Breeding For Puppy Dreams Is No Dog’s Dream
“What dog are you planning on taking home?”
I had been in the Puppy Dreams store of Sherman, Texas for exactly six seconds. I hadn’t had enough time to adjust to seeing the store’s interior that was a clash of orange, lime-green, soft pink, and deep blue, before a young male employee asked me the question. He approached with an awkward smile, as if he wasn’t comfortable delivering the line. The poor guy looked like he would have been more at home on a lacrosse field than peddling puppies. But, knowing I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I decided to see what Mr. Lacrosse knew about the puppy industry.
He told me, with a straight face and eye contact, that the store uses “a licensed breeder.” His exact words were, “Our puppy breeder is a licensed breeder.” I saw about thirty puppies from more than a dozen different breeds, which, as you might imagine, made me skeptical. I asked who the breeder was. He walked off to speak to a manager, came back, and said, “So it’s USDA.”
Over the course of my career as an undercover puppy mill investigator, I’ve had people threaten to kill me if I worked for the government, had a puppy miller rub my face to read my mind through God, and another puppy miller blow his rotten-tooth-meth-tinged breath in my face to exorcise demons from me. That said, one of my proudest moments in keeping a straight face was when young man at Puppy Dreams told me the store’s breeder was the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, of course, licenses and inspects puppy mills. They don’t, despite what anyone at Puppy Dreams may tell you, breed dogs and sell the puppies to pet shops.
Why the lies? Because the truth is worse than you think
But this encounter took place at the Puppy Dreams store in Sherman. Puppy Dreams has fifteen stores in Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kansas. Eight of the nine Texas stores are in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. An employee at the store in nearby Arlington was different. Sort of. I spoke to a worker there who was about the same age as Mr. Lacrosse, but she didn’t seem like him at all. She just looked like a normal, honest person and gave clear, confident answers to everything I asked. The only problem was that everything she said was a lie. Not just normal pet store lies, either, though she had plenty of those. She claimed the USDA inspected the breeders up to six times a year (they inspect them once a year), that the breeding dogs are running around in large pens and play areas (they are generally confined in cages and small runs), and that most of the breeders’ dogs are “family dogs” (they’re treated like livestock).
But this employee went above and beyond those normal untruths. Registration papers I requested revealed the breeder was Jake Kruse, K & E Kennels, in Salem, Iowa. Anyone familiar with commercial dog breeding knows that the Kruse family in Iowa is one of the most notorious puppy mill families in the Midwest, Jake’s uncle, Steve in West Point, Iowa, has had more than 1300 dogs and puppies at several locations, numerous USDA violations and suspensions of his federal license. As I looked at the info, the worker said the store’s breeders “can’t have any like violations within the past like five to seven years.”
Bold-faced gaslighting
So, I pulled up Jake Kruse’s information on my phone. I found an article on the Iowa Capital Dispatch site that detailed recent violations for Kruse at a USDA inspection for “sharp corner edges,” broken metal” that could injure the dogs, and a feeder with a buildup of “caked food and wild bird feces.” It noted Kruse had about 300 adult dogs and puppies on site at the time. A review of USDA inspection reports shows that he has had as many as 421 dogs and puppies.
I showed the information to the employee who, without losing any confidence in her voice, said, “Right, it probably is a different kennel, or a different broker.” She then repeated the claim, saying that because the store doesn’t work with people who have violations, the info I saw had to be wrong, and it had to be a different Jake Kruse. I was impressed by her bold-faced gaslighting. If she wasn’t so lacking in ethics, she could have made a good undercover investigator.
Now, I don’t think this young employee came up with these lies on her own. Part of why I say that is that I’ve heard them at other Puppy Dreams stores. Remember the one in Sherman, with Mr. Lacrosse? Well, Mr. Lacrosse’s manager had overheard him and got up to correct him. She told me that the breeders are USDA-licensed, inspected twice a year, and have random check-ins from the USDA every three to six months (again, the USDA conducts annual inspections and sometimes goes longer than a year). She went on to say the store’s breeders have had no violations within the past five years (a big lie), and then refused to give me breeder information on a puppy when I asked for it.
At a Puppy Dreams in Garland, Texas, I heard similar fraudulent statements as those made by the Arlington and Sherman employees. The Garland employee said the store’s breeders were “USDA-approved” and had only a few dogs each, which were kept in “play pens.” She also said that if breeders received any USDA violations, they’d lose their licenses, which is blatantly false.
