Authors: Carol Bradley
Advocates fanned out across the state to lobby for support. Main Line Animal Rescue held town hall meetings in districts of lawmakers who were leaning against the overhaul. The organization also continued to gather evidence of abuse and neglect. In the aftermath of the Oprah show, breeders circulated more than 300 photos of Smith and warned colleagues about his undercover tactics. But Main Line had dozens of volunteers willing to pose as would-be customers to document conditions at puppy mills.
Arguing against the overhaul was the Professional Dog Breeders Association, which represented 300 commercial kennels; that was to be expected. More surprising was that the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association came out against it, too. The veterinary group said breeders should not have to provide solid flooring for their dogs because the dogs’ waste would just sit there, with nowhere to go. They recommended coated wire flooring or some other permeable surface.
On June 24, House Bill 2525 cleared its first hurdle when the House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee passed it by a vote of 17 to 12—almost entirely along party lines, with Democrats supporting it and Republicans voting no. The House Appropriations Committee then passed the bill. A vote by the full House was scheduled for July 4. Of 203 members of the Pennsylvania State House, more than 100 supported puppy mill reform. Desperate to stop the momentum, opponents turned to a time-honored delaying tactic: They weighed the bill down with amendments, dozens of them, each of which could be debated to death as the clock wound down.
Republican representative Bob Bastian of Somerset, a veterinarian and member of the American Veterinary Medical Association, proposed several amendments designed to gut the bill. Republican representative Art Hershey, a dairy farmer, protested that House Bill 2525 would put legitimate breeders out of business. Hershey wasn’t above a little sarcasm. He filed one amendment that would have added the word “dishwasher” to the types of housing considered unsuitable for dogs—an apparent reference to a pro-reform billboard that showed a dog staring out from inside an electric dishwasher. “Under the current kennel regulations,” the sign said, “an adult Beagle can spend twelve years in a cage the size of your dishwasher and never be let out.”
Interestingly, Hershey’s district included Chester County, where two years earlier the raid on Michael Wolf’s puppy mill had turned klieg lights on the ugly truth behind large-volume dog breeding.
The opposition’s strategy succeeded. Heading into recess, lawmakers faced a more pressing issue: the July 1 deadline for passing a state budget had come and gone and the budget was still not in place. There was too little time to resolve the budget and take up a second protracted issue, too, before going home. House leaders postponed the dog law debate until the fall, exactly as opponents of reform had hoped they would do.
Jessie Smith, special deputy secretary for dog law enforcement, lamented the delay. “Every day that goes by without action on House Bill 2525 only prolongs the suffering of dogs kept in commercial breeding kennel cages their entire lives,” she said.
• • •
The legislative recess didn’t stop the Dog Law Bureau from going after abhorrent puppy mills. While they were at it, Smith also decided to take a fresh look at one of the state’s most notorious breeders, Joyce Stoltzfus.
From her Puppy Love kennel tucked away off a country road in the remote community of Peach Bottom, Stoltzfus had spent at least twenty years acting as a broker for dozens of breeds of dogs and churning out more of her own. She’d had repeated run-ins with the law. In the mid-1980s, federal inspectors cited Puppy Love for selling puppies to pet stores without a federal license. Twice after that, the attorney general’s office fined Stoltzfus for distributing medicine without a veterinary license. In 1997, the attorney general’s office sued to close Puppy Love, but a state court denied the request, citing lack of evidence.
Then in 2005, a cloudburst of consumer protests from across seven states landed Stoltzfus back in court on the grounds that she was selling puppies plagued with everything from parasites to parvovirus, distemper, heart defects, hip dysplasia, and pneumonia. Libby Williams’s New Jersey Consumers Against Pet Store Abuse alone collected more than seventy complaints against Stoltzfus. The breeder agreed to pay $75,000 in fines and restitution, allow state dog wardens to inspect her kennel four times a year, and reimburse buyers twice the price of a puppy if the dog turned out to have congenital defects. Despite her status as a repeat offender, Stoltzfus remained in business, however. To skirt the bad publicity, she changed the name of her kennel to CC Pets. State inspectors wrote up CC Pets twice for failing to clean cages adequately, yet Stoltzfus continued to rake in the profits. In 2007 alone, she reportedly sold 2,000 dogs.
