The Blood in the Ring at Westminster

"In order to recoup the money lost from dog shows, the AKC needs to register 666,666 puppy mill dogs a year."

American Kennel Club registrations continue to plummet even as more and more Americans are acquiring dogs.

Today, less than 13 percent of all dogs are registered with the AKC, and a lot of those that are registered are coming from puppy mill breeders which are given special discounts by the AKC which has gone so far as to even create special computer software to speed the registration of  pet shop puppies.

One of the dirty little secrets of the AKC is that the organization would go bankrupt without puppy mill registration dollars.

Ron Menaker, Chairman of the AKC's Board of Directors, noted in the minutes of the September, 2006 AKC Board meeting (link to PDF file), that the AKC has been registering puppy mill dogs "for the past 122 years" and "we have collected millions of dollars" as a result.

He went on to note that "registering puppies that come from these puppy brokers or pet shops" "is not a new phenomenon."

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Why does the AKC snuggle up to the puppy mill industry? The Board of the AKC is rather blunt about the problem.

Though the AKC made a profit of $5.7 million in the previous year, that was not enough. A core problem, says Jim Stevens, Chief Financial Officer of the AKC, is that events "lost approximately ten million dollars in 2005."

"Events" is a euphemism for dog shows like the one being held in New York City next week.

Because rosette-chasing is a money-losing proposition for the American Kennel Club, they have to subsidize dog shows with blood-money derived from puppy mill registrations.

So how many AKC puppy mill registrations does it take to zero out the deficit created by AKC dog shows?

The math is simple. It costs $15 to register a puppy with the AKC. In order to recoup the $10 million a year lost from dog shows, the AKC needs to register 666,666 "misery puppies" a year -- a number higher than the TOTAL number of dogs actually registered by the AKC, which has seen registrations plummet from over 1.2 million in 1985 to less than 500,000 today.

To put it another way, the AKC was losing about $1,175 dollars per dog show back in 2005, which means about 78 misery puppies needed to be registered to underwrite every AKC event.

How many rosettes are awarded at an AKC show? I have no idea, and the number shifts, but I think it's safe to say that every pure bred dog entering the ring at Westminster holds multiple wins subsidized by scores, if not hundreds of "misery puppy" registrations.

Behind every dog trotted around the ring at Westminster is a little bit of misery in fur huddled in some commercial breeding pen pulled well back from the highway. There the dogs are pregnant for life, and when they are too old to produce more, they are killed or dumped at a local shelter to make room for the next generation of breeders.

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