“I need to tell you something, Scooter. Before we bought you . . .”

“You bought me?”

“Stop it! Yes. People buy dogs.”

 

It didn’t take long to coax him from under the bed.

 

Before Scooter, our family history included Poodles, Weimaraners, Goldens, Border Collie, and a fabulous curly-coated Mutt, Puddleglum, who found our house on a rainy southern California day. Some came from breeders, others from the Pound. We appreciated purebreds, but we’re not particular, so in the summer of 2019, we tried, “rescue dog,” but for various reasons that included our not having a fenced yard, and one organization’s display of age discrimination, we began an on-line search. Our fabulous Veterinarian discouraged all puppy store inquiries, advice we respectfully honored until . . .

 

Tuesday, November 8, 2019, when I opened my iPad and took a look at a puppy store ad. The first picture up was a mini Goldendoodle. Scooter.

 

“I was eleven weeks old,” says Scooter. “I had been at the puppy store for eleven days before you finally came.”

“Right. Eleven weeks, eleven days.”

“Tell people what happened next.”

“I will. But really, this blog is something you need to hear, Scooter.”

 

“You turned on your iPad.”

“I did.”

“You opened the website for a puppy store.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“And there I was. First picture up, right?”

“Right.”

“Finally, you arrived and . . .”

“And bought you.”

“Adopted me. And from the very first night, I slept straight through. Not a whimper.”

“Not a whimper. You were wonderful.”

“I’m getting close to my fourth birthday,” said Scooter. “What’s more to say?”

 

“I’m going to say that we ought not to have purchased you. I’ve learned a lot.”

 

He snorted. He wasn’t pleased. “I’m pedigreed. 2nd Generation Mini Goldendoodle. You’ve got the papers. Certified. Three generations deep. AKC registered,

 

“Not. That is, pedigreed, yes, but not AKC registered. Sorry, but you are what’s called a designer dog. A doodle. Your sort is banned from the AKC club. The store was a bit misleading by giving us ‘Welcome to AKC’.”

 

“You’ve got the breeder’s name. You know where I came from.”

“I do. Wright county, Norwood, Missouri. Licensed. Legal. Located in the heart of puppy mill country.

“Puppy mill?”

A commercial dog breeding kennel where the animals are viewed not as family pets but as units of production . . . row after row of dogs living in cages—being bred every heat cycle till their body wears out.

 

If my on-line search is accurate, in 2021, Scooter’s Missouri breeder had ninety-five adult breeding dogs, and ninety-two puppies. I am relieved not to find this kennel named on any of the hundred-plus pages, single spaced, listing the “Worst dog breeders in the Country” (the majority in Missouri). However, another Missouri kennel under our breeder’s last name, with 44 adult breeders, is listed as one of Missouri’s worst puppy mills. Dear god.

It is likely that before we met eleven-week-old Scooter, he had been whelped from an undernourished mini bitch that will be, or has been, impregnated every cycle, will live, or has lived, in a small, filthy wire cage stacked with other small wire cages, denied kindness, and will be, or has been, destroyed after however many years she is or was no longer a profitable “unit of production.” Generally, a mini goldendoodle’s heat cycle occurs every three to four months. Dear god.

The Humane Society of United States (HSUS) reports, “So many puppy mill puppies are born in filthy cages, crammed among row after row of similarly caged dogs with no room to run or play. Mother dogs often spend years living on a wire floor, forced to churn out puppies until their bodies are exhausted. Many breeders kill the mother dogs instead of continuing to feed animals who are no longer profitable.”  I added this just in case you missed what I said one paragraph ago.

There are approximately 10,000 puppy mills in the U.S. each with anywhere between forty or hundreds caged “units of production.” Licensed? Sure. Most, at least. Legal? Of course. Inspected? Laugh time. The lobby for puppy mills is nearly as successful as that for the NRA.

“Yes, Scooter, we have your breeder’s name. However, we didn’t purchase you directly from the breeder.”

 We bought Scooter from a spank’n clean puppy store in a nearby town, assured by a salesperson that “these pups are not purchased from puppy mills.”  That statement wasn’t wrong, but it is amazingly clever. The store doesn’t buy directly from mills, it buys from a puppy broker who buys from puppy mills.

