Puppy Mill Brokers
Puppy Mill Brokers buy puppies from puppy mills to transport and sell to retail pet shops across the country. Puppies are kept in small cages in cramped conditions in the backs of trucks and vans and forced to travel long distances with no stops for wellness checks in between. Brokers often transport puppies from different mills in one trip, increasing the likelihood for healthy puppies to acquire communicable diseases from infected puppies originating from different puppy mills. Many puppies get sick, acquire physical injuries, and die during and after transport. This fact sheet from the Humane Society of the United States provides critical information on how integral brokers are to the puppy industry. Brokers are responsible for the suffering and death of dogs, just like mills and retail pet shops.
Brokers That Supply To Massachusetts Pet Stores
All Massachusetts Pet Stores use brokers. Often, Certificates of Veterinary Inspection only show the broker, either because the broker breeds some dogs on site, or the puppy mill breeder is not identified for some reason. Let’s take a look at the massive commercial brokers Massachusetts pet stores use.
Tiffanie Kurz/Tiffanie’s LLC
Tiffanie Kurz (Tiffanie’s LLC) has been one of Park Avenue Birds and Pet Supply’s and The Puppy Place’s biggest puppy suppliers.
Missouri state inspectors found 35 puppies died during a six month period in 2018. At least 13 puppies died from parvovirus.
While state inspectors documented these disturbing incidents, USDA inspectors found no violations, an example of the uselessness of USDA licensure and the complete failure to enforce animal welfare standards.
More detail on these puppy deaths and the callousness and cruelty of her operation can be found on The Humane Society’s 2019 Horrible Hundred list on page 27:
https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/2019_Horrible-Hundred_0.pdf
Menning Enterprises
Menning Enterprises is one of Pet Express’s biggest puppy suppliers. They have hundreds and hundreds of adult dogs and puppies kept in one facility.
As the below article shows, Menning Enterprises deals with Amish puppy mills, which are notorious for keeping dogs in squalid, unsafe conditions and treating them like livestock. The article discusses how Menning Enterprises sold 170 adult breeding dogs to Amish breeders so they could create space to open a gun store:
https://www.dglobe.com/business/4281055-new-gun-store-opens-edgerton
Fulton Enterprises
Fulton Enterprises is one of The Puppy Place’s biggest puppy suppliers. They have a history of transporting puppies under the minimum age requirements and keeping puppies in cages with inadequate space for them to move around comfortably.
Puppies are transported cross country in the backs of semi-trailer trucks from their facility in Minnesota. This is an example of how retail pet shops are part of a large scale network of the mass production and national transit of puppies.
For pet shops, it’s not about “local breeders”, personal relationships, and the quality of breeding facilities and how they care for their dogs. It’s about quantity and profit at the expense of the well being of dogs.
Pinnacle Pet/Puppy Travelers
Pinnacle Pet/Puppy Travelers is a combination broker/transporter in Neosho, Missouri. They are under the legal business name Sobrad, LLC, and are associated with a number of different names, including Bateman Diversified and Northeast Transit, listed at the same location. They provide puppies for The Puppy Place, Pet Express, and Fish Bowl Aquarium & Pet Mart.
2015: Cited by USDA for an incident involving puppies overheating on a transport vehicle. 9 puppies died.
2018: 24 puppies were seized from a Puppy Travelers transport van outside a Petland store in Florida. Puppies were found with “urine, feces, and no water” in their cages. Many were sick.
For more detail, see Page 37 of the Human Society’s 2018 Horrible Hundred List here:
https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/2018-horrible-hundred.pdf
This Newsday article makes it clear that the transporting of sick puppies continued to be a problem through 2019.
https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/sick-puppies-seized-nassau-county-1.39655088
Below, you’ll see three inspection reports, one from the 2015 incident mentioned above, and two reports seemingly from the same inspection on 2/27/18, yet the one currently on the site does not show a violation, while the other one obtained from the Humane Society shows a direct violation. It appears the violation was erased.