Designer Dogs: An Exposé. Madeline Bernstein

      Preface

      It Started Here

      I still hope to be able to make something out of myself, but who can do anything after Beethoven?

       —Franz Schubert

      When I was a kid, I wanted two things: a piano and a collie named “Lassie.” Unfortunately, my parents were just starting out and had zero disposable income. So my father made me a cardboard piano on which I could practice my lessons. In other words, I could hum while my fingers developed muscle memory for scales.

      The dog was more complex. Every one of my suburban friends had a purebred collie named “Lassie,” or “Laddie” if the dog was male. I knew what I wanted: Lassie, not Laddie. Lassie. It had to be Lassie. According to the television show, Lassie understood everything and could do anything.

      One day, when I was about eight years old, my father came home with a black and brown puppy, which he’d received from a law client who had a litter of them but no funds to pay my father’s fee. “Wow,” I thought, “is this what collies look like when they’re babies?” When I realized that it wasn’t the dog that I wanted, I was horrified. Clearly my friends had parents who loved them more. Did no one care if I fell into a well? I was the neighborhood pariah with a black and tan mutt and no hope of rescue from trouble. I felt pretty pathetic—a cardboard piano and a mutt in a world of baby grands and collies. I was just lucky I didn’t have acne.

      I did not understand the high price tag and maintenance expenses necessary for a purebred collie, nor the dangers of succumbing to peer pressure. I didn’t know the sad reality of how the high demand for collies contributed to setbacks for the breed, as unscrupulous breeders produced puppies at a rate unsafe for their genetic survival. Instead, I understood that I had a knockoff when other kids had the real thing, and I could only sing myself a sad song on my cardboard piano.

      Of course, my mutt, Lucky, became my soul mate and was with me for eighteen years. During that time, things changed. I was considered luckier than my city friends, who weren’t allowed a dog at all, and I stood out as a unique contrarian in a neighborhood of dog owners with upscale, snooty collies. In fact, many of my wealthy Manhattan classmates, who lived in apartments with prohibitions against pets, thought I was the richest of them all, with my real dog in my real backyard. Conversely, my friends in our then–lower-middle-class Yonkers neighborhood thought I was poor and unlucky, as my parents saved up for a piano instead of a collie.

      The appetite for designer dogs has not abated, and the steps to acquire and engineer them have increased exponentially. Unfortunately, this is not good news for the dogs. Years later, I would become president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles (spcaLA), an organization that is dedicated to the prevention of cruelty to animals through education, law enforcement, intervention, and advocacy.

      spcaLA opened its doors as both an SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) and SPCC (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) in 1877, a time when women, children, and animals were all legally classified as property. The need for an SPCC was extreme as there were not yet child labor laws, departments of social services, or the concern to protect children from abuse. Every SPCA in the country is legally separate from the others and functions independently. There is no national umbrella organization, no chapters, and, therefore, spcaLA works completely autonomously.

      As president of spcaLA, it has been my vision, pleasure, and pride to connect spcaLA’s roots to the twenty-first century and deliver programs and services that protect our most vulnerable and prevent their exploitation. We are the only SPCA that has a suite of programs to assist victims of domestic violence and support at-risk youth. We’re also the only one with a court diversion program for juveniles convicted of animal cruelty and/or bullying behavior that sees the connective tissue of abuse and works to remedy it.

      I am frequently asked why I work in the animal welfare field, why I don’t exclusively focus on the welfare of people, and when I am planning on getting a real job. My work before animal welfare was as a prosecutor and then as a deputy inspector general. Both jobs involved prosecuting and investigating crimes. In my new role, I am still investigating and prosecuting criminals. It is the same job I have always had—just a different victim. I never changed jobs!

      In fact, when I began in animal welfare over twenty years ago, I saw many of the same defendants I’d seen before. Only then did I begin to truly understand the interplay between crimes against people and crimes against animals. It is all one cycle of violence. I shouted this discovery to everyone I knew, with no result. My father said my message to the world was essentially the same as a lost fart in a breeze. Now, after all these years it is generally accepted in the public square that acts of animal cruelty are frequently a precursor to or predictive of violent behavior toward people. Just watch any television crime show for that to be asserted. It is also true that often an abused animal is found or threatened in families where domestic violence is common, and that these crimes don’t occur in a vacuum but rather in concert with other criminal activities. Recently the FBI has begun keeping track of crimes against animals in order to study these connections more fully.

      We have all been conditioned to accept as normal the substandard treatment of animals in pet shops, zoos, circuses, pony rides, theme parks, and films, and by breeders. We see a cute puppy and not the journey taken by that puppy to get to us. We are desensitized to it and push this desensitization forward by allowing the next generation to see the same. We truly are ignorant of the high cost of cute. There is also a dearth of real statistics and accurate numbers for anything in this business, since there is no mandated reporting, no uniform statistical categories, and multitudes of animals who exist under the radar. They live on the street or in private compounds and are exploited to facilitate criminal activities. They’re essentially a shadow population.

      Shining a light on and stopping the maltreatment and violence inherent in the creation of designer dogs and the pain endured by those dogs intended to be cute fits squarely within my soapbox of issues and spcaLA’s mission. It is my honor, now as a grown-up, to talk to you about this issue.