298

The little poodle listed as Number 298 in the Oklahoma dog auction

catalog looked as if she were dying.

Sprawled on the floor of her crate, she panted heavily. Her tongue

lolled from a mouth that showed pallid gums and sparse, mud-colored

teeth. In the incessant din of barking dogs and the auctioneer’s

amplified gabble, her eyes remained closed, not from sleep but

exhaustion.

Most people at the auction walked past Number 298 without a second

Glance. Theresa Strader stopped short.

“Oh, no,” she said aloud.

“Mom,” said Strader’s daughter, Tasha, who is 14. Her voice had a

warning tone.

“Look at her,” Strader said thickly, a sign she was close to tears.

She crouched down and looked into the kennel.

Number 298 roused and coughed, spitting out a watery puddle of sawdust

and leaves.

“Probably her last meal,” Strader said. She swiped at her eyes.

Tasha looked around, wondering if people were listening or watching.

The Straders’ first rule at dog auctions is simple: Keep a stone face, no

matter what. Never let on you’re a rescuer. The dog breeders

detest you, and they’ll deliberately bid up the price on a dog

they’d never buy, just to force the rescuer to pay more from their

meager budgets.

Unlike the other buyers, who were looking for promising brood dogs and

studs, the Straders, who run the Colorado branch of the National Mill

Dog Rescue Network, were scouting for the dogs most likely to be

destroyed if they weren’t sold. The Straders’ operation is a nonprofit

organization that rescues retired puppy mill breeding stock, mainly

adult dogs that would be destroyed or left to languish in a cage until

they died, and some puppies that have aged out – grown too adolescent

to appeal to customers browsing in a pet store. Since February 2007,

the Straders and their volunteers have rescued 1,176 mill dogs.

Every six to eight weeks, Theresa and Tasha Strader, and a few

volunteers, drive vans full of empty kennels to auctions in other

states. Mostly, they go to Missouri, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, three

big puppy mill states. Theresa Strader was shocked when she learned

that some of the worst puppy mills in Pennsylvania are run by the

Amish. Until then, she’d thought of the Amish as peaceful and

disciplined people whose lives were harmonic, if not idyllic, a

tranquil island in a frenetic, technology-obsessed society.

Then she visited Amish puppy mills. The dogs lived in kennels stacked three or four high, in

rows of 10 to 20. Nearly always, the dogs were in desperately bad

health, with overgrown toenails, missing teeth, kennel cough, matted

fur and rheumy eyes. There were bands where the fur was worn to the

skin on many of the brood dogs’ ankle

, evidence that the females had

to be chained when they were bred. The older dogs were listless. The

younger dogs cringed or snapped. The Amish breeders unsentimentally

regarded the dogs as livestock, and believed in coaxing as many litters

as possible out of each dog – at least two or three every year.

Technically, the Amish breeders are right. The U.S. Department of Agriculture does define commercial

breeders’ dogs as livestock. Each dog is issued a number. Upon

maturing, a dog is fitted with a permanent metal chain collar that

includes its USDA number on a bronze tag. That was how Number 298 in the Oklahoma

auction, for example, was listed.

Strader had rarely seen a live dog in such terrible shape as Number

298. The coldest, most pragmatic, mill owners know that they can’t coax

litters from a dog on the edge of death. She wondered why Number 298's

owner was trying to sell her. Who’d buy a dying dog?

She and Tasha were still standing by Number 298's kennel. People were

starting to look. Tasha pulled on her mother’s sleeve.

“C’mon, Mom,” she said loudly and rudely, playing the role of an

impatient teenager to snap the spell.

Theresa Strader stirred. She looked at her daughter.

“We need to leave now, Mom, or it’s going to be after midnight when we

get home,” Tasha said.

“We can’t leave without Little Miss Sunshine,” Strader whispered.

Who?” Tasha asked, genuinely flummoxed.

Theresa Strader gestured at the limp poodle in front of them.

“That’s what I’ve decided to name her,” she said. “Little Miss

Sunshine.”

