Amish Confidential (17 page)

CHAPTER 19

BAD BREEDING

T
he state dog warden paid a visit, and he did not sound pleased.

Orlando Aguirre didn’t cite Elmer Zimmerman for animal cruelty, but the stone-faced warden did give the Amish dog breeder seventy-two hours to get thirty-nine of his poodles, shih tzus and cocker spaniels to a vet. The dogs, which were packed in tight wire cages on Elmer’s corn-and-cattle farm, needed urgent treatment for flea and fly bites, the inspector said. Otherwise, the fines could go to $300 per dog.

Like many Amish farmers in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Elmer Zimmerman had started breeding dogs on the side. He specialized in fluffy lap pups. You’d be amazed how much money city people will pay for those yappy little dogs. Dog breeding must have seemed like a natural choice to Elmer. He had the land on Kutztown Road in Berks County and plenty of room to throw up some wire-cage kennels. Like many Amish farmers, he could certainly use the extra cash, and didn’t he already know a lot about raising livestock? How different could dogs really be? Pound for pound, it turned out, dog breeding was far more lucrative than raising cattle or horses.
The puppies (and their mommies and daddies) certainly had smaller appetites.

Elmer called his company E & A Kennels, the E for Elmer, the A for his wife, Arlene. The operation was tiny compared to some of the mega dog farms that were popping up nearby, especially in Lancaster County, but his business had grown to be sizable. He had seventy dogs in his kennels when the state inspector showed up that late-July day.

Elmer wasn’t home at the time to see Inspector Aguirre come and go. But Arlene was, and she was frantic when Elmer got back around 5:30 p.m. She was gripping a blue form the dog warden had left, citing multiple kennel violations. Elmer had a phone he used for the business, and he called the number on the paper, but the warden had already left for the day. Around 8 p.m., Elmer phoned Dr. Frank Moll, a local veterinarian who had treated his cattle before, but not his dogs.

“He believed that he had to get immediate treatment for the dogs,” the vet later told a local reporter, Ron Devlin of the
Reading Eagle
. “He was adamant that the dog wardens were going to return the next morning to see if he complied with their order.” But getting the dogs treated by a licensed veterinarian could be expensive, so Elmer told the vet he had another plan.

He would shoot them.

Dr. Moll told Elmer there wasn’t anything illegal about shooting animals in Pennsylvania, including dogs. “I warned him, though,” the vet added, “that it was not the preferred method of disposing of dogs. I told him the Humane Society probably wasn’t going to like it.”

But Elmer pressed ahead. He used a twenty-two-caliber rifle. He had to reload many times. He started shooting and he didn’t stop
until he’d finished off all the dogs. Not just the thirty-nine the dog warden had cited, but all seventy of the animals in his kennel. Then Elmer’s brother, Ammon, who had a breeding operation on his farm next door, also got into the act. He shot and killed ten of his dogs even though his kennel hadn’t been inspected when Elmer’s was. Together, they buried the bodies in a compost heap nearby.

There weren’t any outside witnesses to the slaughter, so no one besides Elmer and his brother knew the precise details: how they were assembled for the shooting, what order the dogs were killed in, how long it took and what kind of fight if any the doomed animals put up. Did they bark or whimper? Did they try to run away? Did they seem to understand what was happening? Did the later ones watch the earlier ones get killed?

But there couldn’t be much doubt about the basics. That next week, state dog wardens came back to Kutztown Road and unearthed the physical evidence. Just as Elmer had reported, eighty dogs in all took bullets to the head.

T
he Zimmerman brothers were far from alone in the commercial puppy-making business. Experts estimate there are now five thousand high-volume dog breeders in the United States. The vast majority of animals sold in pet stores and on the Internet come from these so-called puppy mills. Some are licensed operations, some are under-the-radar mom-and-pops, others might as well be called torture chambers.

