Story by Brooke Elliott via UNC Media Hub
Photos courtesy of Animal Rescue Corps
Business is booming for North Carolina’s pet shops.
Stores across the state are running flash sales on puppies for the holiday season: Friendly Pets in Greensboro offered $200 off in late November, Petland Raleigh offered a 35 percent discount for Black Friday, and The Pet Warehouse in Jacksonville will send five lucky customers away with their choice of a free dog toy before Christmas. Enter one of these stores in December, and you’ll find it packed wall to wall with prospective customers and a wide selection of verified purebred dogs.
Even though a lot of these puppies are sold in small, independent pet stores, they aren’t bred by the pet store owners. In fact, the vast majority of the dogs aren’t from North Carolina at all. At 2 to 8 weeks of age, most of them have traveled upwards of 800 miles from their birthplaces in Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Ohio.
Together, these states — the Midwest, plus a panhandle extending northeast through Pennsylvania — form what researchers at Bailing Out Benji, a nonprofit working to end abusive breeding practices, call the Puppy Mill Belt. It’s the home of almost every large, commercial breeding operation in the country. Organizations like the Humane Society and the Animal Rescue Corps (ARC) work tirelessly to shut these operations down, citing hazardous and overcrowded breeding conditions, major health issues in puppies, and rampant canine abuse to produce dogs for sale.
“I go into these puppy mills, and they’ll have 200, 300, 400, sometimes 500 animals in one building,” said Michael Cunningham, communications director for the ARC. “These are dogs that are 6 years old, 5 years old.”
Cunningham describes situations so grim they’re difficult to picture: dogs held in suspended cages that have never been outside or seen the sun, older dogs drowned in rain barrels, fecal matter piled so deep that a shovel is required to open a building’s door. Most field operations he’s been a part of took place in the Puppy Mill Belt, especially in Missouri; the state has 885 breeding operations, compared to only 29 in North Carolina.
But pet stores that source from the Midwest will note that most of their dogs come from USDA-licensed breeders (and brokers, though these mostly go unmentioned); the dogs are subject to annual inspections by agents and auditors. Petland Raleigh has a section on its website reminding consumers that “There is more oversight of breeders who sell their puppies to pet stores than any other type of breeder, shelter or rescue.”
Customers who don’t look more closely at the specific breeders they patronize might believe pet stores. Many breeding operations used to source pet store dogs, however, have been marked by the Humane Society for poor dog-rearing conditions. One Siberian Husky puppy from a North Carolina pet store, for example, had official papers that openly displayed its origin: a large breeding operation in Oberlin, Kansas. This operation made the Humane Society’s “Horrible Hundred” list in 2021 for hazardous, filthy conditions and 400 dogs’ worth of overcrowding.
Despite the fact that details this alarming can be found by simply looking up the breeders these pet stores use on any search engine, pet stores in North Carolina have no problem selling scores of dogs from these operations. Do pet store owners who sell purebred puppies know about the conditions the dogs come from, or have they just not done their research?
“Oh, no, they absolutely know,” Cunningham said. “Or, you know, it’s willful ignorance. They’re doing what they’ve always done, and it’s working for them, because they’re able to make money doing it.”
Across North Carolina, a purebred puppy from a pet store will cost you upwards of $1,000, and that’s on the cheaper end. That Siberian Husky at Friendly Pets? $2,500. Almost every one of the websites for these pet stores, from The Puppy Place in Jacksonville to Right Puppy in Salisbury, has a link to a financing or lending website next to pictures of available dogs.
The high prices these dogs command shouldn’t be a surprise; there’s a fleet of often-faceless middlemen to pay when a dog is being shipped from the Midwest to North Carolina. These brokers, also licensed by the USDA, connect the dogs bred in the Puppy Mill Belt to the East Coast pet stores that sell them.
Becky Busboom of Dannebrog, Neb., is one of those brokers. She sends dogs to states across the country, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. In some stores, her name replaces the name of the actual breeder on reports of the dog’s origin; according to Bailing Out Benji, most of her dogs actually come from breeders in Iowa, many of whom have laundry lists of past USDA violations.
“We pick them up from the breeders all at the same time at a central meeting place, bring them back here, and hold them for a few days — at least two — then we can sell them and send them back out. We use a truck that delivers all over the U.S.,” Busboom said.
On the day before her phone interview, Busboom sent 55 dogs out on a truck to a location she didn’t specify. She added that the facility in which she keeps the dogs is, in fact, USDA approved — she is, after all, a licensed broker. When asked what the USDA approval process was like for a broker, she mentioned that her dogs are checked by veterinarians in accordance with their regulations; she was less quick to answer when asked who her veterinarian was.
“It’s one person. Or one facility. He’s got more than one vet there… I don’t know if he’d want me telling you [his name],” Busboom said.
Why was that?
She chuckled. “I don’t know.”
Breedlove’s Unique Kennel in Waynesville, Mo. — which breeds and sells small purebred dogs to Friendly Pets in Greensboro — handles more of their own transportation than most operations. Alisa Breedlove said she’s happy to accompany dogs to pet stores herself, though the majority of them go to brokers and their respective transportation companies.