“Mom! You can’t rescue all of them!” Tasha whispered.

“No,” Strader relied, “but we can rescue this one.”

Until about two years ago, Strader worked as a pediatric oncology

nurse at the Children’s Hospital in Denver, Colorado. She is a

substantial woman, with strong legs, capable hands and straight ash

blonde hair efficient

cut so short that she doesn’t have to bother

with blow-driers or hair products. All her life, she’s loved Italian

greyhounds, the tiny whip-thin cousins of racing greyhounds. Italian

greyhounds – Iggies, in Strader’s shorthand – are slender and

nervous-looking, with prominent eyes that bulge from their narrow

heads. A greyhound in Theresa Strader’s arms looks almost lost; she

easily could hold five or six at once on her lap.

Throughout her adult life, Strader has volunteered as a foster

caregiver for various rescue dog operations – organizations that pluck

Italian greyhounds and other breeds from dog pounds or puppy mills,

give them inoculations and other medical care, and then bring the dogs

home to socialize them, with the goal of placing them with other

families and individuals.

On that February day two years ago, Strader opened her email and read

a note from one of her Iggy rescue groups. The text pled for volunteers

to help pick up 50 Iggies that would be destroyed if they weren’t sold

at an imminent Missouri mill auction.

Fifty Iggies! Strader, who is in her 30s, lives on about five acres of

forested land near Colorado Springs. Much of the land is fenced off for

rescue dogs at various stages of socialization. At the time, she didn’t

have many rescue dogs – maybe 15, including two lanky Ibizan hounds she

decided to keep herself, a half-dozen Iggies, and some Japanese chins.

(Strader is a licensed rescue dog caregiver, which allows her to keep

more than the maximum number of dogs most people are allowed to have.)

Several dog runs were empty. She reckoned she could help out, and

returned an email volunteering to drive a van and 12 kennels to

Missouri the next day. She had no idea what to expect.

She packed the family van with the kennels, telling herself that she

would only take a dozen dogs. She knew she might return with more;

Iggies are so small that two can easily fit in a small crate. She

packed dog food, towels, spray-cleaner, orange-mango juice and some

snacks. When Tasha asked if she could come along, Strader said sure.

Driving east, Strader and her daughter felt that sense of

expansiveness that accompanies a skyline untouched by buildings. The

Eastern Colorado plains yawn east toward a watery horizon that looks

flat until you get closer. The plains are full of ripples, gulches and

ridges. Occasionally, there’s a surprise, like the sandstone canyons

cut into the earth in southeast Colorado, rock mazes you’d expect to

see in Arizona or Utah, not on your way to Missouri.

They talked about the land a little, and other things as they headed

east.

When they reached Missouri, they pulled up at a farm peppered

with auction and going-out-of-business signs. They walked past a corral where two horses waited for buyers, found

the auction table at an aging outbuilding and got catalogues.

Strader asked where the dogs were, and was pointed toward low-roofed

buildings.

Inside the dark buildings, they found more than 600 dogs living in

cages that resembled rabbit hutches stacked three and four cages tall,

and 10 or more rows long. The dogs being led to auction blinked and

cringed when they were led outside, squinting in the Missouri sun.

Commercial breeding dogs almost invariably spend their lives inside

metal cages with wire grid walls and floors. The grid floors allow

feces and urine to fall onto galvanized metal trays underneath that can

be cleaned by hosing, a set-up that’s often unfortunate for the dogs on

the lowest row of cages.

Later, Strader learned that living on a wire grid presents a danger

for small breed puppies, whose little legs can slip through the holes

and snap. In mid-sized and larger breeds, the wire grids wear a pattern

into the dogs’ foot pads. (Strader once rescued a German shepherd whose

paws had never touched a solid surface. When she opened the kennel door

and let it onto the grass near the rescue facility buildings on the

eastern Colorado plains, the dog leapt in terror, as if it were

stepping on hot coals, unable to comprehend the message that its

feet were sending to its brain. It scurried back inside the kennel,

laid down to keep its paws off the solid kennel floor, and trembled.)