Some of the facilities are downright medieval. I know because I’ve been inside a few of them. Puppy-mill dogs live a miserable existence. Instead of walking on grass, the dogs spend their lifetimes
on painful wire flooring in cramped rabbit hutches. The open flooring makes the cages easier to clean. Instead of collars or bandanas, the animals wear livestock clips on their ears. They eat whatever’s left over at the farm. Frequently, the dogs aren’t even given names. The puppies are shipped off as soon as possible, sometimes literally yanked from their mothers’ breasts. The females are often forced to breed twice a year. After seven or eight years of service, the breeding females are often starved to death or led into a dark cornfield and shot. What good are they at that point? They can’t breed anymore.

Millions of puppies come out of these cruel mills every year, just as millions of dogs are put to death at the nation’s animal shelters. Those two figures are hard to separate. With so many new puppies being born, there just aren’t enough good homes to go around. Taken all together, the experts say, the mills are a huge part of the reason for the overpopulation and dangerous inbreeding of American canines.

So what are the Amish doing in the middle of something so shady? There’s no doubt that they are. According to one recent count, there were 277 licensed dog breeders in Lancaster County alone and probably two or three times that many of the unlicensed kind. I’ll bet two-thirds of both categories are owned by Amish or Mennonites. If you doubt me, take a drive against the background of rural Pennsylvania or Ohio or Indiana or New York and look for a crude hand-lettered sign:
PUPPIES FOR SALE
. Those roadside signs are supposed to convince you that a well-loved family dog just had a litter. More likely, somewhere out back is a large-scale puppy mill you definitely won’t be invited to tour. The famously gentle people aren’t so gentle with their dogs. I’m a lifelong dog lover, so it breaks my heart. I’d hate to think of anyone treating
my beloved Cookie like that. She’s the sweetest dog ever and way smarter than I.

Cookie is a poodle. She’s a small dog and doesn’t shed too much. She lives in the house with me. I hate hearing about people who force their dogs to stay in a cage while they’re at work or sleeping. I don’t mean just the uncaring breeders, I mean people with family dogs. They say they love their pets, then lock them up like prisoners. It’s cruel, and I can’t imagine being that mean to an animal.

When I was young, my family always had a dog on the farm. Lady, a beautiful brown German shepherd, was a part of our family for ten years. She was our greatest protector. We never had to lock our doors. Like a lot of other families we knew did with their own dogs, my father would take Lady once a year to an Amish breeder in Lancaster. When the litter was born, we’d sell the puppies. One year, the breeder wrote my father a letter. “I’m sorry to tell you that your dog has died.” We never learned exactly what had happened, but everyone in our family was sad. We really loved that dog. When she’d left to go to the breeder, she was a happy, friendly, healthy dog, but something obviously happened.

Back then, we didn’t know much about puppy mills, but we had our suspicions that Lady wasn’t taken care of right. I don’t think anyone knew what was going on with some of those breeders.

More people do know now, and some of the conditions have improved as a result, I believe.

Despite the bursts of public outrage and occasional media attention, the bad ones never get stamped out for good—for the same reason they have always survived. They make money, and the well-intentioned laws are never enough. Outsiders complain about animal overpopulation, and the American Kennel Club purists wring
their hands, but raising dogs in large numbers can be a very profitable business, if you aren’t too squeamish about the messy details.

How do Amish puppy breeders justify all this to themselves and to the outside world? They do it the usual way: by pointing to the Bible. It’s right there, they say, in the very first book of the Old Testament. Genesis 1:28 says: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ ”

Dogs aren’t people. They are animals. We have dominion over them.

Or as one Amish farmer put it a little more vividly when the question of animal cruelty first popped up: “We country people do not look at dogs that much different from other animals. When you have livestock, you have deadstock. Why is this such a big issue?”

T
he Amish didn’t invent puppy mills. Credit (or blame) for that goes to Midwestern farmers who started breeding dogs during the Great Depression to help make ends meet. Over the decades, the idea spread east. So many Amish farmers have now branched into commercial dog breeding that some animal-welfare activists now call Pennsylvania Dutch Country the “puppy mill capital of the United States.”

