Beating puppy mills... or joining them?

Here's yet another chapter in the saga of my ongoing love/hate relationship with the American Kennel Club. Yesterday, some folks thought I was the spawn of Satan for saying nice things about them, but today? Not so much.



Five years ago, it looked to a lot of people in the purebred dog world as though the AKC board had decided if they couldn't beat the puppy mills, they'd join them. From an excellent article in the new issue of the Canine Chronicle, written by Gretchen Bernardi:

In 2000, the AKC was in the midst of a crisis. The cash cow was drying up, due, in large part, to the boycott of the AKC registry by the commercial breeders in Missouri, spearheaded by Missouri Pet Breeders in March of that year. The back-breaking straw in this scenario was the newly implemented Fre-quently Used Sire program. What was the AKC thinking? First, it institutes a policy requiring minimum standards of care and now it wants to ensure the parentage of the dogs in its registry.

So this particular camel, wanting to be out from under the yoke of more inspections and more requirements, moved most of its registrations to a little-known registry in Arkansas – American Pet Registry, Inc. Actually, that organization and its breeders were visionaries. They had been told repeatedly that without AKC registration papers their dogs were worth very little and that the American public wanted, actually de-manded, those papers. Until then, only the United Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club controlled the puppy paper market and the AKC certainly held the lion’s share of that market.

But soon everyone realized that people who bought their puppies in the pet stores didn’t care who printed the paper that accompanied those dogs and APRI is now one of the four or five major registration entities in the country. From its website: “The nation’s only pet registration service dedicated to the preservation and promotion of pet ownership and the professional pet industry.” It has subsequently merged with Academic Kennel Records and American Breeders Association, among others.

Unable to distinguish itself as the premier registry that we know it is, the AKC found its registrations in serious decline. We have all been bombarded with this news, but suffice it to say that in six years – from 1999 through 2006 – AKC registrations dropped by 249,428 dogs and 113,066 litters. Those figures are even more significant for our discussion than a simple formula of number of dogs registered times registration fees, since most of the commercially-bred puppies are sold with at least one supplemental transfer fee. During the initial, dramatic drop in these registrations, an officer of the AKC stood before the delegate body and said that although we had lost a significant chunk of the commercial breeders, we really “don’t need the puppy mill dogs.” But someone clearly thought we did.

Bernardi goes on to list each recommendation of the committee, and points out that the AKC has implemented none of those aimed at "raising the bar" of what the AKC is and what AKC registration stands for, but only those designed to, as she says, "sanitize" commercial dog breeding:

AKC became a platinum member of the Missouri Pet Breeders, the very organization which launched the boycott. AKC removed the “do not buy puppies from a pet shop” from its website. Andrew Hunte, founder of the Hunte Corporation, was invited to sit in the VIP section at the Invitational and in the AKC box at Westminster. AKC entered into and then backed out of an undisclosed contractual arrangement with Petland. AKC offered quickly expiring discount registration coupons clearly aimed at the most frequent breeders.

In August, the board unanimously passed a resolution, with directors Patty Haines and Bill Newman abstaining, “to direct management to aggressively pursue the registration of every AKC registerable dog and to actively welcome any breeder or owner who is willing to abide by all AKC rules, regulations, and policies”.

[....]

In the end, what am I to think of the good work carried on by this committee and the thoughtful recommendations it made to the AKC board? More importantly, what am I to think of the AKC board and staff that, five years later, have addressed those recommendations that abide by its current philosophy of pursuing commercially-bred registrations in the absence of “raising the bar” and has ignored those that eight of the nine committee members thought would do just that and thereby enhance the name AKC.

At the creation of the committee, its critics said that it was formed to sanitize the commercial breeding industry and that “high volume breeder” was simply a euphimism for puppy mills. I disagreed with that assessment when the committee began its deliberations five years ago, but to my everlasting shame, I think they were wiser than I.

It's an excellent, thought provoking read, and it's here.

Comments

[NPPMWatch]

Lending credence to the above is an article that published in K-9 Magazine well over a year ago: What Have the American Kennel Club (AKC) Been Up To Then?



The article details how the Club abandoned its original philosophy and, instead, focused in on the ability to generate revenue from the registration of dogs at the mass breeding facilities, such as The Hunte Corporation, along with the stores who sell puppy mill inventory: PetLand.



Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/2da549



With AKC now having its own political PAC and using it to block any and all legislation that would create or better minimum health and welfare standards for dogs trapped in the commercial breeding mills, one must wonder: is AKC in business for the dogs or for the money?



Unfortunately, the answer to that question is all too apparent.... even to breeders.



Give Hope to the Mill Dogs

BOYCOTT STORES THAT SELL PUPPIES

North Penn Puppy Mill Watch

Visit Us Online: www.nppmwatch.com

[slt]

Never underestimate the power of greed. Doing the right thing, when convenient and profitable, is the unwritten motto of many American corporations.