That day in Missouri, Tasha managed to keep her face expressionless

when she surveyed dozens of cages holding Italian greyhounds, but her

mother fled outside and leaned against the back of the building, out of

sight, and cried.

“I’d never seen anything like what we saw there,” Tasha said later.

“I can keep a poker face, but after Mom saw that first shack of dogs,

she had to go behind the wall and cry. And looking back, I’d say that

mill was in the middle. The really bad ones have dead dogs laying

around.”

Outside, Strader pulled herself together, using the discipline she

employed with young cancer patients begging to skip a round of

chemotherapy. She straightened her clothes and joined her daughter.

They walked down the concrete aisle, flanked by stacked wire cages that

held oddly silent dogs. Most of the dogs avoided their eyes. When

Strader managed to catch a dog’s attention, it either cowered or pulled

as far back in its cage as it could.

Her gaze fell on one dog that steadily returned her look. It was a

whisper-thin Iggie, trembling in a corner of its cage. The dog’s lower

jaw was missing. (Strader later learned that unattended periodontal

disease had rotted away the entire lower jaw and part of the upper.)

The missing jaw lent the little greyhound a bizarrely jaunty tilt, like

a canine Jimmy Durante. The expression in the dog’s liquid eyes seared

Strader’s soul.

“I swear to God, I could hear her pleading with me to rescue her,” she

said later.

“She’d been in there for seven years, churning out litters twice and

three times a year. I looked back at her, and I promised, ‘I’ll take

you from this hell, and I’ll love you till you die.’”

Strader leafed through the catalog till she found the dog’s number.

When the auction started, she was the only bidder interested in the

bitch with the missing jaw. She paid $20 to an auction staffer who

observed that a dog didn’t need to be pretty to bear a profitable

litter, and gave Strader a wink.

Strader named the dog Lily. She gathered the other dogs she’d bought

– about 20 on that trip – and gave them names, as well.

She arranged towels in the crates to soften the inevitable jostling on

the way back to Colorado. Then she loaded the dogs, and told Tasha they

were leaving. The ride west was somber.

“When I saw Lily and all the hundreds of others that say, I knew I

could not ignore this problem,” she said later.

“Did I know it would overcome my life? No, but I’m happy it has. And I

think we’re making a difference.”

It was impossible to fix Lily’s ruined jaw, and heartbreaking to see

how Lily coped with eating. Without a lower mandible to scoop up

kibble, Lily had taught herself to knock over a bowl of food, and scoot

her face sidewise along the floor, using her tongue to scoop up scanty

mouthfuls.

Lily arrived in Colorado with kennel cough, an infectious hacking

cough that sounds awful but isn’t fatal. Most mill dogs have kennel

cough, along with a plethora of other ills. Periodontal trouble is high

on the list. Most laws require commercial breeders to be associated

with a veterinarian who monitors the dogs’ health, but often it is more

of a nodding acquaintance than an active relationship. A responsible

veterinarian, for example, would have insisted on treating Lily’s

dental troubles long before her lower jaw began to erode.

Over the next few months, Lily’s health improved, though it took

nearly seven months for Lily to trust humans. When she did, Lily

devoted herself to Strader.

“When that trust kicked in, she shared her special love with every

human till the day she died,” Strader said.

“I had her for 14 months. Lost her on May 13 last year.”

Strader still can’t talk about Lily without tearing up. One of the

first things she did when she started her rescue organization was to

establish a memorial web page and foundation in Lily’s name. Shortly

after returning from the Missouri auction, Strader began

researching the dog rescue scene. By Christmas, she’d resigned from

her job at Children’s Hospital, relieving her of a long daily commute

to and from Denver, and giving her more time to invest in the dog

rescue work. She took on more flexible work as a home-care nurse for

three disabled siblings, all victims of shaken-baby syndrome. She spent

nearly all of her free time working on grants and searching for a

facility where she could keep rescue dogs until they were well enough

to go to foster homes.

