of the dogs that day would be called by number, not by name. She was listed as being part of a “breed sellout,” meaning her owner was no longer breeding American Eskimos and had no further use for her.

  As the bidding started, the handler petted dog number 1 continuously, keeping her calm enough to stand on the table in plain view while Hughes called out bids from the crowd over the microphone. The spotters kept pacing the concrete floor and scanning the bleachers for buyers, just the same as when the nail clippers and Easter decorations had been the items up for auction. Dog number 1 didn’t seem particularly happy on the table, nor particularly bothered; bewildered is probably a fair word. She didn’t squirm, she didn’t shake, and she didn’t bare her teeth or growl. She didn’t let out a bark or so much as a whimper. She didn’t piddle on the table in fear, the way some of the other dogs would later that day, nor did she try to play the way some of the puppies coming out that afternoon would. Dog number 1 just stood there, rather nonchalantly, allowing the handler to pet her as bidding on her life continued all around.

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sp; Nobody holding up a card to raise the price on dog number 1 got up from his seat in the bleachers. Nobody asked about her temperament or health, although as the day went on, Hughes would start mentioning up front which dogs were missing some or all of their teeth. Some of the attendees may have inspected the dogs in the back room before the auction started, but now that bidding had commenced, nobody walked up front to give dog number 1 a close look or to touch her, or to assess her in any way beyond her looks from a distance. Next to her description in the program was the name of her seller—a commercial breeder who, during a USDA inspection in 2011, was said to have had an American Eskimo dog living in conditions that did not meet federal standards, such as having a wooden post at the edge of the dog’s pen chewed so badly that screws were sticking out—but nobody asked whether that dog might have been this one. The sale of dog number 1 was a pure business transaction, one based on her status as breeding stock. Ultimately, she went for $60, and then she was carried back to the room where she’d started out, and where she would stay in a cage until her new owner was ready to collect her at the end of the day.

  Now the auction table was open for dog number 2 in the program, a two-year-old Beagle who had recently birthed eight puppies. She was put in the American Eskimo’s place and, in the same way, constantly petted by a handler to keep her calm. Bidding began immediately, with maybe a ten-second pause during the switch, just enough time for Hughes to take a breath and start again in his fast-paced auctioneer patter. There were, after all, some three hundred dogs to work through before sundown. It was going to be a full day’s effort to get them all sold.

  Most of the people in the room paid no attention as the American Eskimo left and the Beagle was brought out. They had come that day for other dogs, and they would wait patiently or chat among themselves as the well-organized program made its way through the Bull Mastiffs and the Dachshunds and the English Sheepdogs and the Pomeranians and the Retrievers and the Soft-Coated Wheatens and all the rest of the breeds in the back room. The teenage girl sitting in the bleachers wearing the pink sweatshirt and sparkly matching headband kept munching on her nachos, not even bothering to look up. She was no doubt upset that her parents had dragged her to yet another auction on a perfectly good Saturday. These long days in the barn were always the same, so routine that they had become downright boring.

  Southwest Auction Service sells many things, from farm equipment to firearms, but it is also home to the largest, most successful USDA-licensed dog auction in the United States, whose citizens buy more dogs each year than any other nation’s in the world. And Bob Hughes, who may look to newcomers like the auction’s franchise-building star player, is actually the continuation of a dynasty. He’ll tell anyone who asks, with a modest amount of humility, that the Hugheses are regarded in these parts as the first family of the pet industry. To know him, and to understand how he came to be calling out prices by the hundreds and thousands of dollars at that podium, one first has to know his parents.

  Jim Hughes was a middling college student who earned Cs before graduating. He served six months of active duty in the US Army, where he apparently figured out just as fast as his commanding officer that he wasn’t the type to take orders from others. After that, he moved to Ohio and worked as a chemist for the state’s Department of Agriculture. In the late 1950s, he married a woman named Sue and the couple spent five years living in California, where Jim worked as a chemist for San Bernardino County. It wasn’t the life they wanted, though, so he and Sue bought a four-hundred-acre farm just outside of Wheaton in the early 1960s, and he promptly began raising cows and crops just like lots of other farmers in the southwest corner of Missouri.

  “What happened was that sometime in the early sixties, Mom wanted a color TV,” as Bob Hughes tells the story he has heard since he was a child. “They were barely making it with the farm, so Dad said, ‘You want a color TV? You earn it!’ Well, Mom bought a couple of Poodles. She’d ship the puppies to my grandmother out in Columbus, Ohio, where she could sell them out of the newspaper to the big city market. She got a hundred ten, a hundred twenty dollars apiece for those puppies. That was big money back then.”

