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Store vets fail pets
By Thomas Caywood
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Second of two parts.
State regulators bared their fangs yesterday at renegade pet shop vets accused of rubber-stamping the sale of ailing animals to unsuspecting dog lovers.
``It is not acceptable to
eyeball a pen full of pet store animals and just approve them all for sale,'' said Anne L. Collins, director of the state Division of Professional Licensure, which regulates veterinarians. ``The board wants to send
a real strong message to vets that there are no second-class pets.''
The division yesterday ordered a pair of vets associated with two of the pet shop chains spotlighted in Monday's Herald to answer
allegations they ``certified animals for sale despite failing to conduct appropriate examinations and testing of said animals.''
The Herald reported that the chains - Woof & Co. and the mall-based Pet
Club-Debby's Petland stores - have racked up scores of formal consumer complaints about sick dogs and violations of animal health regulations. Massachusetts law requires a veterinarian to vouch for the health of pet
store dogs before the animal can be offered for public sale.
Nonetheless, a flood of complaints about sick pet shop dogs has poured into the state for years.
The problem has gotten so bad that the
state Board of Registration in Veterinary Medicine and the Department of Agricultural Resources, which regulates pet stores, have taken the unusual step of drafting a five-page policy statement reminding pet shop
vets of their medical responsibilities.
``It has become increasingly apparent that there is a misunderstanding with regard to the standard of care that is required to be given to animals and their consumer
owners in the pet shop industry,'' begins the statement, to be issued today to all state vets.
A Herald review of thousands of pages of documents and interviews with former pet shop staffers revealed
numerous allegations of pet store vets allowing sick dogs to be sold to the public, prescribing medications for animals they hadn't examined and instructing sales clerks to administer drugs.
``The vet was
giving us the medication and letting us medicate the dogs, but we weren't trained,'' said Sara Purcell, 19, who worked at the Woof & Co. store in Braintree for more than a year.
The chain was cited by
inspectors last fall for selling nearly a dozen dogs in a month without required health checks.
The Board of Registration's ``order to show cause'' alleges Dr. Mark Colin Jawitz spent ``only 45 minutes
examining up to 50 dogs'' at Woof & Co.'s Saugus location. Reached yesterday at the Stoneham Animal Hospital, Jawitz said he no longer worked for Woof & Co. He said he could not comment on the board's
half-dozen allegations until he had studied them further.
Woof executive Judith Bethelmy said her company has never sold dogs ``with the knowledge that they have a disease.''
A second show cause
order targets Dr. Mark Verbin, the staff veterinarian for the Pet Club and Debby's Petland chains. The order alleges several specific violations and adds that such conduct ``constitutes deceit and gross
misconduct.''
``I have never, ever signed off on a dog that I haven't held in my hands. I have never signed off on a dog that I haven't examined,'' Verbin said by phone yesterday.
On the contrary, he
said, Debby's and Pet Club are models of modern veterinary care with the latest technology and equipment at hand.
He said his lawyer had received the show cause order, but he hadn't read it himself until the
Herald faxed him a copy. Verbin wouldn't say how many dogs are under his care or how much time he typically spends examining each of the hundreds of animals owned at any one time by the Debby's and Pet Club stores.
In July 2003, a Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals inspector noted in a report that the staff vet for Debby's, which was Verbin at the time, was allowing sick pups to
automatically go back up for sale after a few days in isolation.
``The vet did not physically look at the dog before it was up for sale again. Employees called the vet while I was in the store, and he
diagnosed 125 mg of chlorophenicol over the phone also without physically looking at the dog again,'' the inspector wrote.
The man who runs Debby's and Pet Club, Donald C. Tewksbury, dismissed as ``totally
unfounded'' allegations that his company sells ailing animals.
Yet state Bureau of Animal Health inspection reports are full of examples of puppies from his chain, and from other problem pet stores, falling
seriously ill days, sometimes hours, after the pet store veterinarian signed off on the health certificates.
Dianne Purcell of Hanover couldn't resist a $1,500 Pekinese pup at the Woof & Co. store where
her daughter Sara worked.
``We had her 24 hours and she had kennel cough and pneumonia. She spent three days in ICU. It was horrible,'' she said. ``When I brought her to the vet that night I was in tears.''
