Dealing Dogs The Betrayal of Man's Best Friend
January 2007 Reviewed by: David Cantor Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

The federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) requires licenses and paperwork from animal laboratories, zoos, circuses, and some other businesses that use animals. U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors are supposed to enforce AWA regulations regarding animals’ living conditions and veterinary care, but it is well known that inspections and funding are extremely inadequate. The AWA does not provide for animal welfare in a literal sense -- overall well being. Animal exploiters can do anything to any animal they own in pursuit of any lawful purpose. That includes beating animals to train them for the circus, subjecting them to severe burns and fatal diseases in experiments, and much more.

The AWA provides for the licensing and inspection of a few categories of animal dealer. Class-B dealers are those that obtain animals from miscellaneous sources and sell them to facilities that use and destroy them. They often trade in stolen pets. We learn in the 70-minute 2006 HBO documentary Dealing Dogs: The Betrayal of Man’s Best Friend that about 65,000 dogs are purchased by laboratories and veterinary schools each year, about 13,000 of them from class-B dealers.

Dealing Dogs follows "Pete," an undercover investigator with Last Chance for Animals, a California-based nonprofit organization the DVD box calls "a small U.S. animal-rights organization." He finds employment with the Arkansas class-B dealer Martin Creek Kennel and documents what goes on there. "Pete" shows how he wires himself for video and sound recording before work each day. He captures conversations with Martin Creek’s owner and family members who work there -- and the heart of the matter: dogs suffering horribly, so horribly at times that many viewers will not be able to watch all the way through.

We get some of the haphazard sound and image we expect in undercover footage, but the film is well edited, fast-moving, entirely comprehensible, and engaging every minute. Available footage from six months’ investigative work is hundreds of times longer than this distillation.

Sickening ironies abound. The kennel’s owner is a minister at a Christian church. When "Pete" tells a worker that a dog in shock from bite wounds languishes in one of the kennel’s hundreds of barren concrete-floored cages, the worker tells "Pete" he can’t help the animal because he’s in a hurry to get to an Easter-egg hunt. Such hypocrisy makes it all the more gratifying when we learn the results of law-enforcement action -- and also that the 125 dogs seized from the kennel all got veterinary treatment and new homes.

Several years pass before convictions finally occur. Emphasizing the happy ending, however, distracts from an important fact: Exposing cruelty and seeking law-enforcement action cannot establish the legal rights that are the goal of the animal-rights movement and ostensibly of Last Chance for Animals. As a long-time animal-rights advocate, I understand that countless animal exploiters are operating with impunity and that neither the AWA nor any other law can afford animals meaningful protection as long as they are property. "Pete" and Last Chance for Animals have done a good job exposing Martin Creek Kennel. But isn’t it what the government should be doing if it claims to enforce meaningful animal-welfare laws?

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