It’s Raining Cats and Dogs

The trucks bumped along the narrow dirt road, slowly winding up the mountain outside of Jefferson City. Inside each were as many volunteers and professional animal rescuers as could be found.

Many were attached to the Humane Society of the United States, which got the call about an alleged puppy mill. The Lewis and Clark Humane Society was also contacted, and asked if they had space enough to keep a large number of dogs.

If there hadn’t been numerous complaints about the place, they wouldn’t have known it was there. The mill was well hidden, up a mountain and down a rarely traveled dirt road, surrounded by very few other houses. No one would mistakenly happen upon it.

As they reached the top and the trucks pulled into the property, they were greeted by kennels and more kennels, stacked side by side around the place, and inside each were Alaskan Malamutes. This was going to be an even bigger project than they had realized. With over 160 Malamutes, it would take all day just to get them to the shelter in Helena, 18 miles away.

Many of the dogs had missing or damaged ears. They had wounds and infections and visible scars. Some of the kennels were locked in by other kennels, so that there was only one entrance for an entire row. Starting with the first enclosure in a row, which contained eight dogs, they would have to continue on to the next.

The earth and grass had grown up in front of the dogs, making the chain link doors a challenge to open. Some of the cages were tied shut and could only be opened with bolt cutters. It was apparent that the dogs had received little to no human contact, and had most likely never been outside of their pens.

The Malamutes were all underweight and malnourished. They did not have any food or water, and the little water they did have was dirty and green. The kennels were caked with feces. Inside the house, they found even more feces. The owner had kept dogs locked up in the bathroom, which was covered in it. A mother dog, it appeared, had gave birth in the bathtub, and was left to live in there with her newborn pups.

It was a puppy mill, so they expected there to be pregnant female dogs, but they were all so emaciated, not even the veterinarians could tell which dogs were pregnant without fully examining them.

Among the many kennels was a single barrel, and inside the barrel were dead puppies. More dead puppies were found over the ravine, carelessly thrown over the edge.

The volunteers spent the entire day, Oct. 12, 2011, tagging, photographing and removing the Malamutes. They were all taken to the Jefferson City Fire Hall for examination.

“The dead quiet was the most astounding part,” Program Manager for Spay Montana Sandy Newton said. Newton was present at the fire hall during the examinations. “You’d expect barking, even the puppies were completely shut down. You’d put 20 dogs in a room and it would be complete silence. It was eerie.”

The volunteers worked past dark moving the dogs to the fire hall, where two veterinarians worked at examining and documenting the condition of each dog.

“The dogs just had no ‘umph.’ You’re expecting noise and you just get complete silence,” veterinarian Dr. Greg Lovgren said.

Earlier in the day, Lovgren had been one of the two vets asked to make the call on whether or not the health of the dogs was enough to warrant removing them. When Lovgren arrived at 141 Malamute Way in Jefferson City, he spent less than 30 minutes on the property before confirming it as an animal cruelty case, and that every dog needed to be removed.

While examining the dogs, Lovgren found that some of them weighed as little as 30 pounds. The ideal weight for a female Malamute is 65 pounds or more – a male Malamute should weigh 80 pounds or more.

“Maybe three or four dogs were close to their normal body weight, everyone else was 30 percent or more underweight,” Lovgren said.

The dogs had open wounds on their ears and other parts of their bodies, most likely from fighting each other over a single bowl of food. With four dogs in one kennel, one dog would fight off the other three and back them into a corner before eating all of the food. Some dogs had resorted to eating their own feces.

The worst part was that the puppy mill, owned and run by Mike Chilinski, had previously received a stamp of approval from the American Kennel Club. Chilinski’s mill had even been inspected, and passed. The AKC did not officially suspend Chilinski as a breeder until 2013, shortly after his conviction.

“Maybe it started out okay, but when he kept going he couldn’t take care of them. There were just too many,” Newton said.

“The dead quiet was the most astounding part. You’d put 20 dogs in a room and it would be complete silence.” —Sandy Newton, Spay Montana.

* * *

A puppy mill is defined as, “an establishment that breeds puppies for sale, typically on an intensive basis and in conditions regarded as inhumane.” In many cases, puppy mills start out as humane, small scale breeders. What starts out as a small operation can quickly turn into a full blown puppy mill without careful control of the population breeders are creating.

Montana is one of many states that has no law to regulate dog breeders. Puppy mills aren’t illegal, and law enforcement can’t intervene until it reaches the point of animal cruelty as it is outlined in the Montana statute.

The Humane Society of Western Montana Legislative and Advocacy Committee is trying to change that, but have yet to succeed. For the fourth legislative session in a row, they have put forth a bill proposing such regulations only to have it die before even making it out of the first committee.

