Designer Dogs: An Exposé. Madeline Bernstein
permitted, or otherwise regulated and can pick up pets from regulated or unregulated sources, like Craigslist or “free to good home” advertisements. The buncher sells to a class B licensee, who can then sell to anyone, including research institutions. The buncher rarely has documentation and is not required to. Hence, a class B licensee, though regulated, can circumvent requirements and muddy the footprints on the source trail by using a buncher.
A class B licensee, though he or she usually doesn’t hold animals at a facility, may store the dogs in the back of a truck or use some makeshift confinement system until enough animals are acquired to move to the research institutions. The conditions under which these animals are held are frequently grossly inadequate and the dogs often become ill because of this, or it compounds existing illnesses. The standard defense is to assert that the dogs were in poor shape when they were acquired, so the dealer should not be held responsible. Since the dogs could come from such places as auctions and pounds, it is hard to prove this defense false. Also, no one really asks. It’s the silent wink and nod of the seedy underbelly of the business.
Consider this, if Pepper the Dalmatian was stolen by a buncher and sold to a class B licensee, a random source dealer, who then sold Pepper to a laboratory, the result at that time would have been the same.
The AWA was flawed, and enforcement lax, but it was a start. And there were ripple effects as some states enacted, revised, or augmented their own animal welfare laws. At the time, in the mid- to late 1960s, there was some optimism that relief for these dogs would come. Sadly, it was not to be.
“Try It On the Dog”—Pound Seizure
The AWA was not seriously enforced by the USDA or law enforcement, and there was little respite for dogs. They continued to be brutally farmed, stolen, sold, and abused. Pound seizure practices exacerbated the harm to them.
Pound seizure is the sale or release of pets from a pound to a research testing or educational facility. In this way, shelters, ostensibly safe havens for animals, betrayed them as well. The shelters were supposed to be places where lost pets could be kept safe until found, and abandoned animals could be cared for. Shelters were supposed to help heal dogs who’d been injured or abused, and, ideally, place them into new and loving homes. They were also places that could provide a peaceful, painless, and humane death to animals should that be necessary. Their overarching goals were to ease suffering, provide shelter from the elements, and protect dogs from harm. Or at least they proclaimed these were their goals.
The biomedical and pharmaceutical industries still wanted to test on animals, and researchers and laboratories discovered that pounds were a cheap source of dogs. For their experiments, they did not require that dogs be purebred, or even bred in a consistent manner, to achieve uniform traits. They only required that they be dead or alive.
In the 1940s, several laws were enacted that mandated that public pounds (and even some private organizations housing animals) turn over unclaimed animals to research institutions for experimentation and testing. The following is an actual law passed in Minnesota in 1949 and is representative of similar laws passed in other states around the same time.
35.71 UNCLAIMED AND UNREDEEMED ANIMALS IMPOUNDED; SCIENTIFIC USE.
Subdivision 1. Institution defined. As used in this section, “institution” means any school or college of agriculture, veterinary medicine, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, or other educational or scientific establishment properly concerned with the investigation of, or instruction concerning the structure or functions of living organisms, the cause, prevention, control or cure of diseases or abnormal conditions of human beings or animals.
Subd. 2. Application by institution for license. Such institutions may apply to the State Live Stock-Sanitary Board for a license to obtain animals from establishments maintained by or for municipalities for the impounding, care and disposal of animals seized by lawful authority. If, after investigation, the State Live Stock Sanitary Board finds that the institution making request for licensure is a fit and proper agency within the meaning of this section, to receive a license, and that the public interest will be served thereby, it may issue a license to such institution authorizing it to obtain animals hereunder, subject to the restrictions and limitations herein provided.
Subd. 3. Supervisor of licensed institution. It shall be the duty of the supervisor of any establishment referred to in subdivision 2 to make available to an institution licensed hereunder, from the available impounded animals seized by lawful authority, such number of animals as the institution may request, provided however, that such animals shall have been impounded for not less than five days or for such other minimum period of time as may be specified by municipal ordinance and remain unclaimed and unredeemed by their owners or by any other person entitled to do so. If a request is made by a licensed institution to such supervisor for a larger number of animals than are available at the time of such request, the supervisor of such establishment shall withhold thereafter from destruction, all such unclaimed and unredeemed animals until such request has been filled, provided that the actual expense of holding such animals beyond the time of notice to such institution of their availability, shall be borne by the institution receiving them.11
Other pound seizure laws such as the one above were enacted before the Animal Welfare Act, so there were no restrictions or rules concerning anesthetizing or treating animals humanely while subjecting them to experimentation.
The practice of pound seizures allowed shelters to monetize their animals in two ways. A shelter could sell a live animal to a research institution rather than pay to house and care for it until an owner claimed it as a lost pet, or an abandoned animal found a new home. Or a shelter could euthanize a pet sooner rather than later, as dead pets could also be sold to institutions. When word got out about these practices, some members of the public who knew and disapproved of them would release or leave strays to suffer and die on the streets rather than turn them into pounds. This fundamentally gutted the primary objective of shelters and deprived the animals of any solace.
It was not until 1993, almost fifty years after pound seizure laws were passed and more than thirty years after the label of a class B dealer was established, that a five-day holding period was enacted, as an amendment to the Animal Welfare Act, ostensibly to allow families to reclaim their lost or stolen pets before it was too late. During this period, laboratories (who sold to other institutions such as laboratories and schools), institutions, and shelters were prohibited from selling pets to a dealer. Such a provision might have saved Pepper the Dalmatian thirty years earlier. The following is the USDA summary statement:
SUMMARY: We are amending the regulations under the Animal Welfare Act (Act) to require that dogs and cats acquired by pounds and shelters owned and operated by States, counties, and cities, private entities established for the purpose of caring for animals, such as humane societies or contract pounds or shelters, and research facilities licensed as dealers by the United States Department of Agriculture, be held and cared for at those establishments for at least 5 days before being provided to a dealer. We are also amending the regulations to require that dealers provide a valid certification to anyone acquiring random source dogs and cats from them. These amendments are being made pursuant to the most recent amendment of the Act. The amendment to the Act was enacted to prevent the use of stolen pets in research and to provide owners the opportunity to locate their animals.
EFFECTIVE DATE: August 23, 1993.12
As of this writing, lest you think that pound seizure is a dead issue, only eighteen states and Washington, DC, have prohibited the practice. Thirty-one states leave the decision to local cities and counties, and Oklahoma still requires that animals be handed over for testing. California, considered the most enlightened and progressive state in issues of animal welfare, did not ban the practice of turning over live animals to research institutions until 2016. However, California shelters may still turn over dead animals for research, if they post a notice informing the public that they do. (The notice requirement used to apply to live animals as well.) The State Humane Association of California, now the California Animal Welfare Association, of which I am currently president, sponsored a bill to ban turning over animals, both dead and alive, to research facilities (Assembly Bill 2269). The part of the bill protecting live animals became law, but the part intended to protect dead pets and let