In the summer of 2008, Jessie Smith met with prosecutors to discuss whether Stoltzfus was violating the earlier agreement. The attorney general’s office investigated whether Stoltzfus had also ignored a three-year-old court-ordered consent petition mandating that she identify her kennel in all classified ads so that prospective buyers who did their research could learn of her history of selling sick and defective dogs. Dozens of Stoltzfus’s ads failed to identify the business, according to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.
Meanwhile, animal welfare groups also continued to ferret out problem breeders. On July 17, with a camera crew from the television show
Animal Cops
in tow, the Pennsylvania SPCA seized twenty-one dogs from Amish breeder John Blank in Chester County after volunteers from Main Line Animal Rescue convinced Blank to sell or give them nine dogs who were in terrible shape: The animals had missing eyes, chewed-off ears, and, in one case, teeth so decayed the dog was unable to close his mouth. Blank, who’d been cited for two violations in 2006, also allegedly sold a three-week-old puppy to an undercover agent. State law required that puppies be at least seven weeks old before being sold. The dog died three days later of dehydration, hypothermia, and emaciation.
The deplorable conditions at Blank’s Limestone Kennel raised the issue of how the Bureau of Dog Law could have overlooked the problems. The kennel had been inspected six months earlier by Maureen Siddons—the same warden who had visited Wolf’s kennel with Cheryl Shaw—along with Siddons’s supervisor, Richard Martrich. In a letter to Jessie Smith, Howard Nelson, the CEO of the Pennsylvania SCPA, said the conditions suffered by Blank’s dogs had festered for years. Before a week had passed, officials inspected Blank’s kennel again and announced that he was no longer licensed to breed dogs. A spokesman for the Dog Law Bureau said Blank gave up his license willingly. Siddons and Martrich were reassigned desk duties while the Dog Law Bureau investigated the matter.
“We wish the department would act this swiftly with all substandard kennels in Pennsylvania,” Baker commented.
• • •
Cruelty charges against other breeders kept the puppy mill debate simmering. Whether the Rendell administration had enough votes to reform the Dog Law when the legislature reconvened wasn’t clear, but the foot-dragging was a bad sign. Then, in August, the
Inquirer’s
Amy Worden broke an explosive story: Ordered by the state to have their dogs examined by a veterinarian, Berks County kennel operator Elmer Zimmerman and his brother Ammon had abruptly decided that they were finished with dog breeding. In a single afternoon, the Amish farmers shot their dogs to death, one by one—all eighty of them.
His veterinarian had recommended they kill the dogs, Elmer Zimmerman claimed. He said he thought the state was trying to close him down. Dog warden Orlando Aguirre had indeed given Zimmerman a bad inspection report on July 24; he’d cited the breeder for twenty violations, including huge gaps in the wire flooring of the dogs’ cages, inadequate bedding, extreme heat, and dogs with skin infections. The warden ordered Zimmerman to have thirty-nine of the dogs checked for fly bites and fleas.
Aguirre learned about the mass killings five days later, when the Zimmermans turned in their licenses. Elmer had shot all seventy of his dogs; Ammon had shot the remaining ten. When Aguirre questioned their story, Elmer Zimmerman fired up a backhoe and scraped away enough soil on his property to show decomposing Poodles, Shih Tzu, and Cocker Spaniels piled in a heap. Since shooting dogs wasn’t illegal, the inspector did the only thing he could: He ordered Zimmerman to destroy his dog hutches to make certain they would never be filled with animals again.
The story came to light two weeks later, and Pennsylvanians were stunned. Shooting dogs was both legal and common in puppy mills, but it wasn’t something ordinary residents of the state had ever given much thought. The cold-blooded callousness of the slayings was a wake-up call. “For far too long, the state has ignored or tolerated unscrupulous kennel owners who mistreat their animals,” the
Inquirer
said in an editorial. “The legislature needs to act on [House Bill 2525] soon. The state can’t keep toying with this cruel industry.”