“There’s different options,” Breedlove said. “There’s different ground transportation companies that are around, and we do meetups where I drive and meet the customer directly. I do the nanny service. I fly with the customer or with the puppies and meet them at the airport of their choice. Then depending on the breed, we also offer cargo shipping.”
Cargo shipping means the dogs travel by air to North Carolina, where a pet store representative — or, depending on the location of the airport, another ground transportation company — takes them to the shops where they’ll be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
All of this is done legally, despite the complicated structure of the puppy-selling industry; dogs pass between middleman after middleman until they reach their destinations, and as long as the brokers have paid for and made a passing grade on their most recent USDA inspection, they can move and sell dogs however they like.
The USDA has measures in place, such as licensing and inspections, to prevent abusive breeding operations from being established or continuing to exist. But Cunningham paints a different and more complicated picture, one involving a lot of money and a lot of breeders.
“The USDA is tasked with regulating them [the breeders],” Cunningham said. “They have to buy a license for each and every animal. When you get into commercial breeding, all the dogs have a collar on them with a USDA tag on there, which [breeders] pay for. The breeder is the client of the USDA. So now you know why they’re not shutting them down.”
A media representative for the USDA declined an interview, but provided a technical document about the breeder licensing process.
Daniel Gingerich, an Amish man from Iowa, ran one of the few operations the USDA actually stepped in to shut down. Rehoming the 514 dogs he had across multiple properties fell to volunteers.
“The USDA doesn’t have a part of their company that has any way of housing, caring for or placing those animals,” he said. “So now they’ve got to reach out to nonprofits, like the Humane Society of the United States, ASPCA and Animal Rescue Corps to come in and help them at our expense — to clean up the mess that they’ve all created.”
Cunningham said the system that exists today — in which the USDA has an incentive to keep large commercial breeding operations open — was gradually established. In the 1930s and ’40s, Amish women sold goods like eggs from their backyards for pocket money independent of their husbands; puppies, docile and sought-after, became another popular “good” to sell.
Today, the vast majority of alleged puppy mills are still run by German-American Amish families. Bailing Out Benji found that at least 22 members of the Amish Borntrager (sometimes spelled Bontrager or Borntreger) family have sold to puppy stores in North Carolina, as have 18 of the Yoders, 14 of the Millers, nine of the Schrocks and eight of the Gingeriches.
Marty Swartzentruber is a member of Missouri’s Amish community, and he’s one of the few who are reachable by phone. He’s a longtime dog breeder, as are many other members of his family. In the Midwest and Pennsylvania, there are breeding operations connected to Randy, Esther, Atlas, David, Joe, Mary and Dorcas Swartzentruber. Marty Swartzentruber said he’s leaving the business soon; the obscure, complicated chain of brokers and buyers that lies between breeders and pet stores make costs prohibitive and business complicated for all but the largest dog-breeding operations.
“There’s too many people in between me and the pet store, and there’s too many regulations to mess with if you ain’t making good money on them,” Swartzentruber said.
Despite these regulations, many operations with multiple USDA violations continue to operate in Missouri. The Humane Society listed Missouri as the worst state for unethical breeding in 2024, as its breeders consistently top their Horrible Hundred list of alleged puppy mills.
But there are lawmakers trying to change this — including Rep. Deborah Ross of North Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District. She, alongside Florida’s Rep. Vern Buchanan, introduced a bipartisan bill called the Petfax Act in 2024, and she hopes it will stem the flow of dangerously-bred dogs to stores in her state and others.
In particular, the legislation would require stores to give customers a precise account of the dog’s origin, past issues with the breeder, and issues the dogs from that breeder have experienced or are experiencing — disease is common among puppy-mill dogs. This information would take the form of a “Petfax” report, inspired by “Carfax” reports.
“The retail pet store would have to provide all the same information that the breeder would,” Ross said. “So if the pet store didn’t have that information, they couldn’t sell that puppy or kitty.”
Ross previously worked with animal welfare groups on the PAWS Act, which connected veterans with service dogs, and she communicates with the Humane Society frequently. The Petfax Act would make USDA requirements more stringent and would also bar any breeder with enough violations from holding a license for 10 years.
She said she hopes the legislation will drive America’s puppy mills — and the pet stores that source from them — out of business entirely by closing the “loopholes” in place in the current system. Her response to dog breeders and pet stores concerned about the impacts of stricter regulations was succinct: “Too bad.”
“Everybody wants to know whether or not their pets have been vaccinated, whether or not they’ve been sick or hurt, all those kinds of things,” Ross said. “If [pet stores] were actually honest about the information, most people wouldn’t pay a lot of money for those pets.”
Until stricter federal regulation is adopted, all customers can do is research the dogs they want to buy and — as Cunningham said many times — go to shelters and rescues for animals in need.
“If they’re serious about looking for a specific breed of animal, they can go to a breed-specific rescue or work with a reputable rescue organization near them,” Cunningham said. “Because rescues, we all network together and if we can place a dog, we’re going to place a dog… so there’s all kinds of options out there before having to go purchase from a breeder or to buy from a pet store.”