when, on February 4, 1966, Life magazine published “Concentration Camp for Dogs,” a photographic essay by Stan Wayman that depicted heart-wrenching images of the cruel confines of a puppy farm.8 Wayman had taken the photos during a raid by the Baltimore Humane Society and Maryland State Police on a compound holding 103 dogs. One page of photographs was titled “Raiders Discover a Den of Woes.” One of the many upsetting images showed a dog who had frozen to death in below freezing temperatures. The public outrage from these two seminal articles was loud and clear enough to be heard by the legislators on Capitol Hill and President Lyndon B. Johnson. Sadly, those haunting photographs could have been taken yesterday, as puppy mills like the one photographed still exist around the country.
On August 24, 1966, President Johnson signed the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966 (now known as the Animal Welfare Act (AWA)), which incorporated the bill proposed by Clark and Resnick, and added humane treatment standards for laboratory animals. Upon signing the bill, President Johnson remarked:
Progress, particularly in science and medicine, does require the use of animals for research and this bill does not interfere with that. But science and research do not compel us to tolerate the kind of inhumanity which has been involved in the business of supplying stolen animals to laboratories or which is sometimes involved in the careless and callous handling of animals in some of our laboratories.9
The AWA provided guidelines for minimum standards of care for the humane treatment of animals in housing, transport, and breeding, as well as a slew of documentation and record-keeping requirements with detailed transaction records and source, veterinary, and sale records. It also outlined two types of parties, breeders and dealers, and required licenses for them, a class A license and a class B license, respectively.
The definition of a class A licensee includes the following language:
Class “A” licensee means a person subject to the licensing requirements . . . and meeting the definition of a “dealer” [a person breeding, buying, and selling] and whose business involving animals consists only of animals that are bred and raised on the premises in a closed or stable colony and those animals acquired for the sole purpose of maintaining or enhancing the breeding colony.10
This type of licensee can sell only what he breeds on his premises. It doesn’t mean the licensee doesn’t run a puppy mill, and is breaking the guidelines for minimum standards of care, but theoretically the source of the animals and the breeding records are established and documented, so a license might be secured. A class A licensee could be breeding specifically to sell either to a laboratory or the pet industry.
Later in the act, the language states that a license is not required for breeders who have four or fewer breeding females and sell only the offspring of these females.
The description of a class B licensee includes the following language:
Class “B” licensee means a person subject to the licensing requirements . . . and meeting the definition of a “dealer” and whose business includes the purchase and/or resale of any animal. This term includes brokers, and operators of an auction sale, as such individuals negotiate or arrange for the purchase, sale, or transport of animals in commerce. Such individuals do not usually take actual physical possession or control of the animals and do not usually hold animals in any facilities. A class “B” licensee may also exhibit animals as a minor part of the business.
This licensee is a random source dealer, which means his animals could come from anywhere, including front lawns, pounds, owners, swap meets, and animal shelters. Some of these dealers work with middlemen called “bunchers.” A buncher is not licensed, permitted, or otherwise regulated and can pick up pets from regulated or unregulated sources, like Craigslist or “free to good home” advertisements. The buncher sells to a class B licensee, who can then sell to anyone, including research institutions. The buncher rarely has documentation and is not required to. Hence, a class B licensee, though regulated, can circumvent requirements and muddy the footprints on the source trail by using a buncher.
A class B licensee, though he or she usually doesn’t hold animals at a facility, may store the dogs in the back of a truck or use some makeshift confinement system until enough animals are acquired to move to the research institutions. The conditions under which these animals are held are frequently grossly inadequate and the dogs often become ill because of this, or it compounds existing illnesses. The standard defense is to assert that the dogs were in poor shape when they were acquired, so the dealer should not be held responsible. Since the dogs could come from such places as auctions and pounds, it is hard to prove this defense false. Also, no one really asks. It’s the silent wink and nod of the seedy underbelly of the business.
Consider this, if Pepper the Dalmatian was stolen by a buncher and sold to a class B licensee, a random source dealer, who then sold Pepper to a laboratory, the result at that time would have been the same.
The AWA was flawed, and enforcement lax, but it was a start. And there were ripple effects as some states enacted, revised, or augmented their own animal welfare laws. At the time, in the mid- to late 1960s, there was some optimism that relief for these dogs would come. Sadly, it was not to be.
“Try It On the Dog”—Pound Seizure
The AWA was not seriously enforced by the USDA or law enforcement, and there was little respite for dogs. They continued to be brutally farmed, stolen, sold, and abused. Pound seizure practices exacerbated the harm to them.
Pound seizure is the sale or release of pets from a pound to a research testing or educational facility. In this way, shelters, ostensibly safe havens for animals, betrayed them as well. The shelters were supposed to be places where lost pets could be kept safe until found, and abandoned animals could be cared for. Shelters were supposed to help heal dogs who’d been injured or abused, and, ideally, place them into new and loving homes. They were also places that could provide a peaceful, painless, and humane death to animals should that be necessary. Their overarching goals were to ease suffering, provide shelter from the elements, and protect dogs from harm. Or at least they proclaimed these were their goals.
The biomedical and pharmaceutical industries still wanted to test on animals, and researchers and laboratories discovered that pounds were a cheap source of dogs. For their experiments, they did not require that dogs be purebred, or even bred in a consistent manner, to achieve uniform traits. They only required that they be dead or alive.
In the 1940s, several laws were enacted that mandated that public pounds (and even some private organizations housing animals) turn over unclaimed animals to research institutions for experimentation and testing. The following is an actual law passed in Minnesota in 1949 and is representative of similar laws passed in other states around the same time.
35.71 UNCLAIMED AND UNREDEEMED ANIMALS IMPOUNDED; SCIENTIFIC USE.
Subdivision 1. Institution defined. As used in this section, “institution” means any school or college of agriculture, veterinary medicine, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, or other educational or scientific establishment properly concerned with the investigation of, or instruction concerning the structure or functions of living organisms, the cause, prevention, control or cure of diseases or abnormal conditions of human beings or animals.
Subd. 2. Application by institution for license. Such institutions may apply to the State Live Stock-Sanitary Board for a license to obtain animals from establishments maintained by or for municipalities for the impounding, care and disposal of animals seized by lawful authority. If, after investigation, the State Live Stock Sanitary Board finds that the institution making request for licensure is a fit and proper agency within the meaning of this section, to receive a license, and that the public interest will be served thereby, it may issue a license to such institution authorizing it to obtain animals hereunder, subject