I pull away from the computer here to find a quote by Rudyard Kipling: The truthful well-weighed answer that tells the blacker lie.”

From all reports I have amassed in my search for Scooter’s past, I learn that his particular puppy store (which is being sued by Washington state’s Attorney General) buys exclusively from JAKS Puppies. Inc., an Iowa puppy brokerage frequently in trouble for major infractions both in their business practices, and treatment of dogs. The Broker, not the store, buys puppies from puppy mills even before the pups are eight-weeks-old. One report stated that in a recent year, “Based on audited records, JAKS Puppies imported at least 8,500 puppies from facilities outside Iowa (Human Society of United States).” And quite important to our house, HSUS reports that our Missouri breeder’s facility “is a major supplier to this broker.”

 But who knew? Pups are shuttled from breeder to broker; from broker to store, by puppy transporting companies. Surely, some of these are good, but in many cases, you might not want to look inside the van. In February 2018, “24 puppies were seized from a . . . transport van outside a Petland store in Fort Myers, Florida. The puppies were found with ‘urine, feces, and no water in their cages.’ This transporter was named one of the worst puppy mills in the nation.” That company is still transporting dogs to nearly all points in the country. They’ve got a lovely website.

Purebred pups mostly from puppy mills (probably Scooter was one) are transported to a puppy brokerage site where they live in stacks of containers until it’s time to be stacked in a van and sent across the country.

  Puppy stores order the puppies they want through online purchasing programs. Those pups are located and transported to the broker where they are stored until such time as a transporter loads a van (one pet transporter van was stopped by police in Florida carrying 127 caged dogs) and delivers them, some, thousands of miles, often without a break, certainly without proper care, from broker to stores. There, puppies are cleaned up, and charmingly displayed.

“Did that happen to you, Scooter?” From Missouri, to Iowa, to Washington? From a wire breeding cage to a transport cage, to a holding compartment, to a transport cage, to a puppy store?”

From my hours of researching, trying to learn about a most secretive puppy mill industry, I didn’t find Scooter’s breeder on any of the “horrible” lists. However, his breeder is a major seller to JAKS, and if the reports I read from the HSUS, and such sleuthing organizations as Bailing Out Benji are accurate, our nearby store buys exclusively from JAKS and JAKS is one part of a very cruel industry – dogs bred and sold as “Units of production.”

“I’m a puppy mill dog?”

“It’s possible.”

“Is this a bad thing?”

“You aren’t a bad thing, but the puppy mill industry is.”

“So, I’m not a good dog?”

“You are a wonderful 2nd generation goldendoodle. It couldn’t be better.

“Scooter, let me tell you about some children a bit like you.

There once was a man, a real man, named Nicolae Ceausescu. He was a powerful leader of a very poor country. He thought he could improve his economy, could get rich, by increasing the size of his population. He ran a people mill, we might say. He prohibited all abortions and all contraception. He actually required women to bear five or six children.

“He’s a breeder?”

“Of sorts, yes.”

“Did he have a kennel?”

“Good question. He did. Twenty-six state institutions called ‘child gulags.’”

Many overseeing those institutions were abusive, sadistic, or at the least, terribly neglectful. Babies were not held. Affection was non-existent. Forced sedations, sever beatings, children tied to beds; children suffered frostbite, malnutrition, babies developmentally hindered. Some were kept in cages, smeared with feces, some eaten by rats. Between 1969 and 1989, until Ceausescu and his wife were executed by firing squad, over 150,000 children, mostly not orphaned at all, were wards of the state. It is estimated that 20,000 children died in such confinement. It’s hard to admit that humans can be so bad, that we are capable of utterly devaluing living things. Children didn’t need to be ‘bought,’ the industry needed to be stopped.

 “I may be a puppy mill product?”

 “I think so. I needed to tell you that. I wanted to tell people through our blog that while we can’t imagine life without you, we should never have supported a puppy store.

 “I wish I felt better,” said he, heading for under the bed.

“Scooter! Here, take a look at your first year. This can only make you happy.”