  Jim, meanwhile, was doing everything he could to keep the farm going, but “we promptly began to starve to death,” as he put it in an article about his early business life. Jim had started out with thirty-two cows and then added pigs to increase his income, along with his workload. He ultimately built up the farm to one hundred and forty-eight cows and twenty-seven sows, which had him doing backbreaking chores for eighteen to twenty hours a day. As he remembers things, Sue didn’t bring in Poodles at that time; they were Schnauzers and Pekingese—and the market for what they produced was beating the heck out of the market for what his cows and pigs were generating. And truth be told, the initial breeds weren’t of much consequence as more and more of them arrived, diversifying Sue’s stock. Her handful of dogs soon grew to more than 320 on the Hughes farm, and Jim ultimately decided they were a better bet in terms of a cash crop. He was killing himself and barely breaking even, and his wife was earning enough to have to pay income taxes by playing around with puppies.

  A lot of the other dairy farmers thought Jim Hughes was nuts, letting his place literally go to the dogs—as Bob Hughes tells it, “They’d come over and ask him, ‘Hey Jim, how much milk does a Maltese give?’”—but the Hugheses didn’t mind the needling because they were onto something big. In fact, they were among the first people to tap into what would ultimately become the biggest market for purebred dogs in the history of the world.

  Just as Jim and Sue were becoming large-scale breeders, a post–World War II surge in middle-class income had Americans leaving the cities to embrace the suburban lifestyle of a house with a yard, a couple of kids, and a beloved dog. The United States, always a melting pot of people, had until then been a place where if there were a family pet at all, it was usually a garden-variety mutt. That changed in the middle of the twentieth century. The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show started airing on television in 1948, three years before the premiere of I Love Lucy, and dogs like those fancy purebreds shown on TV—dogs previously owned only by the wealthy and famous—were showing up in the newspaper classifieds in places like Columbus, Ohio, at prices working people could afford if they saved a bit. The purebred dogs, as much as the suburban houses, became a middle-class lifestyle status symbol.

  “It got to a point where my grandmother told Mom, ‘I can’t keep up with selling all of these puppies, but there’s a pet store here in Columbus that wants them,’” Bob says. “Well, that was the first-ever Petland. They’re now the biggest chain of pet stores in the USA.”*

  While Sue was selling puppies, other farmers’ wives were selling eggs—but they saw that the size of the Hughes home had doubled and that the family had a new car, and they started asking her about the puppy business at church, as Bob tells the story. That’s where Jim and Sue saw their next business opportunity, which was dealing dogs among their neighbors to help them start kennels, too, and then dealing those dogs’ offspring among all the new kennels as owners tried to diversify their own breeding stock. The Hugheses opened a business called DoBoTri Kennels, a name that most folks thought stood for some kind of a three-colored Doberman Pinscher but actually referred to their three kids: Doug, Bob, and Tricia. DoBoTri allowed the family to buy all the color televisions they wanted for the next several decades, and Jim walked around telling people that he knew more about the dog industry than any other human being in the world. During the course of a half century, Jim bought a half million dogs as everyday business. “Barry County, where Wheaton is, had the largest volume of breeders in the United States because it all sprang from my dad’s kennel,” Bob says proudly today. It’s a legacy that continues, too. Southwest Missouri is still considered the epicenter of large-scale breeding, with the state having one registered commercial kennel for every three thousand people. The next-closest state is Nebraska, which has only about a quarter as many. />
  DoBoTri Kennels is no more; Jim and Sue sold it to the Hunte Corporation, a nearby puppy distributor, in the early 2000s. (More on Hunte later.) But that was long after Bob had started following his dad out on business, learning the dog industry from the inside out. Bob worked for DoBoTri throughout most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, selling dogs among all the breeders in the region. He was acting as what is known in the dog business as a broker, which is a middleman or salesman who connects dog breeders with wholesale buyers, be they other breeders, research facilities, or pet stores.

  From there, it was a pretty easy business jump for Bob to become an auctioneer: a person who gets all the sellers and buyers into a single room and takes a commission for brokering the best deal on each dog.

  “I had always wanted to be an auctioneer,” Bob recalls. “The people who succeed in life sell what they know, and I know about dogs. There was a guy in Versailles, Missouri, who had held a few auctions, but he was a real estate guy. So I went for it. My first auction was a lady with two hundred dogs going out of business. I got her three times the money she expected.”

  That was the beginning of Southwest Auction Service, which is the business Hughes is now teaching to his son, Chadd, while holding grandchildren on his lap—toddlers he refers to over the microphone in the barn as “the next generation.” (As with any good dynasty, there are already heirs apparent.) Bob did breed dogs for a while, but he says he leaves that to Chadd now; in 2013, Chadd was offering one of his Bull Terriers, advertised as a grandson of the 2006 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show best in show champion, for stud service. Chadd also sometimes takes the mike at the auctions, calling out the prices in a way that sounds eerily like Bob’s own patter. Their teamwork has the auctions generating some good business, too. One held on February 11, 2012, when the world’s economy was still lurching to recover postrecession, brought in nearly a quarter million dollars, according to Kennel Spotlight.