The Pet-Store Controversy - How Sick Is That Doggy in the Window?

MARGARET and Al Valdez were strolling in the Brea Mall on their wedding anniversary when Margaret coaxed her husband into stopping at a pet shop. As he eyed the kittens, she tapped him on the shoulder, shouted “Happy Anniversary!” and thrust a miniature pinscher puppy into his arms. He was thrilled. He’d been wanting a dog like this but had balked at the $600 price tag.

That night, as the Valdezes’ three young sons played with the puppy, it began throwing up blood and developed diarrhea. The family rushed the dog to an emergency veterinary clinic near their Chino Hills home, where it received shots and medication. But two days later, the puppy, which Al and Margaret had named “Rambo,” died of parvovirus, a deadly canine disease.

Al, 36, an investigator with the Orange County district attorney’s office, demanded the $600 back from the pet store, Brea Pets. The store refused, saying its policy was to replace any animal that dies within 10 days of purchase. Valdez noticed that the second “Min Pin” the family picked out was missing a lot of fur around its hindquarters, but a salesperson told him not to worry, that hair loss is normal for a puppy.

When the Valdezes took their second pup, which they called Rambo II, to their vet, it was diagnosed with mange and ringworm. They went back to the pet store and were told to leave the dog until the store’s vet pronounced it healthy. But when they returned for the puppy two weeks later, “practically all its hair was gone,” says Margaret, 32, a nurse. They decided not to take Rambo II home.

Three weeks later, the store phoned Al Valdez and told him they had received a new Min Pin. This dog looked slightly more chipper than its predecessors, but when Valdez agreed to take it, the assistant manager informed him that the new puppy would cost an extra $100 because it came from a different breeder. Infuriated, Valdez stormed out of the store, although he returned later that day to buy the dog to console his upset sons, who had already loved and lost two puppies in the space of a few weeks.

The third puppy turned out to have mange, worms and a heart murmur; Valdez spent more than $200 in vet bills in the first two weeks of ownership. Today, more than a year later, Rambo III is a spunky little dog who loves to chase the family cat--but Valdez is still fuming about the pet store. The $60 store credit he received after complaining to the Better Business Bureau hasn’t assuaged his anger; he refuses, on principle, to use it. And he’s considering taking the matter to small-claims court. “It’s my first and last experience with a pet store,” he vows. “Overall, it was a traumatic experience for my kids and a frustrating and difficult experience for myself and my wife.”

Joyce Newberry, co-owner of Brea Pets for 12 years, says Valdez’s situation was “unusual, a worst-possible-case scenario. But we would not have been in business so long if it happened very often. You can’t make everyone happy, but we try. I can understand him being upset.”

The Valdez family’s ordeal is an extreme example of the complaints lodged against pet stores. Veterinarians, humane officials and animal-control officers say evidence is mounting across the nation that pet stores are increasingly selling sick, weak or genetically defective puppies. In Southern California, a rising number of complaints of cruelty and sale of sick animals by pet stores is a sign that such businesses may, in fact, be among the worst places to buy pets. Anecdotes about pet-store abuses are plentiful, but statistics are hard to come by because complaints are reported piecemeal--no single agency oversees pet stores. In recent months, such accusations have sparked calls for stricter regulation of the pet industry.

Twenty-five years ago, the neighborhood pet store was usually a modest mom-and-pop operation more likely to sell rabbits, hamsters or goldfish than larger animals. But in recent years, a growing pet mania, increasing demand for purebred and exotic breeds and the accompanying need for pet supplies have brought about a proliferation of chain operations, big and small. In shopping malls, pet stores are natural magnets, attracting gawkers--and impulse buyers--with windows full of irresistible furry creatures.

Today the nation has 10,093 retail pet stores, one-tenth of them in Southern California. Californians spend $350 million a year in pet shops, about twice as much per capita as the average American, according to the Western World Pet Supply Assn., a regional industry group based in Los Angeles. Today pets are not just man’s best friends; they are products in a lucrative, multibillion-dollar industry. And while bringing home a new pet is usually a joyful occasion, it can turn into tragedy if the animal is unhealthy.

By their very nature, pet stores can be breeding grounds for infectious diseases that attack vulnerable young animals. Consumers may unknowingly purchase an animal that is sick or genetically defective and, after they’ve become attached to it, spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in vet bills rather than give it up. Such circumstances can apply to kittens, birds and fish, but the overwhelming number of complaints concern puppies because they are the animals most in demand, says Sgt. Cori Whetstone, an investigator with the Los Angeles branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“The vast majority of puppies from a pet store have a problem,” says Dr. Ronald Porter, who heads the Los Angeles Veterinary Medical Assn. Pet-industry watchers, such as Lt. Charles Reed of the Los Angeles SPCA, are quick to stress that there are many reputable stores. Still, Reed says, “It’s not uncommon to buy a sick animal from a pet shop. There are more stores; there are more people buying pets. As the supply goes up, the quality of the product goes down.”

The problems frequently show up in the large pet-shop chain stores, humane officials say, because these stores buy puppies by volume from out of state. “The big difference between the chains and the smaller stores is most (chains) are in it purely for profit,” Whetstone says. “They misrepresent what they are selling to make the buck, and they focus on the sale of animals. In the past, the small stores did fine selling supplies, food and leashes, and people were getting their pets from the pound or their own vets.”

Reed notes that complaints about pet shops to the Los Angeles SPCA are on the rise. Between Sept. 1, 1988, and Aug. 31, 1989, the SPCA received 150 complaints, a 10% increase over the previous fiscal year. The Los Angeles County Animal Control Department receives about 12 pet-store complaints a week at its six shelters. The most frequent calls concern poor pet-store sanitation and the display and sale of sick or malnourished animals.

During the holiday buying season, when pet stores double or triple the number of animals they normally sell, the problems escalate. “Christmas is a prime time for selling kittens and puppies,” Reed says, “so they (stores) will get in larger shipments, knowing the turnover is high, and that will generate a lot of complaints.”

Retailers’ rising demand for cheap purebred dogs has led to much of the problem, says Robert Baker, chief investigator for the Humane Society of the United States, based in Washington. He says most puppies sold in California pet stores come from so-called puppy mills, mass-breeding farms concentrated in the Midwest, where dogs are bred, inbred and over-bred under crowded, squalid conditions. The puppies, some removed from their mothers as early as 6 weeks after birth, when their immune systems are undeveloped, are trucked or air-freighted into Southern California, where they’re sold at markups as high as 500%.

“The animals are under a lot of stress; they get shipped (long distances), and if they get one sick one in the batch, it’s spread among the rest of them,” says the LAVMA’s Porter.

PET-STORE profits depend on spur-of-the-moment decisions, especially around the holidays. Often a pet problem starts as “an impulse-buying problem,” says Dr. Mike Buffum, a past president of the LAVMA. “That’s the kind of buying that shouldn’t be done by any consumer. You get in there, see one of these guys, and it’s hard to say no sometimes.”

Channelle Lea of Sherman Oaks was walking by the Petland store in the Westside Pavilion last summer when she spotted a tiny Maltese puppy and had to buy it. “It was,” she explains, “a love-at-first-sight situation.”

Two weeks later, the 2 1/2-pound puppy, named Bree, started bumping into walls. Her veterinarian told Lea and her boyfriend, clothier Rick Pallack, that the dog was hydrocephalic (commonly called water on the brain), a usually fatal hereditary condition frequently caused by inbreeding.

Pallack says when the couple called to tell the pet store, “they very politely said we could have it put to sleep and they’d give us another dog. We didn’t take them up on the offer.”

Instead, they spent $2,000 on brain surgery for the puppy. Although Bree survived the surgery, she came down with pneumonia and died suddenly about a week later. “The money meant nothing. I would have spent $5,000 on the puppy,” says Lea, clearly still distraught. She is also frustrated by what she feels is a lack of regulation of out-of-state breeders and pet stores’ lack of accountability in general. “There’s no legislation. No one is policing this,” says Lea, who refuses to pay her $400 credit-card bill for the dog. “If I sold faulty cars or poisonous foods, I’d be put out of business. What’s the difference?”

Short of filing a criminal complaint or taking the case to small-claims court, consumers have little recourse when they get a sick pet. Pet stores are not required to offer warranties for “damaged goods,” although most do. These range from a two-week guarantee of sound health, which could include a full refund, exchange or partial payment of vet bills, to a stipulation that the seller will replace an animal only if it has specific diseases.

If they can’t get satisfaction from a store, consumers often don’t know where to turn, says Kurt Latham, a West Coast field investigator with the SPCA. “California is an innovative leader in consumer legislation, but we don’t deal with the pet-store industry.” Latham, for one, suggests that consumers report complaints to the SPCA or local animal-control department.

In California, regulation of pet stores comes mainly under a section of the state penal code that requires shops to provide sanitary facilities, proper heating and ventilation, adequate nutrition and humane treatment and to take “reasonable care” not to sell sick or injured pets. Violations are misdemeanors punishable by fines of up to $1,000 and 90 days in county jail. Pet stores also must be licensed by local municipalities and abide by health standards and business codes.

If a pattern of abuse is established, district attorneys or city attorneys may cite the owners of a store for specific violations and give them a deadline to clean up their acts. If they don’t, criminal charges may be filed. The SPCA’s Cori Whetstone, who has investigated 15 criminal cases against pet shops since 1986, says: “With most pet shops we investigate, we’re not going in there to arrest the owner or to impose fines. We go in there to educate them and to show them what it is they are doing wrong. Most of the criminal cases are filed after we’ve visited the store several times and they still won’t comply.”

That was the case with Richard A. Rosenthal, then owner of the Docktor Pet Center franchise in Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, who last year was ordered to sell his business, pay nearly $13,000 in fines and serve three years’ probation for 11 misdemeanor violations of state animal-care laws. That case came to the attention of humane officers when they received a complaint that the store had a dead rabbit in a display window.

The largest pending case in the Los Angeles area involves 14 criminal counts against the owner and former manager of Bob’s Pet World in Torrance. Bob’s is charged with selling sick animals, failing to provide proper food and shelter and failing to seek prompt veterinary care for ill puppies. Whetstone, an investigator on the case, says the store allegedly kept numerous sick puppies with highly contagious illnesses under “abysmal” sanitary conditions. Store owner Robert Cooper and former manager Joni McWilliams pleaded not guilty to the charges in February; the case is in the pretrial phase.

Some observers suggest that pet stores should be subject to systematic review by a governmental agency. “I don’t know that anyone really does regulate pet stores,” says Sal Spinosa, supervising deputy district attorney of Sacramento County’s Consumer and Environmental Protection Division, which has handled several cruelty cases against pet stores. “Somebody should take on the responsibility of doing regular inspections of pet shops.”

The California Veterinary Medical Assn., the nation’s largest state vet association, and other groups want tougher regulation. Recently, pet-store complaints have led to attempts to enact new laws in California (see story, Page 38), New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Florida, but the bills have met resistance from the strong pet-industry lobby.

WHEN THE SPCA investigated Bob’s Pet World, one of the customers it contacted was Cheryl Hooper of Los Angeles, a 27-year-old student at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Last year, Hooper bought a female Pomeranian puppy from Bob’s for $528 and gave it to her sister, Donna Morgan, 23, as a birthday present. Hooper remembers the dog “making sounds like something was caught in her throat” in the store, but didn’t worry about it.

That night, the puppy, named Chee-Chee, continued to cough and choke. Over the next few days, Chee-Chee stopped eating and drinking and began to spend her days under the bed. When Hooper and Morgan took the dog to the vet recommended by the store, he told them Chee-Chee was just “nervous.”

When the puppy broke out in red hives, the sisters took her to their own vet, who said the dog was very sick and advised them to return it. The salesgirl at Bob’s told them to leave Chee-Chee there a few days for care and observation. When Hooper and Morgan went to pick her up five days later, Chee-Chee appeared to be even sicker, with runny eyes, red spots on her stomach and a bad cough. On the way home, the puppy began coughing so loudly the alarmed sisters turned around and returned to the store.

Hooper asked for a refund, but she was told it was against store policy--they could have another puppy in exchange. Hooper gave in, even though this second Pomeranian puppy also had a bad cough. Happily, this time the sisters’ vet was able to cure the problem and the dog, which they named Mousey, is a healthy pup.

Until Whetstone contacted her as part of the investigation, Hooper wasn’t aware that she could have reported the incident to the SPCA. “They sold me a dog that was very sick,” the still-angry Hooper says. “I paid more money for treatment, and then the second dog was sick and needed treatment. Had they reimbursed me (the first time), I would have preferred to go somewhere else to buy a (new) dog.”

Veterinarians point out that many pet-shop problems are inherent in businesses dealing with numbers of young animals, including shelters. “The difficulty is that it’s (the same as) what you go through with kids going to school,” explains Dr. Richard Gebhart, a West Los Angeles veterinarian for the past 22 years. “They’re congregated in one area, and if they’re not vaccinated and one kid has measles, you could have a measles epidemic.”

Not only are baby animals vulnerable to disease to begin with, but puppy-mill puppies often start out sick because of the conditions in which they are raised, according to the Humane Society’s Robert Baker, who has inspected more than 400 puppy mills.

Baker describes the typical puppy-mill owner as a farmer breeding dogs part time for profit. This farmer may have 40 female dogs that are bred from the time of their first heat until they can no longer reproduce. “I’ve seen dogs housed in junked trucks, old refrigerators, washing machines,” he says. “The cages are encrusted with fecal material, then these dogs are sick from the lack of sanitation. But they never see a vet because it would raise the cost of the dog too much.”

Some veterinarians argue that it would be better for the animals if they were shipped at an older age, but pet shops protest that reform. “It’s the nature of the business,” says Gebhart. “Young dogs sell better than old dogs.”

Dog maladies can range from treatable “nuisance” diseases--tracheobronchitis (kennel cough), ear mites and some skin problems--to more serious ailments--intestinal parasites, mange and parvovirus, which is highly contagious and often fatal in puppies. In a 1987 study by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, researchers examined 143 puppies from 14 Atlanta-area pet stores and found that 52% had at least one parasite. A Kansas state Department of Animal Health study conducted at one pet store in the first two months of 1989 examined 60 puppies just arrived from Kansas breeders or brokers and found that 15 were ill and another 12 suffered from congenital defects.

Although most pet shops do vaccinate initially, puppies must receive a full series of shots to produce the immunity they need. But even this does not ensure that the stores won’t sell a sick pet. Dr. Karen Heard, a San Fernando Valley veterinarian who works closely with the Petland stores in Topanga Plaza and Northridge Plaza, examines all puppies within two days of their arrival but concedes that she may not be able to spot a disease in its undetectable incubation stage.

As Gebhart says, “They may look healthy when they come in, but five days later, they could have distemper.”

THE SITUATIONis thornier when it comes to genetic deficiencies, such as hip dysplasia, heart disease or liver problems, which may not show up for months or even years.

On their honeymoon a year ago, for example, Long Beach newlyweds Lori Cross and John Ribisi drove up to Capitola, a small town near Carmel, with their Old English sheep dog puppy, Chop. The couple had bought the 3-month-old puppy for $600 as a pre-wedding gift to each other during the summer of 1988. Four months later, the couple noticed that Chop had started to limp. Halfway through their honeymoon, the puppy’s condition worsened. Suspecting he might have injured himself, the young couple took the shaggy dog to a local vet, who had bad news.

“They’d X-rayed Chop and told us it was one of the most severe cases of hip dysplasia he’d ever seen,” recalls Cross, 27, a public relations executive. “He said we would need to put the dog to sleep within six months, because he’d be in so much pain.”

In the vet’s opinion, he told the couple, the crippling, degenerative hip disease was almost certainly due to “negligent over-breeding.” Later, they learned Chop had come from a breeder in Kansas, which pet experts say is a strong indication that he may have been a puppy-mill dog.

Armed with that information, Cross and Ribisi marched back to the Petland store in Arcadia’s Santa Anita Mall, where they were told they could replace their dog. “We said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ ” recalls Cross. Instead, they took their puppy to an orthopedic surgeon. One year, $3,000 and two surgeries later, Chop is almost fully recovered, although these days he chases after the mailman on a prosthetic hip.

Although Petland refused to pay for the operations, the couple sent the corporate headquarters Chop’s X-rays and received a check for $1,000--the cost of the dog, plus the initial $400 in vet’s fees. Linda Heuring, vice president of marketing for Petland Inc., which has 164 stores in the United States, says the corporation examines each complaint and decides what is best for the customer. “No one likes to see an animal that has a problem,” Heuring says, referring to Chop. “We wanted to help (Cross) out.”

Heuring says the company tries to take “every precaution” to screen its suppliers. Breeders have to apply to Petland Inc. to become a supplier and then are subject to inspection by Petland officials. She says the company would have notified Chop’s breeder about his dysplasia and would “more than likely” drop the breeder from the company’s approved list if it received more than one complaint.

Cross and Ribisi made out much better than many consumers with similar problems who have not received remuneration because they refused to return their sick pet. Still, Cross says, next time she wants a dog she’ll buy from a private breeder.

Critics say pet stores frequently are unaware of the kennel or breeding history behind the dogs they sell. “The dogs chosen for breeding are the cheapest dogs available,” maintains the Humane Society’s Baker. “They inbreed, because it’s cheaper, and end up with genetic defects.”

Many pet stores promise to replace a dog with any congenital or hereditary condition within the first year. By then, however, the owner has bonded with the dog and chooses instead to pay the vet bills and take the loss.

“It’s a double blow to the consumer,” says Martin Blake, a San Francisco attorney who is seeking to bring a class-action lawsuit against Docktor Pet Centers, the largest pet-store chain in the country with 270 stores, 16 of them in Southern California. Blake says the suit, on behalf of purchasers of sick puppies from Docktor stores in the past four years, will attempt to fix the parent company with liability for the alleged bad practices of its franchisees, which he claims also include selling dogs misrepresented as purebred. Hall R. Marston, a Santa Monica attorney representing Docktor in the case, says the company denies the allegations in the suit, now pending in Sacramento Superior Court. Docktor also contends that the suit should not be pursued as a class action.

Veterinarians say that although genetic defects can always show up in an animal, careful breeding can minimize that possibility. Norma Shipman, for example, has been breeding champion golden retrievers--a breed prone to hip dysplasia--for 25 years. She says she breeds only “clear” dogs--dogs whose hips have been X-rayed and certified dysplasia-free by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll come up with a clear dog,” says Shipman, “but you won’t have the degree of dysplasia you would from breeding a dysplastic dog to a clear one.”

But most vets believe that unresearched impulse buying is at the root of unsatisfactory pet purchases. If someone can’t resist a puppy in a pet-shop window, vets recommend at least asking what guarantee the shop offers on its animals, who the dog’s parents were (purebreds should have American Kennel Club registration papers) and where the dog originated. They advise looking for dogs with clear eyes and shiny coats and suggest visiting local animal shelters--even for purebreds--where pets come with shots and are already spayed or neutered.

“That puppy will be a member of the family for the next 10 to 15 years,” says the Humane Society’s Baker. “Yet most people spend less time picking out their puppy than they do buying a washer or dryer.”