You know how pet thieves operate, don't you? Prowling your neighborhood while you're asleep or away, Beavis and Butt-Head look-alikes scoop up every loose dog and cat they can find, cut the tethers of all the dogs left tied, and stuff the animals into cages in the back of a nondescript panel van. Then they head down the road to the nearest purveyor of animals to biomedical research labs - a Class B dealer - where they sell the animals surreptitiously for the price of the next day's crack cocaine high.
You're half right. Sixty-six percent of the pet thieves who have been identified by legal authorities in recent years fit the Beavis and Butt-Head stereotype, using the grab-and-run modus operandi. But the Beavis and Butt-Head look-alikes account for only 20% of the total thefts, according to case files kept by ANIMAL PEOPLE. Further, since the Animal Welfare Act was tightened in 1990 to crack down on pet theft, not even one grab-and-run theft has been linked to laboratory animal supply. Paperwork requirements mandating the identification of the source of each and every animal have made theft for laboratory supply a job for professionals - and the professionals favor fraud. For one thing, it's less dangerous. There's no risk of incurring a breaking-and-entering rap, or getting shot by a frightened homeowner who wakes up at an inopportune time. For another, it's far more efficient. Why cruise the streets for hours, possibly attracting police notice, when one can simply answer free-to-good-home ads for puppy and kitten giveaways?
Finally, the free-to-good-home ad respondent can usually bet the people who surrender puppies and kittens aren't going to try to get them back. Rewards won't be posted. Complaints won't be filed. And the animal dealer can always claim the person who surrendered the animals was aware of their destination. Regulatory officials pay so little attention to the sources of animals purportedly obtained through free-to-good-home ads--because they are so plentiful - that when the Progressive Animal Welfare Society in 1993 tried to identify the 106 individuals who supposedly provided animals to Washington Class B dealer David Knight, the investigators found only 19 listed in state telephone directories. The other 87 may have been fictitious persons.
Today's pet thief is a Schemer who comes on like Mr. Rogers or Shari Lewis. He or she is polite, drives an eminently respectable-looking late model car, is gentle while anyone is looking, is well-dressed, is friendly, and is forthcoming with answers to any and all questions. The stories he or she tells and the references he or she supplies may be entirely fictitious, but they are well-rehearsed and credible. The thieves probably wouldn't pass scrutiny at an animal shelter - and usually don't try, partly because animal shelters usually charge an adoption fee, partly because of the risk of running afoul of post-adoption follow-up procedures, for instance to insure compliance with neutering requirements. However, people casually giving away puppies and kittens usually don't do any follow-up: they may ask where the animals are going, but they really don't care. While fraud is the modus operandi of only 31% of the identified pet thieves, they account for 80% of the actual thefts. In fact, a mere 11 individuals committed 478 of the 599 pet thefts in recent years where both the origin and fate of the animal is known. Of those cases, 10 out of the 11 perpetrators answered free-to-good-home ads. The eleventh, racing greyhound trafficker Greg Ludlow, has been nabbed twice in five years for posing as a trainer while in fact selling the dogs he contracts to train to research laboratories.
Of the 10 big-time perpetrators who answered free-to-good-home ads, nine were professionals, who earned their livings selling animals to biomedical research. The tenth, Mitchell Munoz of Atlanta, Georgia, was convicted in 1990 of the serial torture-murders of 77 cats, and was sentenced to serve five years in prison with ten more years suspended. (At the time of his sentencing, the prosecutor told media Munoz would probably be released on parole after only two years, but was happy to get him even that much time, as prison terms for cruelty were then virtually unheard of - and are only slightly more common now.)
The nine professional pet thieves stole at least 368 animals among them. Three of the thieves cannot be named, having cut various deals to escape prosecution. The other six include Barbara Ruggiero, Frederick Spero, and Ralf Jacobsen, who were convicted in 1991 of taking at least 106 dogs and cats through answering free-to-good-home ads in the Los Angeles area, and Brenda Linville, David Stephens, and his wife Tracy Stephens, convicted in 1992 of taking at least 101 dogs and cats through answering free-to-good-home ads in Oregon and Washington. Both cases were cracked by activists who traced responses to free-to-good-home ads. Chris DeRose and Last Chance for Animals put away Ruggiero, Spero, and Jacobsen, while Dana Entler and Bobbi Michaels of Committed to Animal Protection, Education, and Rescue nailed Linville and the Stephenses.
The latter operation was particularly sophisticated, as Linville provided false statements of animal origin and provided herself and cohorts with false identities using data she gleaned on strangers while working as a janitor for the Oregon Motor Vehicles Division - which gave her the chance to surreptitiously copy motor vehicle registration forms. The operation also had a pedigree dating back decades, as David Stephens formerly worked for the notorious dealer Joseph Hickey. Hickey took over the family laboratory animal supply business in 1988, after his father James drew a 25-year suspension of his Class B dealer's license and a fine of $40,000 for 71 violations of the Animal Welfare Act, including involvement in alleged pet theft. Joseph Hickey was fined $10,000 in 1991 and drew a one-year license suspension for a string of similar violations. The USDA blocked his attempt to transfer the business to his wife, Shannon Hansen.
Laboratory use accounts for 71% of stolen animals, according to the ANIMAL PEOPLE records. Individual acts of sadism and abuse accounts for 18%. Training dogs to fight accounts for an apparently fast-growing 8%, up from under one percent just three years ago. "Where I used to live," one Missouri informant told ANIMAL PEOPLE, "pit bull fanciers were quite open about collecting giveaway animals for bait." Because dog fighting is illegal almost everywhere, dogfighters are even more leery than Class B dealers of doing anything that might attract the notice of police. Grab-and-run thefts of yard dogs for use in fight training isn't unheard of, but the free-to-good-home scam is far more attractive. Grab-and-run, at this point, appears to be the primary modus operandi only of spur-of-the-moment abusers - like Beavis and Butt-Head, whose most notorious exploit was detonating a firecracker in the rectum of a stolen cat. Look out for those guys. But be just as wary of anyone who seems unusually interested, week after week, in the free-to-good-home ads posted on your local supermarket bulletin board. If you see such a person, ask questions. Maybe that person is a rescuer, like yourself, who is trying to keep those giveaway puppies and kittens out of the hands of the dealers and sadists. More than once, activists have investigated people and organizations who solicited receipt of giveaway puppies and kittens, only to find a rescue group operating under cover. On the other hand, such individuals have in the memorable cases above turned out to be the real bad guys. And one thing every pet theft investigator agrees upon, including the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service team that prosecutes the federal cases, is that for every one caught and put out of business, there are many more still operating. They can't be shut down until someone collects the evidence that they are indeed collecting animals under fraudulent pretense.
Additional Comment
Are there any practical steps you can suggest for people to identify fraudulent responders to their ads?
Technically, people doing free-to-good-home giveaways could use screening procedures similar to those of a good animal shelter: requiring references, checking them before turning the animal over. But in practice, most people doing free-to-good-home giveaways don't care enough about animals in the first place to have had their pets neutered, so in practice the likelihood of increasing owner awareness to prevent free-to-good-home fraud is nil. The only real ways to end free-to-good-home fraud are to:
- Promote neutering until there are no surplus dog and cat births,
- Convince the biomedical community to stop using random source animals (significant headway is being made here in that many institutions have already ceased and some of the leading umbrella groups in the field are now talking about adopting no-random-source-animals as policy; I've been included in some of the discussion and will report on the outcome as soon as there's something to report),
- Crack down on dog fighting, and
- Respond promptly to other sadism.
Additional Information:
Animal Testing
Animal Testing: Know What It Entails
