Amish Confidential (18 page)

Comments like that didn’t make him any friends at the rally that night.

A
fter the shooting, Elmer Zimmerman had done the best he could to defend himself and other Amish dog breeders. He told Ron Devlin of
Reading Eagle
, who covered the story, that he really didn’t think he had much choice when he decided to kill the dogs. Things
were busy at home that night. He had fifty cows that needed milking, and his wife was frantic. He said he didn’t realize he could have taken the animals to a local shelter, as the animal-rights people were saying now.

“A lot of them were old, and I doubt they could have been adopted,” he said. “We decided the best thing to do was to get rid of the dogs. I thought there was no other way.”

But the animal-rights people weren’t close to done. They were already thinking beyond the Zimmermans. They vowed to continue until the laws of Pennsylvania were changed, making heartless puppy mills illegal once and for all. It wasn’t like the Zimmermans were the only dog breeders who had kept their animals in metal cages. They certainly weren’t the largest. Probably, they weren’t even the worst.

New cases kept popping up, and the activists turned their attention to the Pennsylvania legislature. They focused on something called House Bill 2525. It promised sweeping changes to the state laws governing breeder dogs and their puppies. The proposal would have banned wire floors, prohibited cage stacking, required annual vet checks, doubled the minimum floor space for dog kennels and given all dogs access to outdoor exercise areas. It would have given people like dog warden Orlando Aguirre a whole new set of enforcement tools.

Sensing public outrage, quite a few state politicians jumped on board.

“The decision by commercial breeders to kill healthy dogs instead of paying to repair a kennel and seek veterinary care is alarming and will likely outrage many people,” State Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff said. “Until our state’s outdated dog law
is changed, kennel owners may continue to kill their dogs for any reason they see fit, even if it is simply to save money.”

Ed Rendell, who was then the governor, had followed the Zimmerman case closely. He said he was committed to ending Pennsylvania’s reign as the puppy-mill capital. He even held his own noon rally on the state capitol steps in Harrisburg, declaring his support for the puppy-mill law.

“There are a lot of special-interest groups in this building fighting to defeat this legislation,” Governor Rendell said. “What does it say about us that we allow people to shoot and kill dogs?”

The governor introduced Maggie, a small retriever he’d adopted from Main Line Animal Rescue after she was rescued from a Lancaster County puppy mill. Rendell said Maggie’s ticket to freedom was that her third litter was stillborn, making her unprofitable to the kennel operator. He said she’s small for her breed because she lived in a rabbit hutch for two years before being rescued.

“You can see she’s very happy now,” he told the crowd. “At this point, Maggie wakes up every morning and says, ‘Thank God I’m not pregnant.’ ”

The delicate issue of Amish tourism was raised. Jana Kohl, an animal activist from Chicago whose grandfather started the Kohl’s department-store chain, said she’d like to see dozens of puppy-mill billboards near the major Amish-tourism sites.

“Two thousand of the country’s ten thousand commercial breeding kennels are owned by Amish and Mennonites,” Kohl said. Dog lovers across the country, she said, should “shame and embarrass them by putting as many billboards and ads in as many places as possible. We can point the finger to Pennsylvania as aiding and abetting this horrific business that is nothing more than legalized torture.”

A campaign like that could do damage to Amish Country tourism, Kohl seemed to be warning Pennsylvania officials. “A lot of people with a lot of money and resources are prepared to venture into a campaign like this,” she said. “It’s going to be a bigger and more embarrassing campaign than people expect, and it’s going to shock.”

Apparently, the Amish tourism officials heard that message loud and clear.

Janet Wall, vice president of Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau, showed up at Ed Rendell’s capital rally to express her group’s support for the puppy-mill reforms of House Bill 2525. “Abusive breeders should be put out of business immediately and permanently,” she said in no uncertain terms. “Our voices must rise up as one.”

But in the end, what the reformers got was a big disappointment. As House Bill 2525 worked its way through dark corridors of the legislature in Harrisburg, small changes were made. Then medium-sized changes. Then some bigger ones. Before the dog lovers knew what had hit them, the sweeping reform they were hoping for felt more like crumbs.

The new rules did ban dog shooting, and that was a good thing. They called for larger cages and regular vet visits. But many of the smaller puppy mills were exempted from the tighter rules. The law applied to only 650 of the state’s 2,750 licensed kennels. And much of the enforcement was put in the hands of the industry-friendly Canine Health Board.

