Brooke Knowles knew she wanted the black puppy posted on the Facebook page of a self-described home breeder of Coton De Tulears. He looked like he\u2019d have an outgoing personality.<\/p>\n
She put down a nonrefundable deposit and drove to Temecula to pick him up. She paid about $2,000 and named him Ted.<\/p>\n
Before she even left for home, Ted vomited and had diarrhea on the grass outside. He was lethargic, his chest soaked with drool.<\/p>\n
A closer look later at the paperwork provided by the seller revealed something else unsettling: Ted wasn\u2019t bred in California. He had been imported from a kennel in Utah.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought that I was getting a dog that had been bred at his home,\u201d Knowles said in a series of interviews with The Times. \u201cThis poor puppy, he was so traumatized.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of animal welfare bills into state law that will restrict puppy sales and strengthen protections for buyers like Knowles. The bills were introduced as a result of a Times investigation last year<\/a> that detailed how designer dogs are trucked into California from out-of-state commercial breeders and resold by people saying they were small, local operators. <\/p>\n The three bills Newsom signed into law are:<\/p>\n The bills were supported by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said they are \u201can important step in shutting down deceptive sales tactics of these puppy brokers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSunlight is the best disinfectant, and it\u2019s time to shine a light on puppy mills,\u201d Newsom said in a statement. \u201cGreater transparency in pet purchases will bring to light abusive practices that take advantage of pets in order to exploit hopeful pet owners. Today\u2019s legislation protects both animals and Californians by addressing fraudulent pet breeding and selling practices.\u201d<\/p>\n Lawmakers said new laws close loopholes that emerged after California in 2019 banned the sale of commercially bred dogs, cats and rabbits in pet stores. That retail ban did not apply to online sales, which surged during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n The Times\u2019 investigation found that in the years after the retail ban took effect, a network of resellers stepped in to replace pet stores, often posing as local breeders and masking where puppies were actually bred. Some buyers later discovered they had purchased dogs from sellers using fake names or disposable phone numbers after their pets became ill or died.<\/p>\n Times reporters analyzed the movement of more than 71,000 dogs coming into California since 2019 by requesting certificates of veterinary inspection, which are issued by a federally accredited veterinarian listing where the animal came from, its destination and verification that it is healthy enough to travel.<\/p>\n The California Department of Food and Agriculture has long received those health certificates from other states by mistake \u2014 the records are supposed to go to county public health departments \u2014 and, in recent years, made it a practice to immediately destroy them.<\/a> Dog importers who were supposed to submit the records to counties largely failed to do so.<\/p>\n The Times obtained the records by requesting the documents from every other state. In the days following the story\u2019s publication, lawmakers and animal advocates called on the state\u2019s Food and Agriculture Department to stop \u201cdestroying evidence\u201d of the deceptive practices<\/a> by purging the records. The department began preserving the records thereafter, <\/a>but released them with significant redactions.<\/p>\n In one instance, the state redacted the name and address of a person with numerous shipments of puppies from Ohio. The Times obtained the same travel certificates without redactions from the Ohio Department of Agriculture. The address listed on the records is for a Home Depot in Milpitas. The phone number on some of those travel certificates belongs to Randy Kadee Vo.<\/p>\n The Times\u2019 reporting last year found Vo\u2019s name and various Bay Area addresses, including a warehouse, were listed as the destination for 1,900 dogs imported into California since 2019. At the time, he disputed that number but declined to say how many he had imported. People who bought puppies from Vo told The Times that they were told they were buying puppies that were locally bred.<\/p>\n Shortly after The Times questioned Vo about the imports, a different name, along with the Home Depot address, began appearing on health certificates with his phone number. Vo did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n The Times identified hundreds of records detailing other sellers with names that appear to be fake or addresses that go to unaffiliated businesses, shopping centers and commercial mailbox offices.<\/p>\n While the new laws were championed by animal welfare groups, some have questioned how adequately the laws will be enforced by state officials \u2014 particularly when it comes to policing out-of-state facilities selling online and then shipping puppies directly California buyers. <\/p>\n \u201cEnforcement will now fall on nonprofits like ours to monitor and report issues that we see, in hopes that the agencies act,\u201d said Mindi Callison, head of the Iowa-based anti-puppy-mill nonprofit Bailing Out Benji.<\/p>\n Callison said lawmakers should next turn their focus to requiring California breeders to be licensed, similar to standards in Iowa, Missouri and other states. California does not have a statewide licensing program, instead relying on local jurisdictions for oversight. While some cities and counties require breeders to be licensed and inspected, little information is available online to help consumers vet them.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a higher risk of dogs being kept in inhumane conditions in states where there are no regulations to follow and have no eyes on them,\u201d Callison said.<\/p>\n Opponents of the legislation argued that California\u2019s previous attempts to cut off the supply from puppy mills by banning pet store sales only fueled an unregulated marketplace \u2014 and warned banning brokers will do the same. <\/p>\n \u201cEliminating these brokers will not reduce demand for pets; it will simply force more Californians into unregulated, riskier marketplaces,\u201d said Alyssa Miller-Hurley of the Pet Advocacy Network, which represents breeders, retailers and pet owners, in a letter opposing the legislation.<\/p>\n For consumers like Knowles, the lack of transparency when buying her puppy Ted has been long-lasting and costly. More than a year after Knowles took the puppy to her home in Long Beach, he developed stomach issues that got so bad he wound up in the emergency room. She also had doubts that her puppy was a purebred Coton De Tulear as advertised.<\/p>\n She said a pet DNA test confirmed those suspicions and connected her with other people whose dogs were purchased from the same seller. The test results said one of the dogs share the same amount of DNA as people do with their full siblings \u2013 and that they\u2019re mutts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe call him the most expensive rescue dog we\u2019ve ever had,\u201d Knowles said of Ted, who is now on a restrictive diet. \u201cOur group started to call our dogs \u2018Fauxtons,\u2019 since they weren\u2019t Cotons.\u201d<\/p>\n Knowles sued the seller, Tweed Fox of Carlsbad Cotons, over the test results showing Ted was not a purebred puppy, but said she lost. <\/p>\n \u201cReally the core issue is \u2026 masquerading to be something you\u2019re not,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Fox told The Times that he began sourcing from a Utah company during the Covid pandemic, when the demand for puppies spiked beyond the number he was able to breed at home.<\/p>\n He thought the Utah puppies were purebreds because they came with the proper registration paperwork, but said that \u201cturned out not to be the case.\u201d He said he did not mislead customers because he was in fact a home breeder, and only advertised the out-of-state puppies as Coton de Tulears, \u201cwhich is what I thought I was purchasing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou only can breed so many in a home,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought I was providing equal quality puppies at the time, and apparently, I wasn\u2019t at that point, except for my own home bred.\u201d <\/p>\n Fox said he has since moved to Dallas, where he breeds and sells Cotons. While the California broker law won\u2019t impact him now that he\u2019s left the state, he said he refuses to buy anyone else\u2019s puppies for resale. <\/p>\n \u201cI only sell my own,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not in the business to cheat people out of anything.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brooke Knowles knew she wanted the black puppy posted on the Facebook page of a self-described home breeder…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":290868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[149171,149172,72525,1582,276,24655,316,2961,224,5337,5204,75784,149174,34961,149173,69588,28636,637,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-290867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-black-puppy","9":"tag-brooke-knowles","10":"tag-buyer","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-dog","14":"tag-home","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-name","19":"tag-new-law","20":"tag-pet-purchase","21":"tag-record","22":"tag-seller","23":"tag-state-law","24":"tag-ted","25":"tag-times","26":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115347633167644233","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n