About half of the households in America have a dog, and some 30 million pet dogs are brought home worldwide every year. This estimated $11 billion in consumer demand is fulfilled by commercial-scale breeders (sometimes called “puppy mills”), small-scale breeders, pet stores and rescue groups. Today’s rising demand for rescued dogs, following decades of industry domination by purebreds, has led to a network of people who ship dogs out of shelters, as Kim Kavin explains in her new book, “The Dog Merchants.”
For eight years around the early 2000s, Tracy Cotopolis volunteered at a progressive animal shelter in Ohio that worked hard to find homes for dogs instead of killing them, and she did everything from cleaning the kennels to helping with fundraising to working at adoption events.
One day, a woman she knew said there was a dog in Pennsylvania who had been offered a home in Kentucky and who needed a ride through Ohio.
“I said, ‘OK, I can do that,’ ” Cotopolis recalls. “I had no dog crates. I had nothing. I knew nothing about it. There was this man and his partner, and they had rescue magnets all over their car, and they showed me how to tether a dog in a car using a seat belt.”
Cotopolis had unwittingly become among the first members of what today is an interstate and sometimes international network of cars, trucks and planes moving dogs from high-kill shelters to homes by the hundreds of thousands.
Where shelters say they cannot get the job done, more and more nonprofit rescue groups are stepping up; transporters include everyone from individuals like Cotopolis to major organizations like PetSmart Charities, whose Rescue Waggin’ has transported more than 70,000 dogs since 2004.
The groups use the Internet, particularly Petfinder.com, to advertise the dogs. But such sites don’t arrange transport, which is how people like Cotopolis find themselves ferrying cars full of dogs from point A to point B in bucket-brigade style.
For many dogs, point B is the Northeast. Dr. Scott Marshall wasn’t the first to notice the trend. His predecessor in the job of Rhode Island state veterinarian coined the term “Underhound Railroad” in the mid-2000s after noticing an increasing number of everyday people transporting homeless dogs from the worst southern shelters up into New England for adoption.
“He noticed it was happening,” Marshall recalls, “but he didn’t have a grasp of the magnitude.”
On the Road
Cotopolis joined a Yahoo group called the Dog Rescue Railroad and began to drive dogs for a transport coordinator in Michigan whom Cotopolis felt was particularly on the ball — which is important, since she’s heard all too many tales about well-intentioned rescuers piling vans full of dogs from multiple shelters in varying degrees of health, stacking crates one atop the next with no consideration of disease prevention, and semitrailer trucks creating filthy conditions.
“They’re not stopping for water breaks. They’re not cleaning out the crates,” Cotopolis says. “There are horror stories all over the Internet if you look.”
In this sense, it’s fair to say that nonprofit rescue groups today are sometimes operating similarly to the way many commercial breeders were operating in the 1980s, shipping dogs by hook or by crook to get an increasing number of deals done. There are well-organized rescue agencies, for sure, with serious protocols even more stringent than government regulations require, but generally speaking, the market for homeless dogs has grown faster than the infrastructure to move them into the homes of adopters.
Campaigns like “Adopt, Don’t Shop” are shifting huge numbers of buyers away from pet stores and breeders and pushing them toward shelters that, for generations, have operated more as animal control pounds than as adoption centers. The increasing popularity of rescue is also shifting buyers toward new nonprofit groups that are mom-and-pop in nature and often working without a net.
Volunteers like Cotopolis love the fact that so many dogs are being saved — animals who otherwise would be killed — but she also sees the growing pains of the process up close.
So much of what happens to the dogs often boils down to a single person’s character and decency.
Most of the dogs Cotopolis transfers have foster homes or permanent homes waiting at the end of the line, as opposed to dogs who are sometimes moved from shelter to shelter to buy them extra time in the system before they’re killed. Cotopolis’ dogs have health certificates from veterinarians, and some of them are already spayed or neutered. She moves about 100 dogs a year, and after she transfers them to other volunteer drivers, they end up in places like New York, New Hampshire and Canada.
Generally speaking, she thinks the current, mostly self-regulated nonprofit rescue networks have about a 70-30 percentage split, with more than half the volunteers following sound protocols to ensure the dogs’ health and safety and to disclose the dogs’ true nature and condition to adopters.
“One coordinator I drive for, she’s a schoolteacher, and another one is an attorney,” she says. “These are people volunteering. They have full-time jobs. The one I drive primarily for, she’s hardcore. If the shelters don’t have their act together, she’ll turn the dogs away until they get it right.”
Put another way, Cotopolis is talking about a private volunteer ensuring that a taxpayer-funded shelter is doing its job.
Most of the dogs Cotopolis transports sleep the entire way. They’re not bouncing off their crate walls with stress, and they’re not whining or barking with dismay. Mostly, she says, they seem relieved.
“They are universally accepting and friendly,” she says. “Sometimes they’re a little shy, but none of that spinning that you see in the mill dogs. They’re very even-tempered. I’m shocked at the even temperament of these dogs.”
Her favorite drive so far was on a bitterly cold January day when she found herself cruising into the snow-covered state of Ohio with a carload of Treeing Walker coonhounds, bluetick coonhounds, Australian shepherds and beagles who had been pulled out of shelters in balmy Alabama and Tennessee.
