The Doggie in the Window by Rory Kress

Author:Rory Kress
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

THE DOGGIE IN THE BROWSER WINDOW

Until 2013, if a breeder sold his dogs online, he did not need to be licensed by the USDA. Consider this fact for just a moment. Until very recently—long after internet commerce was well established—breeders could operate online with no government oversight whatsoever. How? By claiming they were retail pet shops.

When the exemption from retail pet stores from USDA licensure was first created more than forty years ago, the agriculture agency envisioned it applying to brick-and-mortar pet shops or hobby breeders selling directly from their homes or farms. In a fact sheet published by the USDA, the agency explains its original reasoning: “Such establishments were not regulated under the [Animal Welfare Act] because it was assumed that customers were providing public oversight.”

Because of this exemption, depending on where you live, your mall’s local pet store selling puppies likely holds a business license and needs to stay up to code with the Health Department—not the federal government.

While it’s easy to find fault with the Animal Welfare Act’s minimal regulations that the USDA does impose upon its licensees, it’s even easier to find fault with the fact that breeders selling online were legally exempted from any USDA oversight at all.

Before the rise of the web, breeders were able to sell dogs directly to individual customers via ads in newspapers and magazines and achieve that retail pet store exemption. This, of course, didn’t guarantee humane treatment but at least was on a much smaller scale than the internet now facilitates. But as Sara Amundson, executive director of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, tells me with a wry laugh, she’s been fighting to end this retail pet store exemption since long before Al Gore invented the internet. However, time and time again, animal welfare advocates were unable to do so. You can hardly blame breeders for taking advantage of the gaping loophole to licensure the internet provides: it was just too good to ignore. By 2010, 80 percent of the worst breeders in the country were those who were freely going unlicensed thanks to this exemption, according to the USDA’s own internal investigation.7

Before the rise of e-commerce, breeders had been forced to rely on pet shops and brokers like the Hunte Corporation to handle wide distribution. Through the web, dogs could be shipped—for a fee paid by the buyer—unaccompanied on a crate in a plane’s cargo hold, and the buyer could then head to his local airport and pick up his brand-new pup. All this without ever meeting a breeder face-to-face, checking out the dog for sale in person, or seeing the place where it was born and bred.

Brick-and-mortar pet shops, already becoming sullied by their reputation as the end point for puppy mills, were no longer even necessary in the puppy purchase transaction. Suddenly, the doggie in the window became the doggie in the internet browser window. And like most things we buy online, there was no guarantee that the dog you clicked on to purchase was, in fact, the dog that you would receive.

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