Governor Rendell tried to sound upbeat when he signed the puppy-mill bill into law.

“The advocates and ordinary dog owners and dog lovers made their voice clear,” he said in a special signing ceremony in the
Bucks County vacation community of Langhorne. “You guys did this.”

But with all the limits, waivers and exceptions in the new rules, no one expected puppy mills to disappear in Pennsylvania, and they didn’t. In fact, one of the most notorious puppy-mill owners from Lancaster County, Daniel Esh, reeling from all kinds of well-deserved bad attention, tried to outwit buyers and inspectors by changing his kennel’s name. It went from being Clearview to Scarlet Maple.

He and his father, John Esh, had a long list of black marks against their names. In 1996, they were accused of selling a rabid golden retriever named Toby to a family in Pittsburgh. The dog bit a child, resulting in the first and only case of dog rabies in recent Pennsylvania history.

The following year, the Eshes were accused of selling hundreds of sick dogs. A state inspection of their unlicensed kennel found Yorkies, poodles, spaniels, shih tzus, Rottweilers and Jack Russells with eye infections and rotting teeth. The animals were covered in feces. The Pennsylvania attorney general filed a lawsuit.

These humans acted worse than animals. Their dogs lived in sweltering heat in summer and frigid temperatures in winter. Larger-breed dogs were made to live in cramped cages with broken wire. Smaller-breed dogs didn’t even have that much. They were kept outside with no shelter or bedding at all.

The name change didn’t work. Daniel had his state license revoked again in 2009. His father decided the strict new state regulations were too tough for him. He closed the barn doors on his Scarlet Maple kennel for good.

Or at least that’s what he said he was doing.

But in 2013 John Esh was caught advertising a company called Green Mountain Toy Puppies online. He had to pay a $175 fine. That wasn’t even one-half the cost of one of the puppies he was selling. His son Daniel, the one who’d once sold a dog with rabies, was also in court. He pleaded guilty to having unlicensed dogs without rabies vaccinations.

For people like the Eshes, this is all just a cost of doing business, a very small cost for a very lucrative business. No one really expects the Amish to be out of the puppy business any time soon.

CHAPTER 20

THAT’S RICH

T
here’s an old Amish proverb: “If you want to feel wealthy, count the blessings that money can’t buy.”

And that’s certainly one way to do it. Another way to feel wealthy is to own a large working farm in Pennsylvania or Ohio at a time when land values are flying through the roof. A lot of Amish families have done that. Or you can get in early on America’s organic-produce craze and be a key supplier to large supermarket chains. That’s another one that turns out well for some Amish. Or you can take an English-driven bus down to a nice house on the gulf coast of Florida and spend the winter there riding bicycles and playing shuffleboard while your brethren up north shiver with woodstoves and no electricity.

Hey, why suffer through the cold?

Clearly, some Amish people these days are counting the blessings that money
can
buy.

Abundance comes in two flavors, the preachers like to say—spiritual abundance and material abundance. The truly fortunate get to experience both.

Just ask Moses Smucker. Moses started out selling handcrafted leather goods from a leaky tobacco shed in Churchtown, Pennsylvania. His Smucker’s Harness Shop was quickly pulling in millions of dollars a year outfitting the Budweiser Clydesdales, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus horses and the pampered pets of Saudi princes and country-music stars. Customers still wait six weeks and pay up to $50,000 for finely stitched harnesses that take eight pairs of hands to make.

Or ask Sam Mullet, the imprisoned Amish bishop convicted of sending his followers to cut the beards and hair of believers who had displeased him. When the fiery bishop was arrested, he had more than $2 million from oil and gas leases on his eight-hundred-acre farm in Bergholz, Ohio, prosecutors said. They wondered why Sam needed the government’s help paying his legal bills. Hadn’t his wife just offered to pay off one child’s mortgage with $60,000 in cash?

Or go ahead and ask any of the well-off Amish farmers in Holmes County, Ohio, who’ve earned up to $6,000 an acre from oil and gas companies eager for fracking rights to the land. Environmentalists hate the idea. Some of the neighbors have been cheated by lease hounds who know how much the Amish hate to sue, but many Amish landowners have hit fracking bonanzas over the past few years. They’re the Holmes Hillbillies, liquid gold gushing beneath the feet of these famously plain people.

