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ALLENTOWN — Puppy breeding and boarding kennels across Pennsylvania have been virtually assured of passing grades from state regulators even with feces-filled living areas, cramped cages, dirty water bowls and diseased or dead dogs, The Morning Call said in a first-ever analysis of 20,000 state inspection records.
In a story for publication today, the paper said the practices of the state Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement set its mission up for failure, tilting toward instructing kennel owners on how to comply with the law rather than issuing citations or closing kennels.
Even with violations marked on the kennel inspections, dog wardens gave kennels overall ratings of “satisfactory” 1,311 times. Kennels got flawless reports in more than nine out of every 10 inspections, the paper said.
The newspaper’s findings “sort of verifies in a very strong way what we’ve been complaining about for years,” said Bob Baker, a national investigator for The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Baker said even the harshest critics would not have predicted that nine out of 10 inspections would be perfect.
Mary Bender, director of the Dog Law Enforcement Bureau, told The Morning Call that she saw no reason why kennels shouldn’t have spotless records. Assuming that wardens should have been more critical “presupposes that there must be problems in kennels,” she said.
But Gov. Ed Rendell, who last year ordered the bureau to get tough, said he believes problems exist.
“There’s a reluctance to roll up our sleeves (in Harrisburg but) … the status quo in policing puppy mills is unacceptable,” Rendell said.
State regulators tacitly permitted incomplete inspections by allowing wardens to file inspection reports even where they were unable to go inside a kennel, The Morning Call said.
The paper said that until it demanded kennel inspection records, the bureau had no idea how to analyze its own data.