It was a hopping night at Petland as Chihuahuas danced about, a
little Labrador relieved himself, and a tiny dachshund battled his
blanket while customers gawked through thick Plexiglas.
It was a far cry from a few days earlier, when an angry crowd
picketed the store on East Broadway Boulevard. They were protesting
Petland’s business of selling puppies to a community awash in unwanted
animals.
Among the protesters was Katherine Moore, who tells the Tucson
Weekly that her “personal reason for picketing is that I believe it
is unethical to breed and ship puppies here from other states, when
there are dogs dying every day in Arizona because they can’t find
loving homes or the care they need.”
But it wasn’t just a surplus of animals that had the crowd upset. On
March 16, officials from the Humane Society of the United States joined
a class-action lawsuit against Petland Inc., and its puppy supplier,
the Missouri-based Hunte Corporation. The suit alleges that Petland and
Hunte conspired to sell sick puppies supplied by so-called puppy mills,
while telling customers the animals were procured only from
high-quality breeders.
The mills, mostly scattered around the Midwest, are notoriously huge
operations where hundreds of breeding dogs are kept in cramped cages,
rarely seeing the light of day as they churn out litter after litter.
Puppies produced this way can suffer from genetic defects and
infectious diseases.
But Peter Sher, owner of Tucson’s two Petland franchises, claims the
Humane Society is barking up the wrong tree.
“I buy from probably 100 breeders from all over the
country—the same breeders that I’ve been buying from for five
years,” he says. “I’ve sold 6,000 puppies in the community of Tucson,
with an extraordinarily high level of customer satisfaction.”
Checking with the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona,
however, reveals a slightly different picture. According BBB reports,
both of Sher’s stores score a resounding “F,” with complaints about a
failure to honor contracts and issues with products, refunds or
exchanges. In nearly all of those cases, Sher’s stores didn’t even
respond to the bureau’s requests for mediation.
That does not surprise Kathleen Summers, director of the HSUS Stop
Puppy Mills campaign. “A lot of the people who are contacting us in the
wake of the lawsuit being filed are saying that the stores they were
involved with were not adhering to their promises.”
Those promises include providing puppies that are healthy and
well-socialized.
Prior to its lawsuit, the HSUS conducted an eight-month
investigation of 21 Petland stores and 35 breeders providing puppies to
the chain. It also sifted through the records of 322 more breeders, and
tracked nearly 18,000 puppies dispatched to the stores. What emerged,
according to the HSUS Web site, was an industry in which puppies are
treated as a “cash crop” by huge commercial breeders, and “hundreds of
breeding dogs are packed into cramped, barren cages—often for
their entire lives, with no socialization, exercise or human
interaction.”
While Sher claims to buy only from the finest breeding operations,
he admits he hasn’t inspected most of them himself. “It’s just not
practical for me to go visit 100 breeders around the country,” he says.
“But I do substantial due diligence on them, through references and
such.”
Like many other Petland outlets, his stores obtain many of their
puppies from the Hunte Corporation, which serves as a broker between
breeders and retailers.
Hunte president Steven Rook says his business operates in the
stratosphere of integrity. But Hunte receives an “F” rating from the
Southwest Missouri Better Business Bureau for failing to address
customer complaints, much like Sher’s stores.
Nor can Rook pinpoint which breeders actually supply puppies to the
Tucson stores. “But there are only two acceptable sources for our
puppies at the Hunte Corporation,” he says. They include small-time
“hobby breeders” and “USDA-registered and licensed and inspected
breeders.”
He refuses to provide their names, however. “I don’t give out any
breeder information to the press,” he says.
Still, he emphasizes that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is
diligent about inspecting the larger breeders. “The (USDA) is required
to by law. And if they find that there is something that should be
repaired to improve the quality of the facility, they give that breeder
30 or 40 days to fix that.”
But consider that there are only about 100 USDA inspectors to
monitor 10,000 facilities across the country, raging from research labs
to zoos. Many even consider the agency’s standards abysmal: federal
guidelines currently allow a medium-sized terrier to be kept in a cage
the size of a clothes drier for its lifetime.
Summers says USDA inspectors must adhere to the federal Animal
Welfare Act, which is hardly the gold standard for compassion. For
instance, “the act doesn’t say that you can’t have 300 dogs living in
cages their whole lives. They’ll never get taken for a walk. They’ll
never be part of a family. Nobody gives them personal attention. As
long as they have food and water and space to turn around,” the breeder
can pass USDA muster.
“The other thing we found, as part of our investigation, is that the
USDA-licensed breeders we checked on which were linked to Petland had
significant violations of even those basic care standards in their
inspection reports.”
Summers’ bottom line: “The USDA standards are very minimal, and just
adhering to those standards doesn’t prove that a breeder isn’t a puppy
mill.”
During a surreptitious visit to Sher’s Tucson store on Broadway, the
sales clerk did show us paperwork on three puppies, which revealed
breeders in far-flung states. But whether those breeders were puppy
mills seemed impossible for customers to easily determine.