She found a building for sale, 11,000 square feet of cavernous metal

barn originally designed to train show dogs. She talked the owner into

renting it to her for a pittance. The nearest neighbor is a

quarter-mile away, and the property is fenced. Inside the barn is a

double row of kennels with concrete floors, drains, electricity,

heating and plumbing, including sinks where new arrivals could be

washed, and a small room that serves as a veterinary office.

Through fundraising and word of mouth, people in the dog-rescue

community found Strader and began volunteering. Jason Beckinsale, a

Colorado Springs veterinarian, regularly helps on intake days, when a

new group of dogs comes into the facility. Other volunteers do

carpentry and construction. Some come to sit on the kennel floors and

pet the dogs or talk to them.

As Strader learned more about running a rescue operation, she talked

with others who did dog-rescue work. Not surprisingly, most of them

detest large-scale commercial breeders, who return the feeling. When

breeders recognize a rescuer at a mill dog auctions, it’s not unusual

for auctioneers and buyers to collaborate in bidding up an otherwise

unsalable dog’s price in order to force rescuers to spend more of their

limited budget.

When Strader caught on to that ploy, she began thinking about

counter-measures. She knew she could not afford to pay $50 to $200 a

dog at auctions and still run a rescue facility.

Eventually, in a move unprecedented in the dog rescue community, she

approached the large-scale breeders and proposed an arrangement: She

would take any dogs they were retiring or putting up for auction,

provided she had enough space. All the breeder had to do was notify her

by email or telephone, and she would drive out and pick up the dogs.

They would call or email Strader with the number of dogs they were

retiring, and an expiration date – three days, two weeks, a month –

after which the dogs would be killed or auctioned. She wouldn’t be able to get every dog, she told them, but she’d pick

up as many as she could.

This did not sit well with quite a few of her fellow rescuers, who see

the puppy mill owners as villains. Some of them refer to Strader as a

sell-out.

But the response from puppy mill breeders floored her. Emails filled

her in-box and voice mail. Many of the breeders wanted to take up her

offer. For them,

it was a good deal: They get rid of unproductive dogs

without the expense of euthanasia or an auction. For her part, Strader

sees that those dogs get a little love, medicine and human contact,

along with a life outside the inflexible wire grid of commercial

kennels.

About 90 percent of the

dogs Strader gets these days are through breeders donating

retired livestock. All the kennels in the rescue vans on the day she spotted Number 298,for instance, were full of dogs they’d picked up from other commercial breeders in Missouri and Oklahooma, but she still goes to auctions

At that auction in Oklahoma, Strader saw something of her beloved Lily

in the enervated black poodle that she decided to name, without irony,

Little Miss Sunshine. Strader is smart and witty, but when it comes to

dogs, her soft spot is big enough to accommodate a freight train. She

hoped that an optimistic name might turn around the fate of a dog that

seemed to be dying.

Repeatedly, Strader pled with the auction staff to put Number 298 on

the block ahead of schedule. Outside the auction building, she had a

van packed with dogs donated by Missouri breeders, and a 13-hour drive

back to the rescue facility in Colorado. Nobody on staff would budge.

“If we move up your dog, then we have to do the same thing for anyone

else who asks,” a staffer said in inflexible language widely known

and loathed.

Finally, Number 298 was pulled from her kennel and dumped onto the

table serving as an auction block. She didn’t rouse. Her sides hardly

moved as she struggled to breathe.

“C’mon, she’s probably got another litter left in her,” the auctioneer

said half-heartedly, but Theresa Strader was the only

bidder. After

paying the fee – $2 – Strader hustled to the waiting vans, knowing it

would be at least midnight before they got back to Colorado.

It was nearly 5 a.m. when the vans pulled onto the dirt road leading

to the rescue network’s facility. They’d run into dense fog at the

Colorado-Oklahoma border, adding another four hours to the journey.

Strader traded turns driving with one of the volunteers. When she

wasn’t behind the wheel, she sat shotgun, cuddling Little Miss Sunshine

in a towel on her lap, trying to coax her into accepting an eyedropper

of infant formula or water. The dog’s tongue and nose were dry as a

towel, an indication that she was dangerously dehydrated.

