Interview with the author
Feb. 26, 2010

Great Falls author’s debut book reveals horrors of puppy mills | greatfallstribune.com

Gracie, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, was by no means a picture-perfect dog when she was saved from a Pennsylvania puppy mill.

She spent the first six years of her life in a cage, breeding litter after litter of puppies.

When authorities raided the kennel where she lived, the dog with short dry hair, one bulged out eye and drooping nipples found her way to an adoptive home.

Gracie turned out to be the perfect dog to help expose the horrific world of commercial dog breeding, or puppy mills.

Carol Bradley’s new book, “Saving Gracie, How One Dog Escaped the Shadowy World of American Puppy Mills,” chronicles Gracie’s life from her time as a breeding dog through her eventual adoption by a loving family and transformation into a healthy, happy animal.

“Saving Gracie” is the first book for Bradley, a Great Falls resident and former Great

“Saving Gracie” is the first book for Bradley, a Great Falls resident and former Great Falls Tribune reporter. The book officially publishes Monday but is already available on Amazon.com.

Bradley hasn’t always been a dog lover. In 2002 while working for the Tribune, she covered a case in which collie breeder Athena Lethcoe-Harman and her husband were charged with multiple counts of animal cruelty when they tried to transport their kennel of 180 dogs from Alaska to Arizona and were stopped at the border north of Shelby. For nine months, while the Harmans faced prosecution, the collies stayed in Shelby and later in Great Falls under the care of dozens of volunteers.

“It opened my eyes to the widespread existence of puppy mills and to the cost, both in real dollars and human effort, required to salvage their victims,” Bradley writes in the introduction to “Saving Gracie.”

After the case ended, Bradley studied animal law during a fellowship at Harvard. All the while she kept thinking about Camp Collie and the widespread problem of puppy mills.

“I just couldn’t get this out of my mind,” Bradley said in a recent interview. “I was struck by the fact that there was this whole underbelly of dog breeders that I was not aware of.”

Her original idea was an expose filled with the gut-wrenching details about the large puppy mills that operate across the country.

Puppy mills have been found with more than 1,000 dogs. Breeding dogs spend years in those kennels, often living in cages, covered in filth and producing a litter of puppies every six months. Those puppies are sold to distributors who sell them to pet stores or over the Internet.

“I started off thinking I would write your basic angry manifesto,” Bradley said.

When she pitched that plan to agents at a 2007 writing workshop in New York, she got the same feedback from each agent — good topic, but too grim. They told her she would need a character or a plotline, something the reader could follow as they learned about the problem of commercial dog breading along the way.

That’s where Gracie came in.

Of the book’s 20 chapters, 17 follow Gracie, the raid on her kennel, the prosecution of the breeder and Gracie’s transition to normal dog life after her adoption. The other three chapters focus on the broader issue of puppy mills.

Bradley chose to focus on a puppy mill in Pennsylvania, where the state recently changed its laws to prevent unhealthy kennels.

“At the time, Pennsylvania was kind of the perfect storm for this issue,” she said.

She chose Gracie because she wanted to profile a dog that had spent much of its life as a victim of a puppy mill. She also wanted an owner who wasn’t the perfect dog lover, but instead was changed by adopting a dog.

Gracie’s owner was reluctant to get a dog, giving in because her children begged and pleaded for the pet.

“Gracie really wound up changing her life,” Bradley said.

Bradley spent four years writing and researching the book, along with learning how to be successful in the world of publishing.

She traveled to Pennsylvania twice and spent time with Gracie and her family, the Humane Society officer who raided Gracie’s kennel, the attorney who prosecuted the case and the woman who ran the shelter where Gracie stayed during her breeder’s trial.

Bradley hopes her book raises awareness of a problem that few people realize exist.

Dogs have become such an important part of many families and people spend millions on their dogs every year, she said.

“But yet behind the scenes this unbelievable squalor exists and people need to know about that.”

posted under Animal Welfare News, Puppy Mills, Saving Gracie, Uncategorized | No Comments »

People mag gives Gracie 4 stars!

February26

Thanks, People, for this very generous review! People review crop

posted under Blogging, Puppy Mills, Saving Gracie | 9 Comments »

Pub date nears

February22

I spent the summer of 1976 working the saddle stitchery at The Kingsport Press in Tennessee – a brain-numbing task that required jostling enormous piles of paper into tidy stacks and feeding them into a contraption that bound them and sent them on their way. The first two weeks on the job, I acquired dozens of paper cuts: my hands felt as though they’d been dunked in acid. There was no air conditioning in the bowels of the plant where we worked, only a humongous fan; one afternoon I collapsed from heat prostration and had to limp home early. To the rest of the stitchery crew I was a patsy, a college kid destined for some white-collar job, ineligible to collect the six weeks of unemployment they got each winter when the Press slowed down.

The saddle stitchery constituted my only up-close and personal look at book-making. Never once did it occur to me that summer that I might write a book of my own someday — that the person waiting most anxiously on the other side of the presses would be myself.

But life has a way of surprising us. Thirty-six years later, my personal copies of Saving Gracie are en route from Wiley’s distribution plant in Virginia and scheduled to arrive sometime Tuesday, courtesy of UPS. The book goes on sale next week. I have to admit, this moment feels awfully sweet.

Four years have passed since I began researching puppy mills, and to say the learning curve was daunting is an understatement. But for every person who has said to me: “Puppy mills? I can’t read that” there is someone else who has read a galley of the book and knows that yes, you can. The positive early feedback has been gratifying.

I’ve worked with a wonderful team, from my agent, Jeff Kleinman; to my editors, Pam Mourouzis and Beth Adelman; to Wiley’s marketing and publicity staff, Malati Chavali and Adrienne Fontaine; and Ken Howell at Newman Communications. In Great Falls, Pam Lemelin and Chris Miller put together this boffo website.

Now the real work — selling the book – begins. No paper cuts or suffocating heat involved, just working it to get out the word.

I feel more than up to it.

posted under Blogging, Puppy Mills, Saving Gracie, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »