REMINDER: Animal Planet TONIGHT at 10 PM, Animal Cops Philadelphia
Animal Planet documents Cochranville kennel raid
'Puppy Mills: Exposed' premiers tonight
Intelligencer Journal
April 27, 2009
By STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
You would expect a program with a name like "Puppy Mills: Exposed" to be full of gruesome sights, and it is.
But perhaps the most dismaying moment in it is, at first glance, benign and trauma-free: It shows a chocolate Labrador retriever walking in a circle.
Only when you realize that the animal, which was rescued from a wretched breeding mill in Pennsylvania, is doing nothing but walking in a circle does the implication sink in. The dog was caged for so long, that that's all it knows how to do.
"Puppy Mills," an episode of "Animal Cops: Philadelphia" having its premiere at 10 tonight on Animal Planet, spends much of its time detailing a raid last summer at Limestone Kennel in Cochranville, Chester County, where the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals found almost 90 dogs living in conditions that more than justify the "viewer discretion" warning at the beginning of the program.
Kennel owner John Blank, 54, offered free breeder dogs in a Lancaster newspaper ad and unknowingly gave nine dogs to members of Main Line Animal Rescue. Based on the dogs' ailing condition, MLAR tipped off the PSPCA, which sent an undercover agent to the kennel.
Blank illegally sold the agent a sickly 3-week-old puppy that died from dehydration a short time later. Pennsylvania law prohibits puppies younger than 7 weeks from being sold.
Within days, PSPCA raided Blank's kennel — with the Animal Planet film crew in tow. They seized dogs with eyes missing because of untreated disease, severed ears, abscesses, skin conditions and splayed feet from years of standing in wire-floored cages.
Within a matter of days, the state Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement revoked Blank's license to operate Limestone Kennel, a move Blank didn't contest.
Blank was charged with three misdemeanor counts and 23 summary charges of animal cruelty for the condition of his dogs.
As part of a plea agreement, Blank surrendered 66 dogs to PSPCA. He pleaded guilty to eight summary counts of animal cruelty, two summary counts of failing to maintain a sanitary and humane kennel and one summary count of harassment.
He was fined $576, placed on 2 years' probation and forbidden from ever again operating a kennel.
Blank was permitted to keep two pet dogs. He also agreed to unannounced inspections by bureau wardens and officers from Chester County Adult Probation.
Operations such as Blank's exist to churn out puppies that can be sold to brokers, who then pass them along to pet stores and other outlets. They are a long way from a Norman Rockwell world where happy dogs romp in the yard and give birth once a lifetime.
Instead the mills view dogs merely as "puppy-producing machines," as Bob Baker, an investigator for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, puts it.
"They're just bred incessantly in horrendous conditions," he said bluntly. "And as soon as they don't come into heat regularly, they take them out and shoot them."
The program acknowledges but doesn't explore in depth the great contradiction in all this: While puppy mills are turning out dogs at an assembly-line pace, animal shelters are swamped and can't give their dogs away.
