The remaining counts of the indictment were dropped. The Davises were sentenced to just four to six months of detention in their own home. However, in 1996 Michael Dunn, an assistant secretary for marketing at the USDA, told Congress that during the previous year the agency had searched for as many as 1,800 suppliers who were providing dogs to dealers, then forty in number. Furthermore, although there is a regulation that limits to twenty-four the number of dogs a buncher can sell each year, this is easy to get around. The USDA's leniency may reflect long-standing allegiances.
Conflicts of interest exist at lower levels of the agency as well.
Conscientious inspectors can't count on the agency's support. Some enforcement officers who have been relocated believe they were moved because of their zeal. Elsewhere on the Web Links to related material on other Web sites. The myth of shadowy figures who cruise around residential neighborhoods luring pets into vans and selling them to research labs persists as a kind of urban legend. It's also almost never true.