Get your copy of our weekly print products at any of these convenient locations.

Poster dog for puppy mill reform in town

Judith Davidoff  —  7/01/2008 6:55 am

Shortly after losing her nearly 9-year-old standard poodle to cancer, Jana Kohl decided she wanted her next dog to be small and portable. Like many others, she turned to the Internet in search of a purebred toy poodle.

One especially cute puppy from a breeder in Texas caught her eye. Kohl called the breeder and mailed a deposit. A friend warned her of the horrors of puppy mills, but Kohl admits she only "half-listened."

Still, Kohl, who was already active in the fight against factory farming, decided to fly to Texas herself so she could dispel her friend's concerns. The trip had the opposite effect.

"What I discovered was a house of horrors," says Kohl, who lives on the West Coast. "Barns and sheds filled with rows and rows of caged dogs who had never walked on grass, had never seen the sun, who were locked in cages their entire lives and used like breeding machines -- treated as if they were inanimate objects."

Kohl left without a dog but with a new mission in life: "I remember standing there that day, saying to myself, 'You will never be the same.' Because I knew I had to do something about it."

A few months later Kohl adopted "Baby," a 9-year-old toy poodle that had been rescued from a puppy mill, and the two have been inseparable ever since. Together they travel the country drumming up support to outlaw the inhumane practices and conditions found at thousands of puppy mills around the country.

During the course of their travels, Baby has been cuddled and cooed to by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama when he was still a state senator in Illinois, Madison's own Bishop Robert Morlino, and celebrities galore, including Lindsay Lohan, Martina Navratilova and Ted Kennedy.

A chronicle of their travels -- with heart-melting photos of Baby and her conquests -- is contained in "A Rare Breed of Love: The True Story of Baby and the Mission She Inspired to Help Dogs Everywhere," a new book out from Simon and Schuster. Baby and Kohl were in Madison on Monday, June 30, at Barnes & Noble as part of a 25-city tour to promote the book.

"We just don't have laws on the books to protect these dogs from inhumane abuse," says Kohl in a phone interview from her tour bus, which is wrapped with photos from the book and a plea to "Boycott pet stores and Internet breeders -- adopt instead."

Kohl says the public is becoming more aware of issues of animal cruelty, thanks in part to recent investigative efforts by local and national media. Oprah, for instance, recently aired a show on puppy mills that was so well received it was quickly replayed, says Kohl.

"I think the public is increasingly outraged and is demanding that we treat the animals in our midst with humanity and compassion."

Kohl, a niece of U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, grew up in Fox Point, a suburb of Milwaukee, and attended Nicolet High School. She spent some time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-1970s before transferring to UCLA in search of warmer weather.

She was in college when she heard a speech by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who was in the process of founding what would become the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization headquartered in Los Angeles.

"I went up to him that night and said, 'I want to help you,' " recalls Kohl.

Kohl dropped out of college and volunteered at the center for about six months before joining the staff. In the early 1980s she opened the organization's Chicago office.

Looking back on the last several decades, Kohl says a common thread has run through her work.

"For whatever reason, I've always been concerned about how society sanctions cruelty," she says. "There's probably no more hideous example of that than the Holocaust."

Kohl eventually went back to school, earning a doctorate in psychology. Yet right after finishing her degree, she chose animal welfare work instead of a counseling practice.

She says she learned about inhumane factory farming practices by reading literature from the Humane Society. At the time, her standard poodle, Blue, was still alive.

"It was my relationship with that dog that really sensitized me to the sentient nature of animals," she says.

Kohl says that is a common trajectory for people with family pets.

"The dog was the ambassador who opened their eyes," she says.

Recently, Kohl helped lead the fight to ban foie gras in restaurants in Chicago. The delicacy is produced by force-feeding ducks and geese through a tube inserted into their esophagus to fatten their livers. The process has been banned in some countries.

Chicago outlawed the practice in 2006, but the ban was recently overturned due to heavy lobbying of the Chicago City Council by the Illinois Restaurant Association and Mayor Richard Daley.

"Chicago is run by a dictatorship, not a democracy," says Kohl, explaining the turn of events in the Windy City.

Almost four years ago, a few months after Kohl's devastating visit to the Texas dog breeder, she adopted Baby through a pet rescue Web site. Baby had been rescued from a puppy mill in California just before she was going to be killed because she was too old to produce litters.