“C’mon, Sunshine,” Strader kept whispering as Tasha and the other

volunteer exchanged looks.

Snipping off the USDA collar was the first thing Strader did before

taking Sunshine and another sickly poodle into the veterinary office,

where she carefully laid Sunshine onto a towel-draped futon, and then

collapsed alongside the dog to wait for Beckinsale’s arrival.

She knew the prognosis was not good. Throughout the journey from

Oklahoma to Colorado, Sunshine not only refused food and water, but

kept vomiting a soupy mixture of sawdust and leaves. It wasn’t the

first time Strader saw a dog throwing up sawdust. Once some puppy mill

owners decide to get rid of a dog, they don’t want to waste money

feeding it, so the hungry dogs eat whatever they can find. Often, they

ingest things that their digestive tracts can’t handle, adding to a

plethora of other ills.

Strader dozed fitfully next to Sunshine, interrupted as volunteers

darted into the office to ask for advice about the other dogs going

through intake.

“I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” Strader kept saying, stroking

Sunshine as lightly as she could.

Despite Sunshine’s matted fur and curling, overgrown toenails, Strader

didn’t put the dog through the regular intake process of being weighed,

measured, photographed, bathed and groomed. She wasn’t sure that

Sunshine could survive the relative stress. She wasn’t even sure that

she could safely hold Sunshine in her lap without overtaxing the dog’s

remaining resources.

Finally, Beckinsale arrived. He took in the sight of Strader and the

inert little black poodle. Something in his expression shifted. He

could tell that the dog was in trouble, and that Strader was hoping for

a miracle.

Beckinsale, who is tall and lanky, crouched down for a look at

Sunshine while Strader debriefed him, her voice steadying as she went

through the familiar medical language.

“I’m worried that she’s dying,” Strader admitted.

“Probably I shouldn’t have gotten her. But she’s gonna know what it’s

like to

feel loved – even if it’s only for a few hours. But maybe

she’ll make it, huh, girl?”

Sunshine opened one eye to look at the humans hovering over her. She

closed it again as Beckinsale picked her up. Strader hurriedly slipped

a towel on the metal exam table before Beckinsale lowered the dog.

“She’s hot,” he remarked, gently running his hands over Sunshine’s

body. He clucked disapprovingly when he looked into her mouth, and said

a bad word.

“Look at those teeth,” he said.

He pressed one finger against the dog’s gray gums. In a healthy dog,

that will cause the gum to lose a little color but gain it back

promptly. Instead, his finger left an indent that was slow to refill.

Only about seven teeth were left in Sunshine’s mouth. All of them were

coffee-colored and soft.

Strader looked back and forth from the dog to Beckinsale’s eyes,

hoping for encouragement that did not come.

His diagnosis was worrisome. Internal bleeding. Advanced gingivitis.

Heartworm. Fluid in her lungs. Blood loss from chronic infections.

“And that’s off the top,” he said.

Strader’s face fell. She sat heavily in a chair next to the exam

table. Beckinsale swaddled Sunshine in a towel and put her into

Strader’s arms. Strader looked down at the dog, Madonna and canine

child. She stroked Sunshine with one careful finger.

Sunshine

opened her eyes. She lifted her head and laid it directly on

Strader’s thigh. Theresa Strader nearly broke down.

A volunteer opened the exam room door and poked her head inside. All

the other rescue dogs – 79 – were through with the intake. Nearly all

of them were small breed purebreds – bichon frises, pomeranians,

Yorkshire and Maltese terriers, poodles, Lhasa apso, shih tzu, Cavalier

King Charles spaniels, Brussels griffons, and a handful of designer

dogs – eski-poos and brugs (a Brussels-pug mix), and a couple of

15-week-old golden retriever puppies that pet stores rejected as too

old to sell. They were bathed, groomed and ready to see Beckinsale when

Strader was ready. Also, the Boy Scouts were here for their scheduled

tour and volunteer work.

