The Dog Factory: Inside the Sickening World of Puppy Mills. The house on Hilton Lake Road was unremarkable, a brick one- story with an under- watered lawn and a scrimshaw of patchy shrubs. It was flanked by bigger and smarter homes on a two- lane strip in Cabarrus County, 2. Charlotte, North Carolina, but nothing about it suggested to passersby that inconceivable cruelty lived at this address. It wasn't till we opened the side- yard entrance that the horror inside announced itself. A stench of complex poisons pushed out: cat piss and dog shit and mold and bleach commingled into a cloud of raw ammonia that singed the hair in our nostrils. Twenty of us – blue- shirted staffers from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS); several members of their forensic camera crew; the sheriff of Cabarrus County and his deputies; and a contingent of veterinarians from a local animal hospital – tiptoed around the filth underfoot into a house caked in pet fur and waste.

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Damp laundry draped across every flat surface; the floor was a maze of cat crates and garbage. From somewhere in the house, we heard the howling of dogs, but they weren't in the bedrooms or the tumbledown john or the kitchen piled high with dishes. Then we found the door that led to the basement. Down there, dozens of puppies in dust- cloaked cages stood on their hind legs and bawled.

After young Riley is uprooted from her Midwest life and moved to San Francisco, her emotions - Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness - conflict on how best to. The Dog Factory: Inside the Sickening World of Puppy Mills. An investigation into the underworld of America's overcrowded dog farms, the secret shame of the pet industry. Superheroes, swimsuits, and special operatives await you in our Summer Movie Guide. Plan your season and take note of the hotly anticipated indie, foreign, and. Watch An Inconvenient Sequel (2017) Free Online.

There were Yorkies and poodles and Maltese mixes, but their fur was so matted and excrement- mottled it was hard to tell which from which. Bred for profit, most of them would have been sold in pet stores or on websites by their third or fourth month of life.

HSUS staffers had gathered evidence that the breeder, Patricia Yates, was selling puppies on multiple websites without a license, and had a stack of buyer complaints lodged against her. But it took a tip from an anonymous source to alert the Sheriff's office to the scale of Yates's operation. David Taylor, an animal- control cop who helped launch the investigation. Obtaining an arrest warrant was the least of it, though.

When you bust an illegal kennel, you're suddenly swamped with sick dogs, often double what had been reported. It took Taylor a month to coordinate with HSUS – the rare non- profit with the money and equipment to house and treat puppy- mill rescues – before launching the raid on Yates's kennel. Watch footage from inside Patricia Yates' illegal kennel. Back up the stairs, we followed more barking to a porch bricked in by the owner. It was pitch- black inside, and the smell was a hammer. Here were the parent dogs in desperate shape: blinded by cataracts and corneal ulcers; their jaws half- gone or missing entirely after their teeth had rotted away.

Some were so feeble they couldn't stand erect; their paws were urine- scalded and their wrists were deformed from squatting on wire their entire lives. Out the back door and up a dirt trail, the worst was yet to come. A cinder- block kennel, hidden from the street, housed the bulk of this puppy- mill stock: 5. They wept and bayed and spun in crazed circles as we toured the maze of cages.

Some went limp as the rescuers knelt to scoop them. Each was photographed, then carried downhill to the giant rig at the curb. There, teams of vets from the Cabarrus Animal Hospital worked briskly to assess each rescue. Once triaged and tagged, they were loaded into crates on the Humane Society's mammoth truck, an 8. One hundred and five dogs came out of that house, many of them pregnant or in heat. I turned to John Goodwin, the director of the puppy- mills campaign for HSUS, and asked him how many puppies sold in this country – at Petland and Citipups and a thousand other pet stores – come from puppy mills as dire as this one.

Input any ZIP code and you'll see the list of stores that sell pups rather than offer them for adoption. That vastly ups the chances that the dogs are from mills, not from reputable breeders. Another click shows you ghastly shots of the mills those stores buy dogs from. Those pictures weren't taken by animal- rights zealots, but by United States Department of Agriculture agents who inspect breeding kennels. Pet stores usually buy their dogs from federally licensed breeders, meaning kennels with five or more breeding females that breed a lot of pups.

Varsa, a veteran of 5. When told what Yates had said, Varsa pointed to two poodles, both of them desperately underfed. Delicately, she lifted the male from the crate and put him, trembling, in my arms. Buy The Star (2017) Movie Online. He was blind in both eyes and had thumb- size infections where his molars used to be.

They chased off wolves and bears while we slept, caught and retrieved the game we ate, and dined on the garbage we left behind. Over the course of 1. Once inside the door, though, they were in for good, to be loved and spoiled like toddlers. The number of pet dogs in America boomed between 1. Pet- shop commerce boomed in tandem, from practically nothing in the Fifties to nearly $6. Where once you adopted your pup from the neighbors, now there is a Furry Paws down the block with dozens of designer puppies in the window. Of course, in America, we industrialize anything that turns a profit.

Beginning in the 1. Baker, an animal activist for 4. ASPCA and the HSUS – watched the trade evolve from a mom- and- pop sideline into a multinational behemoth. What followed was a 4. HSUS as commercial kennels where profit counts more than the dogs' well- being.

There are, by HSUS's estimate, about 1. America, though the organization concedes that no one knows the real number: It's an industry born and raised in shadows. The USDA only licenses a fraction of all kennels, about 2,5. States also license and inspect kennels, accounting for another 2,5. Kathleen Summers, the director of outreach and research for HSUS's puppy- mills campaign. But if the seller deals directly with the puppy's buyer, either selling face to face, through classified ads or, increasingly, via pop- up websites, there is little or no oversight of their business.

Three years ago, the USDA passed an amendment requiring online sellers to get federally licensed, which would submit them to annual inspections and standard- of- care rules. At the time, the department expected thousands of breeders to step forward and comply with the law; to date, less than 3. When asked about sellers who disregard the law, Tanya Espinosa, a USDA spokeswoman, says, .

All claim to be local, loving and humane. Far too often, they are none of the above. It's the most basic rule in our code of ethics: Never sell a puppy sight unseen. The HSUS estimates that roughly half of the 2 million pups bred in mills are sold in stores these days; the rest are trafficked online. The number of stores that still sell puppies has cratered over the course of the past decade, as groups like HSUS, the ASPCA and CAPS (Companion Animal Protection Society) have conducted stings of high- priced stores across the country and found them packed with sick puppies from Midwest mills. Howard sends investigators out to infiltrate mills, exposes the stores that do business with those breeders, and coordinates with advocates across the country to ban the retail sale of puppies in big cities.

Puppy brokers are wholesalers who buy from breeders, keep a running stock of dozens of breeds, then sell and ship the pups for a hefty markup. The biggest of those brokers, the now- defunct Hunte Corporation, professionalized the trade in the Nineties. They bought up other brokers, made large investments in equipment, trucks and drivers, and moved thousands of dogs a month from their facility in Goodman, Missouri. A day or two later, they'd load 'em on 1. In 2. 00. 3, state inspectors in Missouri cited Hunte for dumping more than 1,0. Missouri law – in its back yard. Not that Missouri is an outlier in the disposal of sick and dead dogs.

In Pennsylvania, two breeders shot 8. Shih Tzus and cocker spaniels rather than provide veterinary care. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA), enacted in 1.