Designer Dogs: An Exposé. Madeline Bernstein
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of the United States. The new version confronts the existence and practices of puppy mills and answers the question “how much” with “too much.” In 2009, Patti Page was quoted by the Humane Society as saying:
The original song asks the question: “How much is that doggie in the window?” Today, the answer is “too much.” And I don’t just mean the price tag on the puppies in pet stores. The real cost is in the suffering of the mother dogs back at the puppy mill. That’s where most pet store puppies come from. And that kind of cruelty is too high a price to pay.4
The lyrics of “Do You See That Doggie in the Shelter?” were set to the same tune as the original version. It spoke of the dogs across the country without homes and owners to protect them, and who are lost and go hungry until rescued by a shelter.
Its catchy chorus is:
Do you see that doggie in the shelter
the one with the take me home eyes
If you give him your love and attention
he will be your best friend for life
While the public was celebrating its easy access to designer dogs, as the happy, tail-wagging music played on, back at the farms horrible things were happening. The original puppy farmers, who came from a background of agricultural crop farming and were not dog-breeding experts, treated the dogs like livestock rather than companion animals and figured out early on that the less they invested in good food, veterinary care, and husbandry, the higher their profits would be. They gave no regard to the health of mother dogs, which they bred constantly, or to genetic pool diversity. They also spent as little as possible to care for puppies during their transportation to pet stores. If some puppies died during transport, the price of the survivors would be raised so that the profit wouldn’t be hurt.
The term “puppy mill,” while colloquially used during the post-war period, wasn’t formally introduced into legal vernacular until a 1984 Minnesota court case, Avenson v. Zegart, 577 F. Supp. 958. The plaintiffs in the case had been operating a dog-breeding business in Hubbard County, Minnesota, when, in March of 1982, they came to the attention of Lesley Zegart, then executive director of the Minnesota Humane Society, who was investigating dog-breeding businesses in Minnesota to determine which ones were operating as puppy mills. The term “puppy mills” got an official on-the-record definition in the courts’ statement of facts, which defined it as “a dog breeding operation in which the health of the dogs is disregarded in order to maintain a low overhead and maximize profits.” This characterization was true from the onset of puppy mills through the time of the 1984 case and continues to be true today.
The retailers the farmers shipped the dogs to were no better at caring for the dogs than they were. They too were out to make the highest profit margins possible, and they too crammed as many dogs into cages as they could and avoided paying for high-quality food or medical care. In effect they became minimills. If puppy deaths during transportation led to low inventory, that is, scarce “crop,” or they had to pay more to farmers because of this, they, too, simply raised their prices to make up for it. Costs were passed to the consumer.
Many dogs died within days of arrival at a shop or purchase by a consumer. Yet stores were not legally obligated to provide refunds for the purchase cost or the medical bills incurred by grief-stricken consumers. Decades later, this persistent bad behavior inspired the passage of dog and cat “lemon laws” and “puppy/kitten mill warranty laws” in some states. These laws required refunds, reimbursement for medical bills, husbandry standards, and mandatory documentation of the source of each pet and its medical status—a customer bill of rights, if you will. Later in this book you will see actual cases involving these issues.
It is critical to note that although a puppy may survive early challenges and appear healthy, problems caused in the breeding process often manifest later in life, for example, medical disabilities, congenital problems, and incurable pain or discomfort. Sometimes an entire litter shares the same condition. Customers saddled with ongoing medical bills are often excluded from pet insurance protection policies, as many of the problems are considered preexisting conditions. The Affordable Care Act legislated against excluding coverage, or price gauging for coverage of people deemed to have preexisting conditions by insurance companies, but there is no such law governing pet insurance. Often when these costs are too burdensome, the pets are abandoned.
In the 1950s, stores like Sears, Roebuck and Company, and F. W. Woolworth Company started to get in on the action, featuring window dogs to attract customers, who bought other items as well once they were in the store. One could even order dogs from the Sears catalogue, foreshadowing the ability to order sight unseen from the internet.
What did department stores know about housing and caring for live animals? Not much more than anyone else at either end of the supply chain. I still remember the section of the Woolworth store that had what seemed like hundreds of little birds for sale crammed into cages!
As puppies were becoming available for purchase through a wide variety of retailers, brokers and dealers were developing a “convenience delivery program” to service the industry. The service would, if you will, “Uber” puppies to shops, buyers, and even research laboratories. It was a cash business with no regulation or third-party oversight. Puppies were transported in cramped quarters via pickup trucks or trailers and subjected to the elements.
In the 1950s, the beagle, made popular by the debut of Snoopy of Peanuts fame, became one of the most popular family dogs of the next two decades. Beagles also became, and still are, the favorite breed for animal testing in laboratories, as they are small, docile, and willing to please. The less stressed out a dog is during experiments, the fewer unpredictable changes in their physiology will occur and the more consistent the results will be. The calm demeanor of the beagle also reduces stress for the laboratory staff while they are experimenting on the dogs or caring for them. That a dog revered for his or her love and trust of humans is rewarded by being subjected to painful testing, seems like treachery and a cruel misuse of that trust.
In the late 1990s, the actress Kim Basinger brought cruel laboratory testing on beagles into the public eye when she learned that Yamanouchi USA, a pharmaceutical company, and Huntingdon Life Sciences, a medical research company, planned to break the legs of thirty-six beagles to test an osteoporosis drug. Basinger mounted an enormous, well-publicized fight, during which she demanded the release of the dogs and even offered to take all thirty-six beagles home with her. The laboratory refused her request to remove the dogs, but it did stop the experiment.
To this day, the beagle remains the favorite dog of animal testing laboratories, but it’s also the subject of “beagle freedom” legislation. The legislation calls for dogs (not just beagles) and cats to be released to humane societies and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, to be adopted into loving homes rather than euthanized, when they’re no longer desired by the labs. In 2015, California enacted a law that required that publicly funded research institutions comply. There are comparable statutes in four other states: Connecticut, Minnesota, Illinois, and Nevada.
The bottom line is that the beagle suffered the torments of mass production because children wanted Snoopy dogs and medical researchers wanted to cut them up. Why do beagles still like us sixty years later? As an aside, it is not uncommon for me to see dogs who were brutally treated by their human companions still act like they love them. It is really heartbreaking to see that; we can’t always understand that level of love and loyalty.
Pepper the Dalmation
With the surge of family pets came a surge of burglaries. Family pets were easy targets because they are more docile than stray dogs. This quality made them especially desirable for research institutions, since it’s easier to experiment on a dog with a calm demeanor. And so, dognappers caught pet dogs and sold them to research facilities.
In 1965, the issues of stolen family pets ending up in laboratories, their mistreatment there, and the deplorable treatment many of them received early on from puppy farm operators and other breeders, became part of the public discourse after the journalist Coles Phinizy published a story titled “The Lost Pets that Stray to the Labs” in the November 29, 1965 edition of Sports Illustrated.5 It told the tale of