Company-wide lies
How do so many people give such outrageous lies? Let’s look at the source: The Puppy Dreams websites. They have a website for the stores I visited in Texas in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and then website other stores. On the home page for the Texas stores, a golden, curly-haired puppy is front and center, exuding innocence that seems to permeate everything about Puppy Dreams. In case you aren’t won over with just the picture of a cute pup, there’s an “Our Philosophy” tab, which explains Puppy Dreams has “been screening breeders for over 20 years,” and has “zero tolerance for breeders with substandard practices or questionable practices.” They describe breeders that “go above and beyond industry and top veterinary standards” and claim they “personally check all inspection reports to ensure compliance with strict operational criteria and requirements.”
Another Puppy Dreams website, one that is for all of their stores, has an entire section called, “How Can You Verify If A Breeder Is Legitimate?” Right next to a logo for the USDA, another for the AKC, and one for their “No Puppy Mill Promise,” they offer the following advice: 1. Ask for references. 2. Visit the breeder’s facility. 3. Check health records. 4. Ask about the breeding practices. 5. Look for certification. 6. Avoid red flags. 7. Check reviews and online presence. Sounds good, right? It’s a smokescreen. Such advice is even given out by some animal protection groups, but there’s a problem with it. It doesn’t take human nature into account. Most people don’t do proper due diligence when buying a car or house, and certainly don’t when buying a pet. They aren’t going to demand to see where a puppy’s parents are kept, drive out to inspect the facility for themselves, and demand health records and references. Instead, they’re going to look at a store which recommends such advice and think, “They did that due diligence for me. I’ll just buy from them.”
But Puppy Dreams claims about their breeders are lies. They do buy from puppy mills, and their conditions are often the opposite of Puppy Dreams claims. I know this because I’ve personally documented numerous breeders who sell to their stores.
One of their breeders has been Clinton Michel in Long Lane, MO, at whose property I saw dogs pacing in small wire cages. They weren’t in “play pens,” and they weren’t “family pets.” They were dogs confined like egg-laying hens or breeding hogs. Puppy Dreams has also bought puppies from Roger and Marla Campbell. At their kennel in Newton, Kansas, I saw they had dogs in small, raised wire cages, much like Michel did. Dogs had only enough space for a few steps lengthwise and less than a full step width-wise before they had to turn around in their cages.
Puppy Dreams uses numerous brokers to buy puppies. Brokers are licensed by the USDA to buy and resell puppies, and each has a wide group of breeders who supply them. Puppy Dreams has used brokers such as J.A.K.’s Puppies, Select Puppies and SouthPaw Pets.
J.A.K.’s, a reprehensible facility that created fake nonprofits to sell puppies as “rescues” to stores who can’t sell from breeders, has bought from some of the worst breeders I’ve ever documented. Such breeders include Dennis and Donna Van Wyk in New Sharon, Iowa. At their kennel, I saw a dog with an infected openly bleeding wound and dogs in concrete pens coated in mashed feces.
Both J.A.K.’s and Select Puppies have bought from AJ’s Angels in Cushing, Minnesota, at whose facility I saw hundreds of dogs in tiny, raised wire cages. Some were spinning and pacing for minutes at a time. One Yorkie paced and circled for the entire thirty minutes I observed the facility. Billie Alford has sold to Select Puppies, and at her kennel I found small dogs in cages and pens, jagged wire and pieces of sharp metal sticking into the enclosures.
The list of terrible breeders I’ve documented selling to Puppy Dreams and brokers who sell to Puppy Dreams is exhaustive, and I don’t want to drag you through all the evidence, but it’s important to understand Puppy Dreams’ claims about their breeders aren’t just misrepresentations, but bold-faced lies.
Why does it all matter? Why the focus on Puppy Dreams? Because Puppy Dreams has so many stores. Popularity for them is growing. Their tactic of promoting “legitimate breeders” and saying their suppliers have clean records and spacious facilities is fooling people. They have employees so lacking in knowledge that they don’t even know what the USDA does, yet Puppy Dreams still runs successful pet shops because the deception is that convincing and effective.
The best option is adoption
The truth about Puppy Dreams must be told, and it must be shared. The breeding dogs they exploit can do nothing to speak for themselves, so we must speak for them. Dogs and cats at our local shelters will continue to be euthanized unless we promote their adoptions, and those adoptions don’t happen when people are convinced that buying from a pet store is a responsible decision. We must turn away from pet stores like Puppy Dreams, and go to our local rescues instead.
One day, someone may ask you, “What dog are you planning on taking home today?” Make sure that dog is from a shelter or legitimate rescue organization.
