Saving Gracie » Carol Bradley

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‘Working there messed me up’

January23

In the 22 months since Saving Gracie was published, I’ve heard from dozens of animal lovers eager to share their story about rescuing a puppy mill dog. A recent letter from 20-year-old Ohio resident Breann Davis is as powerful as they come. Breann wrote about her own experience working in a puppy mill. She was so shell-shocked by what she witnessed — and by what she was unable to change — that last October she finally left, vowing to do what she can on the outside to change the lives of these dogs. With her permission, I’m reprinting Breann’s letter so you can read the disturbing details for yourself. Thanks, Breann.

She writes:

Hello,

My name is Breann and I recently purchased your book, “Saving Gracie.” Stopping puppy mills is something I want to dedicate my life to. I recently quit my job, I worked at a puppy mill for fourteen months. During my time there I saw the most horrifying things and to this day I still have nightmares about it.

I started my job there right out of high school. My mother had told me about a “dog kennel” that was hiring and I jumped on the opportunity because I love dogs. Dogs have always been my life and my love for them is uncomparible to anything else. To my horror, it was not a dog kennel at all but a full blown mill. Three buildings filled with dogs in wire cages. The noise was deafening. The smell was even worse. But I accepted the job because I wanted to work with animals and I figured that I might be able to make their lives a little better. When I first started there were around 100 dogs. You see, she didn’t breed very much so out of the 100, only about 20 were adults. She was mostly a broker. She bought puppies for low prices from local amish and resold them for outrageous prices. 90% of the dogs there were sickly. Every week she would go out and bring more dogs in. Half of the pups would die after about a week. It was truly awful.

The dogs mental health were worse than their physical. If they weren’t completely terrified of people then they were so crazed for attention that they would try digging or biting threw the cage to get to you. After a few months of me being there she doubled her kennel size. She kept most of her dogs in 24″ by 24″ wire cages. She had Yorkies, Maltese, Poodles, Caveliers, Bichons, Poms, Havanese, Pugs, and various mix breeds. In slightly bigger wire cages she kept Bulldogs, Bermese Mountain dogs, Labs and various others. If these larger breed puppies didn’t sell fast enough, their legs would grow wrong from standing on the wire and not being able to exercise. Working there messed me up, being in the middle of animal cruelty was stressful.

She always lied when selling the pups, telling the new owners that the pups were bred and raised by her. She hired a vet who had lost his license due to malpractice to “vet check” these puppies. Most of the dogs she sold went for at least $600, most of them being mixed breeds. She oftentimes sold mixed dogs as purebreds. I spent most of my mornings frantically trying to revive dying puppies, medicating ill dogs and giving each animal a little bit of love, even if it was just a pat on the head. The rest of my day consisted of cleaning and feeding.

I ended up saving two dogs from that hell hole. My first was a yorkie-poo I named Sheldon. Soon after I started working there Sheldon came in from an amish breeder. Three days later I took him low for the “low” price of $250. She was selling him for $600 originally. My tiny half pound puppy was riddled with ear mites and worms. He was also underweight. But boy was he a little lover boy and I was happy for him to have a home.

My second dog, Namine, I got in January of this year, 2011. She was seven months old and extremely terrified of everything. My boss had told me she was trading her to an Amish breeder in exchange for some puppies. I couldn’t bare to watch that tiny, horrified yorkie-pom girl spend the rest of her life producing litter after litter. I immediately offered to buy her and that day I took her home for $150.

I still have both of these dogs and they are spoiled rotten. Namine is still very skittish and trusts very few people, but she spends most of her time slumbering in my lap or enjoying the big yard we have. You can tell that both dogs are grateful to be out of that place, they are such wonderful animals who have brightened my life.

I ended up quitting soon after an awful upper respiritory infection broke out, killing over half of the kennel. Never have I ever witnessed that much death at one time.

I hope one day my ex boss will be shut down, but sadly animal laws aren’t very strict so she will continue to get away with it. I may only be twenty, but I hope one day I can be part of the solution to getting rid of these cruel operations.

Thank you for your time and your book.

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NC puppy mill bust is wake-up call

July19

My first thought when I started reading about the puppy mill bust in Hickory, North Carolina last month was: Oh no. Here we go again.

Authorities removed 276 dogs, some of whom had serious infections and almost all of whom were crammed into filthy cages, stacked one on top of one, other from Mason Creek Kennels, an operation run by Bill Thomas Allen, in the northwest corner of the state. The similarities to the puppy mill I wrote about in Saving Gracie didn’t stop there.