“If this bill passes, it would set up a commission of breeders, shelters and law enforcement who, as a group, would set the standards to decide when a loss of breeder licensing is warranted,” the Chair of the committee, Stacey Gordon, said.

The Legislation and Advocacy Committee is made up of several lawyers, a reporter, a small business owner and an educator. The overall sentiment of the group is, ‘other businesses have to be regulated, why not this one?’

Gordon said the reason House Bill 608 has not passed is the is the costs associated with it. “The problem with this bill is the cost, we would have to create an entire new agency to regulate the breeders,” Gordon said. “Anything with a fiscal note just doesn’t have a chance of passing.”

In previous years, the bill has been assigned to the House Agriculture Committee, but it never went further than that. With the support of Democratic legislator Margaret MacDonald and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), the bill made it into the House Business and Labor Committee.

“We’re not thinking of it as agriculture, we’re thinking about it more as consumer protection. So getting the bill into the business and labor committee was a huge victory for us,” Gordon said. Gordon and the other members of the committee intend to continue to fight for their bill in the next legislative session.

“It often takes more than one session to get things passed. So next session, we’re just going to keep working on it,” Gordon said.

The passing of this bill would not only help prevent puppy mills, but help to keep the population down as well. The more animals sold by breeders, the more other animals start to fill up the shelters. For every cat or dog bred and sold to a home, there is another cat or dog without one.

The breeders heavily pushed against this bill. Gordon hopes to someday establish a dialogue with the breeders to explain to them what the bill would and would not do. “They feel their livelihood is at stake, but if they aren’t doing anything wrong, then it’s not,” Gordon said. The main target for this bill is not the small scale breeders, but the breeders who have gotten out of control and are heading toward inhumane standards.

Jefferson County Attorney Matt Johnson said that perhaps kennel inspections would not have caught the starvation of the dogs, as inspections generally only happen once a year, but being able to inspect the property after the first complaint would have helped. “Perhaps discovery of the abuse would have happened sooner,” Johnson said.

* * *

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office was already investigating Chilinski’s mill before that October. Deputy Chad McFadden received several complaints from over the previous years, but it wasn’t enough. In 2011 alone, there were at least five other written reports regarding animal neglect. But none of the complainants were willing to prosecute – until Sept. 15, 2011.

William Peterson and his wife Carole Peterson took photos and told Deputy McFadden about their experience visiting Chilinski’s mill. The couple had gone to purchase a Malamute puppy and could not believe the conditions the dogs were living in.

Mr. Peterson told the police there were more than 100 makeshift kennels, all with no food and little water, and all covered in dog feces. Peterson even confronted Chilinski, questioning him about when the kennels had last been cleaned. Chilinski admitted that it had been a few weeks, claiming he had hurt his back. But the feces that covered the kennels was several inches thick and packed down – which was more than could have possibly been accumulated in a couple weeks.

The Petersons purchased a puppy from Chilinski, partly out of pity and a need to save the puppy’s life. The puppy’s spine and hip bones were easily seen through the fur, and the puppy looked like it had never been bathed before.

They took the puppy to a vet, Dr. Rex Anderson, who found it malnourished. Anderson also found parasites and a large number of round worms and giardia.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s office not only had probable cause to search Chilinski’s property, but enough to execute an arrest warrant. They arrested him on Oct. 12, 2011, and immediately brought in volunteers and employees of the Humane Society of the United States and the Lewis and Clark Humane Society. Expecting to find only 100 dogs, they were shocked when they tallied more than 160.

Each one had to be carefully documented. The Jefferson City Fire Hall acted as a staging area while the vets went through and examined each dog. They ranked the dog’s body weight on a sliding scale from one to nine to determine the health of the dog, with one being extremely underweight and nine being overweight.

Of the 139 adult dogs examined, 35 ranked at a body scale of one, 49 received a score of two and 30 received a body score of three. More than 82 percent of the dogs were considered underweight due to malnourishment.

Many of the puppies did not make it. Nearly 20 of the dogs were pregnant, and from their litters fewer than 50 percent of the newborn puppies survived. Even after being rescued and given adequate care, the stress put on the mothers’ bodies during their time at Chilinski’s mill was too much.

Apart from the direct physical and emotional impact on dogs who lived in puppy mill conditions, large scale breeding has an even wider area of impact.

* * *

According to the Humane Society of the United States, 2.4 million healthy cats and dogs are euthanized each year in shelters around the United States. That’s one animal every 13 seconds. While breeders may not be the sole cause for pet overpopulation, they are far from the solution.

“You can breed kittens, and won’t have a problem finding them a home, but that means some other kitten doesn’t have one,” Alan Applebury, founder of the Fox Hollow Animal Project, said.