Just don’t expect to see this slogan on the license plates any time soon. You certainly won’t find any mention of puppy mills in the Amish tourist literature. If you ask the people at the tourist bureau, you’ll get a wall of blank stares. The idea of dogs spending their
whole lives in narrow cages, never allowed outside, rarely taken to the vet, forced to breed relentlessly, then killed when they get too old or too sick to sell or procreate—that’s not exactly the image the tourist-promotion people are going for.

Puppy mills really began exploding in Amish Country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The animal-rights group Pet Watch New Jersey cites a crucial meeting of Midwestern farmers in November of 1981: “Several hundred Amish and Mennonite farmers were told they could raise and sell puppies to the public and pet stores alike, and with little or no overhead, they could make a fortune. Centrally located, Lancaster County was easy pickings for customers in Maryland, Delaware, New York, New Jersey and New England.”

Animal welfare groups have been sounding a warning about these Amish puppy mills ever since. They “treat puppies as a cash crop,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States. “I don’t like to pick out a particular group,” said Thomas Bougher of the Pennsylvania Dog Law Enforcement Office, “but the Amish are a significant part of the problem. Most people treat dogs as quasi-human, but a dog is the same thing as a chicken to them.”

Main Line Animal Rescue, which has saved thousands of Amish Country dogs, offers several commonsense tips to dog lovers who want to avoid getting cage dogs from puppy mills. Don’t patronize breeders who ship dogs to customers or sell too many breeds at once, the group suggests. That is common sense, but another of the warning signs, number three, might come as a surprise to some people—or maybe not: “Beware of ads in newspapers with phone numbers starting with 717 area codes”—the number for the Harrisburg-Lancaster-York area of south-central Pennsylvania. “Some of the
most infamous puppy mills in the country can be found in Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country.”

P
ublic outrage about the Zimmerman case did not quickly die down. Many things were said about the Amish farmers’ decision to shoot the dogs, but one thing wasn’t said—that shooting those animals was a violation of the law. “It’s horrible, but it’s legal,” admitted Jessie Smith, special deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania dog-law bureau. He, like most non-Amish, sounded appalled. “That someone would shoot seventy dogs rather than spend money to do a vet check is extremely problematic,” he said, but there wasn’t much, it seemed, the state could do unless the laws of Pennsylvania were changed.

So on a Friday night, three weeks after the dogs were murdered, more than a hundred people gathered on Kutztown Road at the end of Elmer Zimmerman’s farm. Partly, they came to rally for a law change. Partly, they came to hold a vigil for Elmer and Ammon’s dead dogs. As the people arrived, Elmer parked a tractor at the entrance to his farm, blocking the crowd from coming onto his property. So that is where the people stayed.

The moon was full. The protesters lit candles. They sang “Amazing Grace” and said some prayers. They placed eighty chrysanthemums and eight dog biscuits next to Elmer’s tractor. Several people from pro-animal groups delivered highly emotional eulogies.

“These were dogs with no names,” said Jenny Stephens of North Penn Puppy Mill Watch. “These were dogs that none of us ever knew. These were dogs who never knew the kindness a human hand can offer and these were dogs who died a violent and terror-filled death with no one to comfort them.”

A lot of people got teary-eyed at that.

Howard Nelson, CEO of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said he’d cut short his vacation and driven straight to Kutztown Road. “It’s not uncommon for puppy millers to shoot or drown their dogs instead of spending money on medical care,” he said. “There may have been some spite in this case, but I’m just calling it pure evil. Every humane society in the state would have taken those dogs.”

Harry Brown of the Main Line Animal Rescue seconded that point. “We would have taken them and not filed charges,” he agreed. “That way, the animals survive and the kennel is out of business, a win-win situation.”

As the vigil rolled on, the talk got more political. Speakers called out the names of “guilty” legislators who hadn’t endorsed efforts to tighten Pennsylvania’s dog laws. Interestingly, the list included several from the Lancaster area. One was State Representative Dave Hickernell. Another was State Representative Gordon Denlinger, who had just been defending dog breeding as “an issue of farmland preservation” and said, “There’s a certain question about the removal of a person’s livelihood. Should an animal enforcement officer be able to throw a person out of their occupation on a given day?”