Designer Dogs: An Exposé. Madeline Bernstein
was a five-year-old dalmatian and the beloved pet of Julia and Peter Lakavage and their children when she disappeared from their Pennsylvania farm. The couple advertised that Pepper was missing and searched relentlessly for her. Ultimately, they learned of the arrest of William Miller, an opportunist pet dealer, who was attempting to ship dogs and goats in a truck that was not up to local vehicular codes. His shipment was housed for a night at a Pennsylvania SPCA while he resolved his truck violations. In the account of the arrest, the Lakavages read that there were two dalmatians in the truck. Julia called the shelter to ask about the dalmatians and later, after seeing a photo of them, identified one as Pepper. But before the Lakavages could get to the shelter to rescue their dog, Miller had already unloaded his shipment at Montefiore Hospital in New York City. When Julia learned where Miller had gone, she raced to the hospital, but by the time she got there, it was too late. Pepper had died during experimentation and been cremated after. It was too late to save her.
During an investigation by Pennsylvania police officers, Miller claimed to have received the dog from a person who claimed he got the dog from another person, and so on. There were no reliable records to document any transactions. It was clear that dealers were stealing, selling, and transporting dogs across the country, unregulated.
During the hunt for Pepper, Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania and Congressman Joseph Resnick of New York learned of the theft and investigation. With Senator Clark’s support, Congressman Resnick introduced a bill, H.R. 9743, that mandated that anyone dealing, buying, selling, or brokering dogs be licensed by the federal government and keep a proper record of all related transactions.
The proposed bill led to a raging debate in Congress between two sides: people who had witnessed extreme animal cruelty in puppy farms or those like the Lakavages, who suffered heartbreaking experiences, against members of the medical research community who wanted test subjects regardless of the source, whether bred for research, stolen, or bought from public pounds or private shelters. (The terms “pound” and “shelter” are distinctions without a difference. Antiquated statutes still in use tend to use the word “pound” while modern ones have changed the term to “shelters.” Sometimes the former connotes a public rather than private organization.) Some legislators held a strong position for federal action and others advocated states’ rights and said the federal government shouldn’t intervene. Phinizy articulated the core of the conflict when he wrote:
Whether or not the martyred Pepper will succeed in making a federal case out of dognapping is up to the men who make our nation’s laws, but there are two things that the legislative investigation of her death and disappearance have made quite clear: 1) many pet dogs are being stolen from the front lawns and sidewalks of this country, and 2) the thefts in large part are motivated by science’s constant and growing need for laboratory animals.6
The bill ultimately passed, the winning argument being that because dogs were shipped throughout the country, consistency in regulation was necessary and so the legislation must come from the federal government and not the states. But it wasn’t an easy win.
In his article, Phinizy lamented what seemed like a catch-22 presented to Congress, that they had an important subject to regulate, but insufficient statistics to guide their decision. In other words, there was no documentation to prove the need or lack of need for documentation, and no documentation to prove the activity at all. He wrote:
At a preliminary hearing on the bill some weeks ago a great many charges were made, but not much was proved one way or the other. The truth of the matter is that the whole business of dog procurement for laboratory use, illicit or otherwise, wallows in a sea of insufficient fact. How many dogs do US laboratories use in a year? Nobody knows. How many laboratories use dogs in experiments? Again nobody knows. Where do most of the dogs come from? No one can say for sure.7
The problem articulated by Phinizy is one that the animal welfare community sees over and over again. We learn of atrocities being committed regularly and we demand change to prevent the atrocities from recurring, changes like requiring all parties to formally document their activities so there is a paper trail, and responsibility can be allocated if something goes wrong, but because of the lack of authentic, accurate, and uniform documentation of the sketchy transactions of breeders and dealers, it’s hard to prove their activities, and there is no documentation to rely on to support the enactment of laws that would mandate documentation. The lack of statistics makes it impossible to gauge the size of a problem, if any, and the extent of the necessary fix if one is needed.
The right jab leveled by the Sports Illustrated story against the pet breeding and dealing business was followed by a left cross when, on February 4, 1966, Life magazine published “Concentration Camp for Dogs,” a photographic essay by Stan Wayman that depicted heart-wrenching images of the cruel confines of a puppy farm.8 Wayman had taken the photos during a raid by the Baltimore Humane Society and Maryland State Police on a compound holding 103 dogs. One page of photographs was titled “Raiders Discover a Den of Woes.” One of the many upsetting images showed a dog who had frozen to death in below freezing temperatures. The public outrage from these two seminal articles was loud and clear enough to be heard by the legislators on Capitol Hill and President Lyndon B. Johnson. Sadly, those haunting photographs could have been taken yesterday, as puppy mills like the one photographed still exist around the country.
On August 24, 1966, President Johnson signed the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966 (now known as the Animal Welfare Act (AWA)), which incorporated the bill proposed by Clark and Resnick, and added humane treatment standards for laboratory animals. Upon signing the bill, President Johnson remarked:
Progress, particularly in science and medicine, does require the use of animals for research and this bill does not interfere with that. But science and research do not compel us to tolerate the kind of inhumanity which has been involved in the business of supplying stolen animals to laboratories or which is sometimes involved in the careless and callous handling of animals in some of our laboratories.9
The AWA provided guidelines for minimum standards of care for the humane treatment of animals in housing, transport, and breeding, as well as a slew of documentation and record-keeping requirements with detailed transaction records and source, veterinary, and sale records. It also outlined two types of parties, breeders and dealers, and required licenses for them, a class A license and a class B license, respectively.
The definition of a class A licensee includes the following language:
Class “A” licensee means a person subject to the licensing requirements . . . and meeting the definition of a “dealer” [a person breeding, buying, and selling] and whose business involving animals consists only of animals that are bred and raised on the premises in a closed or stable colony and those animals acquired for the sole purpose of maintaining or enhancing the breeding colony.10
This type of licensee can sell only what he breeds on his premises. It doesn’t mean the licensee doesn’t run a puppy mill, and is breaking the guidelines for minimum standards of care, but theoretically the source of the animals and the breeding records are established and documented, so a license might be secured. A class A licensee could be breeding specifically to sell either to a laboratory or the pet industry.
Later in the act, the language states that a license is not required for breeders who have four or fewer breeding females and sell only the offspring of these females.
The description of a class B licensee includes the following language:
Class “B” licensee means a person subject to the licensing requirements . . . and meeting the definition of a “dealer” and whose business includes the purchase and/or resale of any animal. This term includes brokers, and operators of an auction sale, as such individuals negotiate or arrange for the purchase, sale, or transport of animals in commerce. Such individuals do not usually take actual physical possession or control of the animals and do not usually hold animals in any facilities. A class “B” licensee may also exhibit animals as a minor part of the business.
This licensee is a random source dealer, which means his animals could come from anywhere, including front lawns, pounds, owners, swap meets, and animal shelters. Some of these dealers work with middlemen called “bunchers.”