Three days later, more than one hundred people held a candlelight vigil just off the Zimmermans’ property to honor the memory of the eighty dogs. Advocates from Lancaster County’s United Against Puppy Mills, Main Line Animal Rescue, North Penn Puppy Mill Watch, New Jersey Consumers Against Pet Store Abuse, and others sang “Amazing Grace” and placed eighty chrysanthemums and eighty dog biscuits next to the tractor Elmer Zimmerman had parked across his lane to block the crowd. They also read out the names of legislators who had not yet lent their support to puppy mill reform.
“These were dogs with no names,” Jenny Stephens of North Penn Puppy Mill Watch told the assemblage. “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.”
NJCAPSA’s Libby Williams said news of the wholesale shootings sucked the wind out of her. “But they did the state a favor,” she said. “People are now learning the truth about the ‘gentle’ Plain people.”
As the vigil neared to a close, Elmer Zimmerman stepped out of the darkness and approached the group. He said he was sorry he’d killed his dogs and asked what he could do to stop the harassing phone calls that had been coming in nonstop.
“I just got the impression that I had twenty things wrong on my farm, and I’ve got to work day and night to get things back to the way they should be,” Zimmerman said. One volunteer suggested that he could have surrendered his dogs to a shelter. He didn’t know that, Zimmerman said.
“I understand there’s a thousand people against me,” he told the group. “I want to have peace again.”
If anything, Zimmerman had accomplished just the opposite: He had injected the puppy mill campaign with the ammunition it needed to galvanize momentum for change. The day after the candlelight vigil, Rendell held a press conference at a dog park in Philadelphia’s Center City, where he decried the “brutal killing” of the Zimmermans’ dogs. “Dogs who live in this type of kennel are valued only for the sale price of their offspring,” the governor said.
• • •
A month later, the legislature returned to business. This time the state House was ready to act. On September 17, representatives passed House Bill 2525 by a vote of 181 to 17. They also passed without opposition House Bill 2532, which barred owners and breeders from performing surgery on their dogs.
The bills now needed to pass the Senate.
Two weeks elapsed before the Senate Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee took up House Bill 2525. Before passing it, the committee watered down the bill. Among other things, they agreed to allow slatted floors in kennels. Breeders would not have to install outdoor exercise runs if local zoning laws forbade them. Kennel operators would have to “make an effort” to lower the temperature of a kennel if the temperature exceeded 85 degrees, but weren’t required to do so. And dog crates could be stacked thirty inches high instead of just twelve. Moreover, any kennel that had gone three years without being cited for a violation would be exempt from having to abide by the new standards.
Instead of six months, kennel owners would have a year to comply with regulations. And the Department of Agriculture would appoint a Canine Health Board of veterinarians to review requests for exemptions having to do with ventilation, flooring, and lighting.
Animal welfare advocates were unhappy with the changes. “In two to four years, they could undo all the good this bill does,” Nancy Gardener, a member of the Dog Law Advisory Board, said. She pointed out that Pennsylvania had a lot of bad kennels that had not been cited for violations and would now be exempt from the upgrades.
The bill passed the Senate Appropriations Committee and then the full Senate by a vote of 49 to 1. In the course of melding the House and Senate bills, reform advocates were able to win back some of the tougher provisions. Among other things, the final version doubled the minimum floor space for dogs, eliminated wire flooring, and required at the minimum unfettered access to an exercise area twice the size of a dog’s enclosure. Dogs kept in large-volume kennels would have to be examined by veterinarians twice a year, and, effective immediately, veterinarians and veterinarians only would be authorized to euthanize dogs. The bills that would have forbidden breeders from performing medical procedures and increased fines and jail terms for cruelty violators failed to make it out of committee. Still, Rendell was satisfied. The most meaningful legislation had passed.
The governor signed Act 119 into law on October 9, 2008. Two weeks later he held a second, ceremonial signing, this time with his rescued Golden Retriever, Maggie, by his side. Most dogs confined to wire hutches suffer not only physical problems but tremendous behavioral problems as well, the governor told the crowd assembled to witness the milestone. His own dog had overcome those issues. “Maggie must have been touched by God,” Rendell said, a catch in his voice, “because she is the happiest dog I’ve ever had in my life.”