Inside California’s Brutal Underground Market for Puppies: Neglected Dogs, Deceived Owners, Big Profits
September 17, 2024 at 03:20AMIn this sprawling Los Angeles Times investigation, Alene Tchekmedyian and Melody Gutierrez expose the dark underbelly of California’s puppy resale trade. Animals are bred and kept in horrific conditions at puppy mills across the Midwest—in Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Iowa in particular. Eventually, they make their way to California locations to be resold, often by people who claim to be small, local home breeders. What’s worse, due to a disorganized system, California ends up destroying animals’ veterinary records and travel certificates, making it impossible for owners to later track their origins, especially when puppies become ill. This is a heartbreaking but important read, and also includes a link to a database where you can enter your dog’s microchip number to check if it was listed in documents obtained by the reporters.
To understand the scope of the puppy trade, The Times requested travel documents — called certificates of veterinary inspection — from all 50 states and received responses accounting for nearly 88,000 dogs.
The paper then analyzed the movement of more than 71,000 of them into California since 2019, when the pet retail ban went into effect. These travel certificates show how a network of resellers — including ex-cons and schemers — replaced pet stores as middlemen. Dogs brought from out of state are often rebranded as California-bred, fetching hundreds to thousands of dollars each.
Mass breeders and brokers often market themselves with idealistic portraits of large free-roam farms and home-raised puppies, or refer to sales as adoptions to mirror the language of rescue groups, said John Goodwin, senior director of the Stop Puppy Mills campaign at the Humane Society of the United States.
Also, many puppies pass through at least one broker on their way into a family’s home, a process that obscures where their dog was born.
“We oftentimes get calls about ghost breeders who … have burner phones,” said Jace Huggins, chief of humane law enforcement for the San Diego Humane Society.
Huggins said his office hears from people who have purchased sick dogs. “They want us to track down the person, and most of the time we can’t find them,” he said.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/16/inside-californias-brutal-underground-market-for-puppies-neglected-dogs-deceived-owners-big-profits/
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