At her foster home, Baby jumped off a sofa and broke her leg. Normally, a dog's leg could be set and healed, but Baby had been deprived of proper nutrition, exercise and veterinary care so long that the bones never healed, despite three attempts at setting her leg. She eventually had to have the leg amputated.

When Baby came to live with her, Kohl says she was struck by the amount of attention her three-legged companion drew on the street.

"We couldn't walk down the block without people stopping us," she says. "It became evident to me she was the perfect little spokesdog."

Kohl says she knew "some people" in Washington and Hollywood through her animal welfare work and decided her next project would be a nationwide effort to ban puppy mills. With Baby in tow, she started setting up appointments and photo shoots with the likes of Bill Maher, Patti LaBelle, Gloria Steinem, Sen. Elizabeth Dole and Judge Judy.

She says all were smitten by Baby.

"Everyone was very gentle with her," says Kohl.

Kohl visited Obama while he was running for U.S. Senate.

Even then, she says, "It was so evident this was an extraordinary human being." Kohl says he was very distressed at what she told him about puppy mills and Baby's plight, and showed a lot of compassion. "He's a mensch," she adds.

Obama posed with Baby in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- a fitting backdrop, says Kohl, because Lincoln was an animal lover.

In her book, Kohl tells the story of how the Lincoln family was moving from Indiana to Illinois in the 1830s when one of the family dogs got separated from the party by a stream. Most wanted to move on without the dog, but Lincoln insisted on wading across the water to fetch it.

"I could not endure the idea of abandoning even a dog," Lincoln reportedly said when telling the story in later years. "His frantic leaps of joy and other evidences of a dog's gratitude amply repaid me for all of the exposure I had undergone."

Judge Judith Sheindlin, better known as Judge Judy, posed with Baby along with rescue dogs on her large plush bed.

Kohl asks her in the book what she would say to a puppy mill owner who came before her for sentencing on charges of animal cruelty.

"I would say that there must be a special place in hell reserved for people who torture animals. Until you get there, you'll deal with me."

Kohl and Baby also made a trip to the National Catholic Bioethics Center, where Bishop Morlino was meeting with other bishops from around the country.

Kohl remembers Morlino, who is cradling Baby in the group photo, as "very, very warm" when interacting with Baby.

She says religious leaders are becoming more vocal about animal cruelty issues.

Kohl says the current pope, Benedict XVI, issued one of the most "beautiful, compassionate statements" she ever heard when he addressed the cruelty of factory farming.

Baby's charms even worked on cynical comic Bill Maher who, says Kohl, "totally turned to mush" when he met the toy poodle.

"Animals do really bring that out in people," she says, "especially the rough and tough ones."

Kohl says she met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill from both sides of the aisle and all agreed that puppy mills have to be stopped.

"They were all so horrified by the evidence," she says.

The biggest opposition to outlawing puppy mills, says Kohl, has come from the American Kennel Club, which certifies purebred dogs.

"It has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo," she says. "They get registration fees to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. For every purebred puppy sold to the public, they get a registration fee."

But Lisa Peterson, spokeswoman for the group, says there are now 29 competing all-breed registries in the United States, and she says the kennel club is the only group that has an "active inspection program behind their papers."

"In 2007 we spent approximately $6 million conducting inspections of breeders and kennels who registered their dogs with the AKC."

She said the group also has a "care and conditions policy so that dogs being used as breeding stock for AKC registered puppies are housed in healthy and humane conditions."

Peterson says her group has often opposed legislative proposals aimed at breeders and dog owners because they tend to "hurt the responsible breeder or responsible dog owner and don't address the issue, which is the irresponsible breeder and dog owner."

She says the proposed laws often target a "hobby breeder who raises one or two litters in their homes a year."

But Kohl says only a very small percentage of breeders are small-operation humane breeders.

Most, she says, overbreed their dogs every time they are in heat: "That is cruel and inhumane to do to a dog her entire life."

The alternative, however, is not profitable, she says.

The bigger question, says Kohl, is whether it is responsible for anyone at all to breed dogs when between 4 million and 5 million homeless pets are euthanized every year, according to Humane Society statistics.

"To me, it's irresponsible," says Kohl. "I say, 'Find another hobby.' "

Judith Davidoff  —  7/01/2008 6:55 am