State rules allow consumers to return sick dogs, but many don't out of a sense of attachment or for fear the pet store will put the puppy to sleep to avoid expensive medical care.
Leading vets have
long been troubled by the lax standards of care reported in pet stores.
``There is no excuse for condoning poor care or sick dogs,'' said Gary Patronek, a professor at Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine,
who has followed the problem of puppy mills for 20 years.
And Susan Weinstein, director of the Massachusetts Veterinary Medical Association, said, ``We've had ongoing concerns about the quality of veterinary
practice in the pet store environment.'' Weinstein said her association planned to focus on keeping pet store vets in line.
``There needs to be a constant reminder that the vet is in charge of the pets'
health,'' she said. ``The manager of a pet store is not a vet.''
Animal activist Leigh Grady of Sterling advises owners of sick pet store dogs to complain to Collins' Division of Professional Licensure.
``We need to start holding these vets responsible for signing off on these animals,'' Grady said. ``Find out who the vet was who signed off on the health certificate and make a complaint.''
Dr. Lisa
Moses, who is in charge of emergency medicine at Angell Memorial Medical Center in Boston, said she ``regularly'' treats ailing pet shop puppies that were sold with clean bills of health from store vets. She said
the animals may appear healthy when sold but are in fact incubating diseases they picked up when they arrived at the pet store.
Pets from out-of-state puppy mills, she said, are especially susceptible to
contagious diseases that may be present in other dogs or in unsanitary facilities.
``It's like putting a newborn infant in a playground - they do not have the same defenses as older animals,'' she said.
``Stores must do more to keep this from happening.''
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=58730
Pet shop horror: Outrage as pooch peddlers foist sick animals on public
By Thomas Caywood
Monday, December 13, 2004
Profit-hungry puppy peddlers are taking advantage of lax state oversight to warehouse animals in inhumane conditions and foist sick dogs on unsuspecting families.
A Herald review of thousands of documents and
interviews with former pet store workers and anguished customers exposed shocking cases of pooches caged in filth, treated superficially by store veterinarians and sold so ill they perished in their new owners'
arms.
``I've had dogs die in my lap so many times,'' said former pet store staffer Paul Brennan of Plymouth. ``We just put them in the freezer. It was disgusting.
Brennan, 24, is one of hundreds of people over the past three years who complained to state officials about problem pet stores. Their concerns rarely led to fines or license suspensions.
Instead, outfits
such as the mall-based Debby's Petland chain - which logged 60 formal customer complaints and nearly 90 violations of state animal health rules in three years - were allowed to continue trafficking in the ailing
animals. Many pups fetch between $1,000 and $1,500 and are in high demand this time of year.
The Herald investigation covered more than 80 pet shops in Eastern Massachusetts, the vast majority of which had
few formal complaints or violations.
`It died in my arms'
Brennan said he saw a number of dogs die during the four years he worked on and off at the Independence Mall Debby's in Kingston. One
stands out - a bulldog pup with an obstructed bowel whose stomach swelled grotesquely.
``I watched it literally turn into a basketball where its back or front legs wouldn't touch the ground. It died in my
arms,'' he said.
Brennan also alleges Debby's violated state rules requiring that newly arrived dogs be quarantined for 48 hours to ensure they're healthy enough for sale. He quit in 2002 and blew the
whistle on ``deplorable conditions'' in a lengthy letter to state regulators.
But the Bureau of Animal Health, which is tasked with inspecting pet stores, never contacted him, he said.
That's no
surprise to animal activists such as Leigh Grady of Sterling, who runs a shelter and the ``Boycott Pet Stores'' campaign.
``It's a total joke. They don't do anything,'' Grady said of the BAH.
Sara
Purcell, 19, a former saleswoman at the Woof & Co. pet store in Braintree's South Shore Plaza, said the state checks often had a perfunctory feel to them.
``I think they overlooked a lot of things,'' she said.
Asked if the bureau comes down hard enough on violators, MSPCA Vice President for Animal Protection Carter Luke said, ``We don't believe that they do.''
The BAH, an arm of the state Department of Agricultural Resources, fields just three inspectors to monitor 173 licensed pet stores in Massachusetts.
``We feel we're doing everything we can under the
law,'' Agricultural Resources Commissioner Douglas Gillespie said. ``You have to be able to document a strong case before you can shut down a business in the commonwealth.''