She and her fellow volunteers followed the usual safety protocols, taking the dogs out of their crates on leashes so they could go potty in the grass, and the dogs did something unusual: They became eerily still.
At first, she thought something might be wrong, but then they “stuck their noses in the snow and blew it up, and then four or five of them started playing and rolling in the snow. They’d never seen it before. There was this moment where they stopped being this fearful creature in the cage, and it becomes this confident, I’m a dog.”
The Challenges
Toward the end of 2011, the influx of rescuers moving dogs into Rhode Island could no longer be ignored because officials like Marshall were seeing the result of what people like Cotopolis would call the 30% cutting corners, or simply not knowing any better, as they tried to save as many dogs as possible.
Cases of canine parvovirus in Rhode Island started to increase beyond anything Marshall or his predecessor had ever seen. Parvo is highly contagious, swiftly debilitating and expensive to treat, creating vomiting and diarrhea that almost always require veterinary hospitalization and intravenous fluids. It’s also tough to kill the germs that linger wherever a puppy with parvo has been, which is how a single case can spread like a wildfire after a drought.
“They’re not stopping for water breaks. They’re not cleaning out the crates … There are horror stories all over the Internet if you look.”
- Tracy Cotopolis
If a single infected puppy is placed inside a car with a dozen healthy puppies and then driven eight or 12 hours in the close quarters, not only can all of those dogs be exposed, but so can the next batch of dogs who travel in the same car, and the batch after that.
Parvo has an incubation period, on average, of four to five days, which means the healthy puppies may look just fine when they arrive at the end of the line and get handed over to families. They can be put into homes where they play with other dogs, including more puppies who may not be fully vaccinated.
At the end of 2011, Marshall says, parvo cases in Rhode Island shot to unprecedented levels. Calls flooded into his office from veterinarians. “We went from two or three cases a year to two or three cases a week,” he says, “and every time we traced it, it was a rescue group.”
That’s why New England states including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut have begun to pass emergency orders and regulations trying to standardize the way rescuers operate.
Officials started to demand things like quarantine periods for every dog entering a given state, to ensure the pups coming in were disease-free and to institute regulations for temperament testing in Massachusetts, after officials there started receiving an increasing number of reports about newly adopted dogs who bit their owners after being advertised as friendly, without any type of behavior checks and balances in place.
In October 2013, New England lawmakers again went on high alert after a 9-week-old puppy from Georgia was transported to a rescue group in New York before being adopted by a family in Vermont, where the seemingly happy, healthy pooch quickly fell ill and died. The puppy had bitten her new owner the day before, so the law required a rabies test — which, to everyone’s surprise, came back positive.
The rescue group said it had mistakenly provided paperwork stating the puppy had been vaccinated, when in fact no rabies shot had been given.
Vermont officials said it was the first case of rabies in a domestic dog since 1994, and as a result at least 15 people had to undergo precautionary rabies shots.
Breeders to Rescues
The noise surrounding small-scale rescuers, like the melee involving so-called “puppy mills,” is now becoming so loud in some parts of America that the federal government is starting to take notice.
The USDA hasn’t instituted rules to treat rescue groups with the same interstate commerce regulations as breeders, but Marshall expects that to change because, generally speaking, the financial transaction now taking place between rescue groups and dog adopters is the same as what happens between breeders and dog buyers.
A person goes online and agrees to buy a dog, and the dog is transported after money is exchanged.
“I think rescues, in their mind, they said it wasn’t a sale,” Marshall explains. “It was an adoption fee. Well, you can call it what you want, but you’re not going to get that dog unless you pay a fee, so the USDA is starting to see it as a transaction.”
For dog lovers who simply want to buy a pup from a responsible source, the distinctions among breeders and rescuers are becoming fuzzier as rescue groups gain a bigger and bigger piece of the industry pie.
Laws are being passed in more and more US cities banning pet stores from selling purebreds, under the theory that those dogs start out in puppy mills, while allowing pet stores to sell dogs marketed by adoption groups, which, in some cases, may be operating with less regulatory oversight than the breeders.
“What’s happening is a paradigm shift. People still want puppies. The brick-and-mortar pet store, at least in New England, is being replaced with the virtual pet store, which is Petfinder.com,” Marshall says. “Rescues have created an us-versus-them mentality. They say, ‘Get the dogs from us, not the pet stores, because they work with puppy mills.’ I think those lines are very blurred, and now with the Internet, the middlemen are being eliminated. Dog breeders are going to end up selling to the rescues because it’s more profitable for them both, and people are going to be getting their puppy mill puppies from the rescues.”
That concept may sound bizarre, but it’s already happening.
At dog auctions in states like Missouri, for instance, rescuers try to outbid commercial breeders.
When the breeders win the bid, the pups are marketed for sale as purebreds. When the rescuers win the bid, the pups are marketed as rescued from puppy mills — even if they’re from the exact same litter. Many of the dogs, on both sides, end up being transported to the Northeast for sale or adoption to families.
Dog lovers from Manhattan to Maine can’t get enough of them.
Excerpted with permission from “The Dog Merchants: Inside the Big Business of Breeders, Pet Stores, and Rescuers” by Kim Kavin, out Tuesday from Pegasus Books.