Like the dogs at Michael Wolf’s Mike-Mar Kennel in Upper Oxford, Penn., where Gracie and 332 other dogs languished, the North Carolina dogs were mired in their own feces, their paws tender and sore from having stood on wire cages their entire lives. The cages were so small the dogs had trouble turning around.

Many of the dogs had teeth so rotten they were decayed down to their jaws. A French bulldog named Jack had a hernia so advanced his bladder and colon came through his torn flesh. Another French bulldog had parasites and fungus so severe her ear canal was swollen shut. Somehow, those dogs had managed to survive. When officials arrived at the scene the carcasses of two other dogs lay there in plain view. The week before the raid, Allen turned over 37 dogs in such bad shape they had to be euthanized.

Like Mike-Mar Kennel, Allen’s Mason Creek Kennels had a website guaranteeing the health of the Yorkies, Pomeranians, Boston terriers and French bulldogs it was peddling. It boasted a “brand-new state of the art facility … designed ideally for the rearing of happy, healthy, exercised and socialized adult canines and puppies.” Allen bragged about having 28 years of experience as a dog breeder and assured readers that his puppies were AKC certified. Of course, if you’ve read my book you know that AKC certification doesn’t guarantee diddly.

In the weeks since, North Carolina newspapers have been full of stories about the Mason Creek dogs. That’s because at least five shelters in North Carolina and Virginia have taken in the ailing dogs, then had to rely on the generosity of hundreds if not thousands of animal lovers to provide donations, supplies and the kind of care needed to turn these dogs’ lives around. The same thing happened when Gracie’s kennel was busted in 2006.

Allen goes to court this week on 104 misdemeanor animal cruelty charges and two charges of failing to dispose of dead dogs. A diabetic who gets around in a wheelchair, he’s blaming his employees for failing to take care of the dogs (even though a number of the dogs, including Jack, lived in Allen’s home).

By last week, things were looking up. A number of the dogs had been adopted out to new homes. And a shell-shocked public has responded in droves, asking how they can help.

They can help by lobbying their state legislators to pass a law cracking down on egregious breeders. Twice North Carolina’s legislature has rebuffed such measures.

Three young girls from Durham — Jen and Elizabeth Spores and Alex Middleton — are circulating a petition that would impose tougher laws on commercial kennels, requiring outdoor exercise and bigger cages for dogs. It’s obvious to these girls, and to many North Carolinians, that an overhaul is needed. The state’s lawmakers need to wake up and smell the ammonia-pierced fumes and tackle a problem the public is demanding they solve.

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Give Diehl a chance

June17

Animal welfare activists in Pennsylvania are disturbed, if not alarmed, over the replacement of Jessie Smith as head of the state’s Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement. Smith held the post for five years. Appointed by then-Gov. Ed Rendell, it was her job to implement the groundbreaking 2008 law that cracked down on large-volume puppy mills by requiring larger cage sizes, outdoor exercise and veterinary examinations. Since the law’s enactment the number of Pennsylvania kennels selling 60 or more dogs a year has fallen by nearly 80 percent, from 300-plus to just 74, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Amy Worden.

Now Rendell is out of office and his successor, Gov. Tom Corbett, has appointed Lynn Diehl, a former bank manager, to run the Office of Dog Law Enforcement. Diehl has lots of experience when it comes to financial loans, but none in the area of kennel-enforcement. She does have a dog, a dachshund named Lilly.

Smith, meanwhile, has been reassigned to the governor’s Office of General Counsel.

It’s too bad Smith is no longer running the Dog Law Bureau. She came under fire from activists like Bill Smith, the founder of Main Line Animal Rescue, who apparently thought the brutal world of puppy mills should and could be cleaned up overnight. As a former newspaper reporter who covered state legislatures in Tennessee and New York, as well as the U.S. Congress, I can assure you that change of that magnitude doesn’t happen on a dime. (What’s more, people who see the world with such black-and-white starkness often hinder the cause.) I tracked Jessie Smith’s progress while researching Saving Gracie, which is set in Pennsylvania, and thought she deserved more credit than she got.

Now that she’s gone, people are even more upset at the inexperience of her successor. A spokeswoman for Corbett insists he has no intention of dropping the ball on the behalf of breeding dogs, however. (The state still has 2,400 dog kennels that aren’t required to abide by the new law.) Corbett was the state attorney general when the new law took effect and he prosecuted some of the most egregious puppy mill cases. Some say he had to be nudged to do so. Either way, he has more than a passing understanding of the law.

I don’t blame activists for their vigilance, because breeders have never liked the new law and continue to clamor for it to be watered down. But as my father likes to say, if you want to get to the honey, don’t knock over the beehive. Give Diehl a chance. Offering to work with her is likely to accomplish more than labeling her an enemy before she’s even had a chance to put her name on the door.

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