God must have put the natural gas down there for a reason!

W
hatever you do, do not pity “the poor Amish.”

As a group, the Amish aren’t poor at all. Quite the opposite. Truth be told, the Amish are doing quite well these days, thank you
very much. That’s not to say some Amish people aren’t struggling. Some are, but by almost any measure, the Amish in America have done spectacularly well on the material-abundance scale. Amish income and wealth are rising. The Amish keep finding their way into new businesses they were never in before, and the vast majority of these businesses are succeeding. Ninety-five percent, say some estimates, compared to 50 percent of new businesses nationwide. The Amish earn more, keep more and succeed more than most other groups—and that’s with the “Amish” tourist trade still dominated by the non-Amish. I guess what I’m trying to say is, please, don’t organize any pie sales or throw any telethons for the Amish. The Amish should be donating money to
you.

There’s a whole bunch of factors behind this.

Some of the credit for Amish success goes to how driven and hardworking our people tend to be. There aren’t too many lazy Amish. Some of it is how diligently the Amish save. One recent estimate said the Amish, on average, save 20 percent of their income, compared to a national rate of 0 to 5 percent. I know my father always hammered that lesson into my head as a boy, insisting I put aside half of the little money he allowed me to keep from my part-time job earnings “for a rainy day.” He never explained why I might need extra money in inclement weather, but as an adult, I save just like he told me to.

The Amish are also loath to take on debt. A typical Amish family will borrow when necessary but only for a clear, productive purpose—and any debt is to be paid off in full as quickly as humanly possible. No high-interest credit cards, no paying just the minimum, no revolving credit plans for my people. You might think that, with so little credit history, the Amish would have trouble getting loans. Exactly the opposite is true. Bankers aren’t at all leery of lending to
the Amish. The Amish hate debt so much, they tend to pay it off fast and fully—almost never falling into default. All a banker has to do is look at the loan history of a borrower’s parents and other relatives to see: There’s very little risk in lending to the Amish.

Amish farms might look quiet, bucolic and slow, but truly, some of them are money machines. They don’t require much expensive machinery—not when Amish families have six or eight or ten children who all work for free. So no big payments to International Harvester or John Deere. Getting the work done is often just a matter of sending the many children out with pitchforks and milk buckets after giving them a stern talking-to about the character-building importance of performing daily chores.

Taken together, these Amish traditions and character traits have all helped the Amish thrive, but some credit also goes to timing, demographics and luck. The Amish didn’t cause farm prices to skyrocket. That happened on its own—in many of the places where the Amish happened to own property, Pennsylvania and Ohio especially. This is beautiful, open country. God isn’t making any more of it. These areas aren’t far from major population centers, making them sought-after second-home territory for well-off city people. Lately, I’ve been seeing mansions being built on million-dollar pieces of land right across the road from the farms and simple homes of Amish families. That’s pushed prices up even more.

Any Amish family lucky enough to have bought fifty or seventy-five acres in one of these prime locations decades ago is almost certainly a multimillionaire family now—on paper, anyway.

The Amish population keeps expanding like gangbusters, and many of those Amish children will eventually want farms of their own. That in itself is causing the Amish population to shift around.

In 1960 there were only forty thousand Amish in the United States. In 1980 that number had jumped to eighty thousand. The total population now approaches three hundred thousand spread across twenty-eight states, and it’s doubling every twenty years, a nearly unheard-of 5 percent growth rate. Fifteen new Amish settlements are being formed every year. The only real question is whether we cross the one-million mark before or after 2050.

The biggest jumps in numbers aren’t where you’d expect to see them. It’s places like New York and Missouri and even parts of Canada that have seen the swiftest growth. The more famously Amish-packed Pennsylvania and Ohio, where farmland is so expensive and so hard to find, are holding steady. But huge extended families are always spreading out looking for new places where the next generations can continue their farming tradition.

That rapid growth is hard to ignore. No other group in the United States can match it, and almost all of it comes from inside. We’re not seeking converts like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, knocking on doors and handing out copies of the
Watchtower
. Hardly any of our growth comes from recruiting. The Amish don’t proselytize, and few outsiders are tempted by our lack of modern conveniences or our sense of style. The numbers are all about the large families and a 90 percent post-Rumspringa baptism rate.