So picking a puppy from Petland appears to be a case of caveat
emptor—or buyer beware.
If the Better Business Bureau is any gauge, some Petland customers
have already learned that lesson the hard way.
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2009.
There are hundreds of rescue groups in Tucson from which you can adopt a great dog. Most of them list on petfinder.com. Petland should stop selling puppies and start working with rescue groups the way Petsmart does. Until they do, I’m only buying supplies from Petsmart.
An extremely well-written and researched article that points out one of the major problems with companion animals in the US today. Until the public is well educated by articles like these we will continue to see high rates of euthanization of unwanted pets. Increasing Spay and neuter is another part of the equation.
I agree with Bruce this is a well-written and researched article. I have walked into the Petland on Wetmore won time in 6 years not to buy but to see the lay of the land and the condition of the animals. Why? Because that is the number of years I have poured my sould in rescue. Just in the last three days there have been 31 animals with treatable diseases like kennel cough, that were in jeopardy of loosing their lives. These homes may have been taken by the last 31 animals purchased at a retail sale of animals. Please Tucson, STEP UP and look first at the rescue and shelter animals that lives are on the line. Don’t buy an animal from out of state that really has no more history than what you see right in Tucson.
Great article. If you purchased a sick puppy from Petland please report it to The HSUS at http://www.humanesociety.org/puppymillstory.
Awesome article! We here in Dallas/Plano/Frisco, TX are also protesting Petland every Saturday. I have posted some of our protest videos on You Tube. Here is one. If you click on my name on You Tube, you can see more. Great job Tucson! We’re with you! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0CNtxK4YXI
Great article! It’s nice to see Petland’s dishonest responses further questioned by the reporter, instead of other articles where I have seen Petland being given yet another platform to lie to the public. I have been protesting with pbjdallas every Saturday for months. Petland should know that we are in it for the long haul until they go humane or go out of business.
If you want to learn more about all of the complaints against Petland go to http://www.consumeraffairs.com and type in Petland. I believe the last count was 41 pages of complaints! Try and deny that Petland!
Great article! Thanks for joining with others in exposing the truth about Petland. I live in San Diego, but am from Tucson. I have become familiar with what Petland is actually doing and with some protests that are happening in the Dallas area through a friend of mine. The media attention you are giving this not only helps rescue dogs and puppies from the horrors of puppy mills, but also is a huge encouragement to those on the front lines of protests every weekend. Keep up the good work, and keep the articles coming and the pressure on!
The Hunte Corp is raking in $ from puppy mills and the reason they don’t want to give breeder information to the press is because some good investigative reporters will document the fact that horrendous cruelty goes on routinely in USDA licensed facilities. Hobby breeders don’t do volume, so that’s baloney. Hunte is high volume puppy mill biz period. Petland is going to go humane, it’s just a matter of time. People are revolted by puppy mills and Petland makes its money off the backs of breeding dogs who live their entire lives in cages. Sad, lonely, sick, in anguish and in pain. Shame on Petland.
Carole Raphaelle Davis, author of “The Diary of Jinky, Dog of a Hollywood Wife”
I’m proud they don’t carry my book. It’s about adoption, that’s why.
Great article that really reveals what Petland is all about. I think it’s really telling that Petland and Hunte refuses to name the breeders, and their rating with the Better Business Bureau says it all. They are failing the animals and their customers by continuing to do business and taking care of the animals as they have been doing. Well done Tim Vanderpool and Tucson Weekly!
Great article..Hopefully the public will see how greedy Petland and Hunte are without showing even a bit of remorse towards millions of dogs that are suffering for their green dollars..Shame, shame, shame…
Mr. Vanderpool and his paper are to be commended. You can’t even get the media in Texas to cover this godawful crisis.
The only time they mention animal overpopulation is to complain about how many strays are on the streets.
Duh! How do you think they got there?
Meanwhile, puppy mill outlets like Petland ensure that we can never stop this horrible cycle of death. Mills churn out about 4 million animals a year, roughly the amount that are euthanized.
It’s a tragedy that’s been allowed to go on for far too long. Let’s pray that President Obama will put a stop to this madness through better FDA enforcement and by writing tougher legislation to put these mass breeders out of business.
Tim Vanderpool is one of the best investigative reporters in this town. Thanks, Tim for writing this article. I hope you’ll follow up on this. BTW, there is a Petland protest at the Wetmore & 1st ave location Saturday April 4th from 12pm-2:30. I hope it will be the best turnout yet!
Thanks to Pam in Dallas, Carole Raphaelle Davis and all of my friends in rescue for posting. Together we can make Petland go Humane!
WE ARE THEIR VOICE!!
Wow! Great article! The pressure is building! I protest in Plano TX. I have a puppy mill rescued pug that goes with me. We, also, foster. Please check into the rescues near you for different ways you can help. And keep up the great work!