As a veterinarian, Applebury euthanized hundreds of cats and dogs. He disapproved of having to kill perfectly healthy animals and sought a better solution. In 2003, Applebury began the Fox Hollow Animal Project. He and his wife, Jesse, started out in their kitchen spaying and neutering in Corvallis.

The same year Applebury started the project, the Bitter Root Humane Association euthanized 639 cats and 153 dogs. In 2014, it euthanized 16 cats and four dogs – none of whom lacked an available home and were simply too sick or too aggressive.

Applebury’s aunt left him a house, which became the clinic they operate out of today. They operate on an entirely nonprofit status, running on donations. Hospitals donate suture materials, PetSmart donated $30 and a rabies shot for every animal in Ravalli County and a couple people donated as much as $10,000. Even if an owner can’t afford the spay or neuter surgery, Applebury does it anyway. He doesn’t turn anyone away.

Other veterinarians in the area at first had a negative reaction to Applebury’s clinic. Some veterinarians oppose spay and neuter under the assumption that it takes away from their profits as a business, but as Applebury explained, “You can look at them like farm animals, just for profit, or more like children, trying to solve the problem.”

“You can breed kittens, and won’t have a problem finding them a home, but that means some other kitten doesn’t have one,” Alan Applebury, Fox Hollow Animal Project.

* * *

Other clinics have cropped up throughout Montana. The Lewis and Clark Humane Society has one such clinic, called Spay Montana. Spay Montana is unique in the aspect that it is actually a mobile clinic that travels throughout the state. A focus for Spay Montana has been decreasing the animal population on the reservations.

In Native American culture, dogs are viewed differently and because of tradition are kept outside rather than inside as house pets. This and a lack of spaying and neutering have led to issues related to overpopulation.

“On the Blackfeet reservation, the average litter size is 10 to 12 puppies. If 200 out of 500 females have puppies, you do the math,” Newton said. Without proper owners to care for these feral animals, the population continues to grow out of hand. An estimated 2,500 to 3,000 homeless dogs live on the Blackfeet reservation.

The feral dogs will run in packs, just like wolves. One dog alone might not attack a human, but together, they can become dangerous while hunting for food. Spaying and neutering has helped to decrease the number of packs, as well as decrease entire cat colonies.

Program Manager Sandy Newton has been involved with Spay Montana since 2004. When she started going to the reservations, they would only have a few appointments lined up. Now, she proudly states, that their schedule is filled up every time.

“We now do what we call the ‘Browning Blitz.’ We’ll go down for four days in the summer, two in the fall and two in the Spring,” Newton said.

Spay Montana sets up an average of 60 to 70 clinics a year, with a minimum of two days per clinic. The clinics quit running from November to March due to the risk of putting animals outside in the cold after surgery.

“We have to go in there twice a year, once isn’t enough. You can’t do it once and then wait another three years to come back, all our work would be for nothing.”

For a typical day during the Browning Blitz, Newton and her team drive down with their mobile clinic on a Friday and spend the day setting up. People start coming in for their appointments starting at 8 a.m. on Saturday, and between three vets the clinic spays and neuters ten dogs and hour.

Nearly every time that Newton goes down to Browning, she runs into the “cat lady” – a woman in Heart Butte who rescues cats and brings them to the Spay Montana clinics each time. People trust her to take cats into the clinic when they are unable to. She lives down a long dirt road, where people will leave kittens in her mailbox.

“There’s people that, god bless them, really put their heart and soul into it saving animals,” Newton said. Each clinic has their own version of the “cat lady.” Support from the community has made clinics like Spay Montana a success.

As effective as these clinics have been, however, puppy mills continue to deplete the resources of these clinics and add to Montana’s pet population.

“There’s people that, god bless them, really put their heart and soul into it saving animals,” Sandy Newton, Spay Montana.

* * *

After all the dogs in Chilinski’s puppy mill were accounted for, they were taken to the Lewis and Clark Humane Society. LCHS has a maximum capacity limit of 65 dogs and the shelter did not budget for situations like Chilinski’s puppy mill.

The Humane Society for the United States gave $600,000 to care for the Malamutes, a highly unusual gift. People in the area also donated money toward the Malamutes. For LCHS though, that’s money that would have normally gone to the shelter. Throughout the time that the Malamutes had to be sheltered, LCHS lost about $70,000.

The dogs quickly outgrew the space at LCHS. Once the puppies were born, there were more than 200 Malamutes. The Malamutes could not be adopted until Chilinski was sentenced, as they were still technically his dogs. “I even offered a lesser sentence if he would give up all of his dogs, but he refused,” Johnson said.

Chilinski is currently serving out a sentence of 30 years, with 25 suspended, at the Montana Department of Corrections. He was convicted of 91 counts of animal cruelty in Dec. of 2012, more than a year after the dogs were rescued. He is also not allowed to own animals for 30 years. Chilinski also faced charges in federal court for manufacturing drugs. More than 200 marijuana plants were seized from Chilinski’s property during the removal of the Malamutes.