F
arming is still a big part of the Amish economy, but it isn’t the only thing that is putting money into Amish pockets. Not by a long shot. Lately, in fact, agriculture is starting to become less important in the economics of Amish life. The phrase
Amish farmer
used to be almost redundant. But
Amish businessman
could soon take its place.

This is one result of the rising prices for all that farmland the Amish own, the same squeeze that many suburban Americans have experienced as their real estate prices have gone up. When the children get old enough to leave home, marry and start families of their own, they need to make some difficult choices. Many can’t afford houses and hundred-acre farms like the ones they grew up on. They’re out-of-sight expensive now. And while many families have packed up everything and moved to places that are affordable for the children, others don’t want to abandon the church and community their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have always been a part of. The Amish always think of family first.

So more and more young Amish men and women are finding other ways to support themselves and their families, starting their own businesses especially, including businesses they never would have been allowed to own or work in before.

A generation ago, the devout Amish could only sell products they would actually use themselves—things like hand-sewn quilts, hand-crafted furniture and baked goods. These rules were enforced very strictly. When I was a kid, I sold little wooden bridges that I built out in the yard. That was a typical Amish business. That’s all changed now. These days, far more is acceptable, even encouraged.

Even if the dollar signs look tempting, Amish entrepreneurs still won’t open businesses the church considers morally objectionable. So don’t go looking for the “Plain Peoples’ Casino.” No “Stoltzfus Gentlemen’s Club,” either. But the rules are definitely looser now. Amish businesses make and sell high-priced desk toys, designer leather clothing and other items the owners probably wouldn’t use themselves.

In their new businesses, the Amish still rely on some of the old techniques: humble bosses, hand-craftsmanship, a life-work balance that says, “Family first.” But as the rules get looser, Amish businesspeople are gaining more and more of the tools to compete in the larger, outside world. Amish businesspeople now routinely use cell phones, inventory computers, electronic cash registers. Increasingly, they are installing air-conditioning in their stores. This is still a delicate topic. Are Amish business owners putting too much emphasis on the business and too little on the Amish? Some bishops think so, some Amish people think so, and many tourists visiting the Amish stores are confused. That’s why you’ll often hear an Amish businessman pointing out that the air-conditioning or the electric lights are running on solar or wind power.

Myron Miller is a perfect example of this off-the-farm phenomenon. As he reached adulthood two decades ago in Millersburg, Ohio, he thought about farming. Land in the area was already pricey back then—good luck today!—so Myron started building furniture instead. Now he has two companies: Four Corners Furniture sells retail to the public, and Miller Bedroom Wholesale sells to seventy-five distributors around the country. Myron has a dozen workers already and sees no end to the growth. He did all this with his eighth-grade education and certainly no MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “I run my business according to God’s way and plan,” he says. Though he isn’t directly in the tourist business, he has benefited from all the visitors. “I saw all the tourism coming in—we’re blessed to be the number one tourism attraction in Ohio—and so I thought I’d try to go into that, selling furniture to the tourists. Then I realized that was just the tip of the iceberg. I thought I’d spread my wings and market the furniture elsewhere.”

He certainly did, setting an example for other Amish entrepreneurs, who keep coming up with bigger and better and more profitable business ideas.

Take Leon Stoltzfus, who owns the Groffdale Machine Company in Leola, my old Rumspringa stomping grounds. Leon’s making a lot of money manufacturing surprisingly sleek and colorful products that are bought by local Amish people. At first glance, his Lancaster County place of business looks like any farm, complete with cows and large fields of crops. When the doors are open, a closer look shows a thriving, high-tech business making some of the best twenty-inch, spoke-wheel scooters on the market today. Amish aren’t allowed to ride bicycles. They were forbidden in the 1890s as unacceptably worldly. Since the first modern scooter patents didn’t come until the 1920s, they were not included in the ban. They could be fast and any color at all, the perfect alternative to the bikes of the era. Inside the Groffdale plant, you can see Amish employees working on various stages of partially built kick scooters in a huge array of colors from red to yellow to bright pink. Word around the county is that Leon has annual sales of $1.5 million.

That buys a lot of scrapple, I’d think.