“Okay,” Strader said. She tenderly handed Sunshine over to a volunteer.

“Just hold her,” Strader said, and bit her lip. Then she went into the

barn to talk to the scouts.

She gave them her usual lecture that began: “Never buy a puppy from a

pet store, because it is from a mill,” and went through an explanation

of a mill dog’s life. Brood and stud dogs rarely leave their wire

cages, spending their whole lives in dim sheds dank with the smell of

feces and urine. The adult dogs are chronically ill, often with

respiratory diseases related to living in confined, close quarters that

are hosed down 20 at least once a day. Some thick-furred breeds are damp

all winter, unable to fully dry after the ritual hosing.

Mill dogs receive little to no human contact, she told the scouts.

They aren’t stroked or spoken to. They have numbers instead of names,

which shocked one woman Strader met at an auction. The woman heard

about the auction somehow, and thought it sounded like a way to get a

good deal on a purebred, which typically sell for hundreds of dollars

in pet stores. At auctions, the typical price per dog rarely goes above

$75, and can be as little as $1. Examining the catalog, the prospective

pet owner had turned to Strader and asked why the dogs were listed by

number instead of by name.

“They’re mill dogs,” Strader had explained. “They use numbers.”

The woman’s brow furrowed.

“Then how do you know what to call them after you buy them?” she asked.

“What?” Strader asked.

“The dogs,” the woman explained. “It would be terrible for them to be

called the wrong name.”

“No,” Strader said. “You don’t get it. They have numbers, not names.

These dogs have never had names. Just numbers.”

The woman’s jaw dropped. Her eyes filled, and she had hurried away.

Strader didn’t see her again. She figures it was just as well. Mill

dogs often have a host of issues, not the least of

which is mistrusting

humans. Strader has had one basset hound that hasn’t been able to

return her gaze for more than six months, shrinking into the corner of

its kennel when anyone pauses in front of the door. It often takes two

weeks to socialize a mill dog, and sometimes it’s many months.

But most rescue dogs allow their barriers to crumble sooner rather

than later, and dedicate themselves to the humans who adopt them. That

perennially astounds Strader. How many humans are capable of such

magnanimous forgiveness?

After touring the scouts around the facility, Strader told them that

there was one more dog she wanted them to meet. She gave Sunshine’s

brief backstory: Seven years of living in a cage the size of a rabbit

hutch, always pregnant or nursing a litter of puppies that vanished

after six weeks, ignorant of veterinary care and decent food, turned

out for auction when she no longer was serviceable.

She led them to the exam room where Sunshine lay on a towel, laboring

to breathe. The scouts looked at the dog, and then at each other, with

questions in their eyes. Theresa Strader saw the glances they exchanged.

“She’s still alive, but I don’t know her prognosis,” Strader said.

“You might wonder why we bothered to save her, because she’s probably

dying. She was probably dying even before I bought her. This dog, right

here, is why I don’t want you to buy puppies at a pet store. And don’t

buy dogs on the Internet. Because that means that you are supporting an

industry that allows this. Is it fair for a dog to live and die in this

kind of shape, just so some jackass can make money selling her puppies?”

“She spent all her life in a cage?” one of the scouts asked. They

looked at Sunshine with fresh, troubled eyes, before filing out of the

room.

Strader stayed behind, settling on the futon next to Sunshine. She

resumed the desultory dozing, rousing to answer volunteers’ questions

and to the occasional phone call, including one from her husband. He

pressed her to promise that she would return home for the night.

“I’ll be there,” she told him, but she didn’t say when.

In the early evening, Strader’s eyes flew open when Sunshine struggled

to her feet. Strader swept the dog into her arms, cooing. The dog

looked at her for a long moment. Then Sunshine closed her eyes and died.

“She lived with only 24 hours of freedom,” Strader said, “ but she

died in the presence of people who cared about her, and not alone, on

the wire.”

To contact Theresa Strader or make a donation, go to milldogrescue.org

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Denver Post