In the time it took to sentence Chilinski, the shelters did their best to keep the dogs in the original groupings they were found in, but they also had to keep the males and the females apart since they couldn’t spay or neuter the dogs until a few months after the seizure.

The problem with putting the dogs into homes was that it could potentially compromise evidence of the abuse. “They were considered living evidence, which is a very tough idea to get around,” Gina Wiest, Executive Director of LCHS, said.

Jefferson County Attorney Matt Johnson showed the jury photos of each dog in its initial weight as well as detailed images of scars and injuries. Johnson then compared these photos to ones that had been taken just before the trial, documenting their recovered conditions. “It was very detailed but necessary and effective for the jury to understand the malnourishment and neglect,” Johnson said.

The biggest challenge was caring for the dogs. Malamutes are large dogs that require a lot of space to roam and a lot of care. There really wasn’t a single shelter in the surrounding area that was big enough.

Another bill that has been trying to make its way to legislation is a bill that requires the owners of seized animals in cruelty cases to post a bond for the care of the animals while in the custody of the State or County. “If an owner cannot afford to care for their own animals and in this case post a bond, the animals should be relinquished,” Johnson, Jefferson County Attorney, said. Such a bill would have meant a much earlier adoption for the Malamutes.

* * *

After Chilinski was sentenced, the dogs could at last be relocated. LCHS kep about 30 dogs, while the rest were sent all around the country to different rescue organizations. They each needed one on one care, which they could not receive if they remained together in the same shelter. The dogs would also need to be socialized before they could be adopted, as they had been isolated from human contact. By sending the Malamutes to various parts of the United States, they were given a fighting chance at being adopted.

The response from people was immediate, everyone wanted one of the rescue dogs. For the thirty Malamutes left at the Lewis and Clark Humane Society, eighty applications were received within a week of becoming available for adoption. The community had taken an interest in the Malamutes even before they were available. The Jefferson County Attorney’s office received hundreds of emails, inquiries, faxes and phone calls. The interest was far greater than that for most other cases.

All of the shelters had similar responses, and to instigate a thorough applications process to determine the best home for each dog. “I applied, had to go through an interview process, and they came to look at the house to make sure it was an acceptable space for the dog,” Celeste Mayer, one of the adoptive parents, said.

Mayer’s son, Chaz, wanted to adopt an Alaskan Malamute Husky, so when Mayer heard about the Malamutes story on the news, she immediately applied through the Moonsong Malamute Rescue.

Going into the adoption, Mayer, did not know the sex, the age or anything else about the dog she would be adopting. Mayer’s son Chaz is a Star Wars fan, and he named the dog Leia.

Mayer met someone from Moonsong Malamute at Petco to get Leia. There were actually two dogs in the back of the car, Leia and another dog, Smokey.

“Smokey just kind of sat there shaking, but Leia was very curious and energetic,” Mayer said.

When Mayer adopted Leia, she was still slightly underweight and her teeth had been gnawed down from biting on the kennel.

“You can tell she was abused, she’s very tough but very loving at the same time.”

One of the challenges with Malamutes as a breed is their tendency to bolt the moment they are off leash. On a leash, Leia would pull so hard that she would choke herself. They had to train her to calm down, but even then, Leia remained quite the escape artist. After two years, Mayer was almost ready to give up on her.

“And we’re not people who give up, it’s just not in our DNA,” Mayer said. But try as she did, she couldn’t get Leia to stay on her leash. Mayer thought maybe it would be better for Leia to find a home with a fenced in yard where she could roam off leash. Maybe even a home with another dog because she has so much energy. “It was like she knew we were thinking of giving her up because she changed overnight.”

“Even now, when I pull up to the house and she’s off leash, she waits outside the house, howling and waiting for me to come to her,” Mayer said. “The happy ending is that she knows she is loved and happy, and Chaz has this dog he’s always wanted, and she fits right into the family.”

Leia now has acres to roam around in, but will still run to the other side of the property at the sign of movement from the neighbors, who know exactly where she belongs and bring her back home every time she comes running to them. Despite her time spent in a puppy mill with little to no human contact, she is a people lover.

Mike Chilinski appealed his sentence to the Supreme Court. In August, 2014, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction. Chilinski remains at the Montana Department of Corrections, and even when he is released, he will not be able to own animals until he is in his 80’s.

* * *

To this day, puppy mills remain unregulated in many states throughout the U.S. and overall protections for animal rights are still not federally regulated.

You can get informed and find ways to support animal rights by visiting the resources below:

• Humane Society of the United States.
• American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
• People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).