The department suspended two pet
shop licenses and issued three small fines in the past year.
Warehousing puppies
Although a dozen or so stores had multiple infractions, a mountain of complaints and violations has accumulated
over the past three years against the Debby's and Pet Club operations - two small chains totaling seven Massachusetts pet shops, all owned by New England Pet Centers Inc.
The company's headquarters in West
Roxbury receives hundreds of puppies weekly from Midwestern breeding centers that activists dub ``puppy mills.'' The headquarters, which houses a vast Pet Club store, and a satellite shop at the Liberty Tree Mall in
Danvers racked up 53 complaints and 77 violations, BAH records show.
In May 2002, Hub animal cops demanded to view the company's packed puppy warehouse on the VFW Parkway. After workers kept them waiting for
15 minutes, the cops reported the pups were sopping wet ``as if they were just hosed down with water.'' Dogs were found stored by threes in cages about the size of a TV set.
A year later, a state inspection
found 144 warehoused Pet Club puppies all suffering from upper respiratory infections at the same time. New England Pet Center officials did not respond to numerous phone calls seeking comment.
A local vet
who has treated sick Pet Club and Debby's puppies, including one that had to be hospitalized for a month with pneumonia, called the warehouse setup a ``major problem.''
``You have a lot of puppies coming in
from all over the country together in this warehouse infecting each other,'' said the vet, who requested anonymity.
As recently as April, an Australian cattle dog from Pet Club got pneumonia within days of
sale, costing its new owners more than $1,500 in vet bills.
Despite scores of similar complaints against Pet Club and Debby's, the operation hasn't faced serious BAH discipline.
``It's almost as if
anybody who makes a complaint, they consider you a lunatic. They support the license holders more than citizens,'' grumbled Brian Dumont of Shirley, who shelled out $3,000 to treat a Chihuahua he bought from a pet
store in Leominster.
Gillespie defended his BAH staff as overworked and hamstrung by outdated regulations, which lawmakers are moving to strengthen. The department hopes to shame scofflaw stores into
cleaning up by posting inspection reports online.
Outbreak at new chain
The relatively new mall chain Woof & Co. has piled up 19 complaints and 27 violations in less than two years at its
stores in the Square One Mall in Saugus and South Shore Plaza in Braintree.
An outbreak of the contagious intestinal parasite giardia at the Braintree store in May prompted town health officials to
intervene. Former staffer Purcell said she often saw sick dogs sold.
``If it wasn't completely obvious they are sick, they'd stay on the sales floor,'' Purcell said. ``They'd be sneezing and coughing with
running noses or diarrhea out on the sales floor. That happened a lot.''
A former manager of the Saugus store, Laurie Reggiannini, said she was fired for pushing reforms and for refusing to move a greviously
ill dog that the store had on retainer from an animal hospital to the vet.
``They don't care about puppies,'' she said of the New Jersey-based chain. ``They care about profit.''
Woof & Co.
Executive Vice President Judith Bethelmy bristled at the criticisms, denying that the chain ever knowingly sold sick puppies. Such allegations are ``totally unfounded,'' she said.
``Any issues we might have
had at one time with the state, we are now in accordance with the state and are enjoying a very good partnership,'' she said.
Missy's Puppyland in Stoughton, a stand-alone store specializing in pricey poodle
mixes, has been cited by inspectors for a whopping 94 violations since June 2002.
In August, a joint inspection by the BAH and MSPCA found a dozen violations. The inspectors reported ``extremely unsanitary''
conditions and noted that two dogs in isolation didn't have enough head room to sit up.
Some dogs had no access to food and water, according to the report, and one boxer pup in the garage was so sick it had
to be taken away for immediate treatment. Store manager Mark Zimmerman denied to inspectors that Missy's was housing more than 50 dogs in an upstairs office and adjacent garage - until their barking revealed the
ruse - according to the report.
In an interview last week, Zimmerman said the boxer pup was fine and was later returned to the store. He dismissed the huge tally of violations as nitpicking.
``They
were looking for anything, whether it was a piece of dust or a hair on a cage. They were picking on us,'' he said, later adding, ``Missy's Puppyland is a very reputable, up-and-up pet store.''
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=58532
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