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The Sun Sets on Puppy Shops in New York City

The sun set on Citipups brick-and-mortar locations in December. (Credit: Bella Bromberg)

The sun set on Citipups brick-and-mortar locations in December. (Credit: Bella Bromberg)

 

High-pitched yaps embellished Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” swelling into a cacophonous puppy-pop tune that rang throughout Citipups, a pet store in Chelsea. 

 

Emilio Ortiz has dedicated over a decade to this place, first as a salesperson, now its public relations manager. 

 

Ortiz, 32, finds the work meaningful. “Getting a puppy is one of those life milestones,” he said in mid-December. “I really cherish being a part of that.” 

 

He also cultivated a large social media presence — Citipups has over 300,000 followers on TikTok and 186,000 on Instagram —with which he attempts to dispel the idea that shelters are always admirable and pet stores despicable.

 

A playpen in a corner of the store doubled as Ortiz’s video studio. “I just sit down and let the dogs tell their own story,” Ortiz said, fiddling with a mini-tripod. “Sometimes, I’ll sit with them for an hour just to get a six-second clip.” 

 

A cream-colored cocker spaniel climbed up, licked his neck and gnawed on his finger. “You’re such a pretty girl!” Ortiz cooed in a voice several octaves higher than his typical gruff, baritone. “You’re chewing on my pinky!” 

 

As of the last week in December, all the puppies are gone. 

 

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On Dec. 15, Assembly Bill A4283 (dubbed “The Puppy Mill Pipeline Bill” by advocates) took effect, banning the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits in pet stores across New York State. Six other states have passed similar retail bans: Vermont, Minnesota, Maryland, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, and California. 

 

Citipups, previously with locations in Chelsea and on the Upper East Side, has now moved all sales online. So far, they have made a handful of transactions, but without a physical location to create content that markets the pups, Ortiz predicts it’s only a matter of time before the business dissolves. “I’m going to sink with the ship no matter what,” he said.

 

Two Citipups Goldendoodles huddled together, December 2024. (Credit: Bella Bromberg)

Two Citipups Goldendoodles huddled together, December 2024. (Credit: Bella Bromberg)

 

Proponents claim the new law, which passed by overwhelming margins, will prevent the proliferation of puppy mills—commercial breeding facilities that raise dogs in large numbers and in poor conditions.

 

Libby Post, a political consultant and executive director of the New York State Animal Protection Federation for nearly a decade, said the law is “long overdue” and “will end New York’s complicity in animal abuse.”

 

But critics argue the legislation won’t stop the mills. 

 

“This bill just exacerbates the problem,” said District 2 Assemblywoman Jodi Giglio, who voted against the measure. “People are just going to be buying pets from outside the state,” she said. “Puppy mills outside of New York just got richer.”

 

Giglio wrote a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul in October imploring Hochul to consider that banning storefront pet sales would push the issue into the unregulated shadows. 

 

“While purporting to protect animals, this feel-good legislation will result in increased suffering by countless dogs and cats and drive legitimate, long-standing businesses into bankruptcy,” Giglio wrote.

 

In 2017, California passed a similar retail sales ban, swiftly circumvented by bad actors due to a legal loophole: pet stores could continue selling dogs if the animals were sourced from rescue organizations. In 2021, the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a class-action lawsuit against a Midwest puppy miller that masqueraded as a rescue organization and sold abused animals to stores. 

 

The New York law allows pet stores to host adoption events, with a caveat: no money can change hands between stores and rescue groups. Allie Taylor, president of the advocacy group Voters for Animal Rights, believes this language will ensure that New York does not succumb to the same issues as California.

 

Animal sales account for 60 to 90 percent of a puppy-selling pet store’s revenue, said Mike Bober, CEO of the Pet Advocacy Network, a national trade association whose members include breeders, pet stores, rescue organizations and manufacturers. It’s unlikely that pet stores will be able to afford their rent after the ban kicks in, Bober said. (The rent for the Chelsea Citipups location alone carries a monthly price tag of $20,000.) 

 

“It’s going to be catastrophic for pet stores in New York,” Bober said. He anticipates three to four dozen stores will shut down statewide—nearly all of them. 

 

Post feels no sympathy for pet stores’ looming business troubles, citing the grace period outlined in the legislation: though the bill passed in December 2022, it did not take effect until December 2024.

 

“They’ve had two years to shift their model,” she said. “If they haven’t wanted to do that, that’s on them.” 

 

The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets oversees the pet dealer licensing process. Splashed across the current “Become a Pet Dealer” page of their website: a declaration that New York pet stores are no longer eligible to be licensed as pet dealers. As such, the current rolodex of licensed pet dealers lacks one name that, before December 2024, had been listed for over three decades: Citipups. 

 

* * *

 

“Frankly, I think it’s corrupt,” Ortiz said of the new law. “It exacerbates the problem. It doesn’t shut down the puppy mill pipelines. All it does is redirect the puppy mill pipeline.” 

 

This relates to what Ortiz considers a nebulous, unscrupulous realm: animal rescue. It’s one of the least regulated sectors in the country, he contends, and unbeknownst to the public, some rescue organizations even acquire dogs from puppy mills. According to Ortiz, a growing number of rescue organizations trade food and goods with owners of mills in exchange for cute puppies with which they can stock their warehouses to entice potential adopters. Rescue organizations claim that they do this to save puppies from poor living conditions; the pet store side rebuts that rescue centers often house animals in abysmal circumstances. Indeed, animal rights attorney Susan Chana Lask called North Shore Animal League, a no-kill shelter headquartered in Nassau County, a “really really bad place,” with “horrific” conditions.

 

“We have to be on point all the time,” Ortiz said, explaining that pet stores are subject to random inspections by the State Department of Agriculture and the City Department of Health. Shelters and rescue organizations, in contrast, “have very little to none of that.” 

 

Taylor, from Voters for Animal Rights, disagrees. 

 

“When you adopt from a shelter or a rescue, you have to go through a very detailed adoption process,” Taylor said. “They even talk to your landlord. It helps weed out those who are just making impulsive purchases.” 

 

* * * 

 

When it comes to the issue of puppy mills, confusion begins with disagreements over the term itself. Store owners say it’s inappropriate to conflate the term “commercial breeder” with “puppy mill,” because responsible, reputable commercial breeders do exist. 

 

But Kathleen Schatzmann of the Animal Legal Defense Fund maintains that there’s no such thing as a responsible commercial breeder. “We admonish them,” she said, of commercial breeders, adding that it’s impossible to adequately care for dogs when producing them at such a high volume. 

 

Candace Croney, a bioethicist at Purdue University, takes a different stance. In 2013, Croney started Canine Care Certified, a program that instructs commercial breeders in improving dogs’ living conditions. 

 

Disparaging and demeaning commercial breeders is counterproductive, Croney said. “We don’t have to be nasty to other people to be nice to dogs,” Croney said.

 

Ortiz believes the pet industry has reached a breaking point: consumers don’t just want to purchase an animal anymore; they want the experience of rescuing one.

 

“Right now, if I shut down Citipups and I opened up ‘Happy Tails Animal Rescue,’ and I brought some puppies from a puppy mill, and I just told people that I rescued them, now all of a sudden they were rescued,” Ortiz said. “It’s not actually about the dog. It’s about the narrative surrounding the dogs.”

 

* * *

Emilio Ortiz holds two puppies at the Citipups Daycare Center in December. (Credit: Bella Bromberg)

Emilio Ortiz holds two puppies at the Citipups Daycare Center in December. (Credit: Bella Bromberg)

 

Two weeks before the ban took effect, Ortiz sat atop a plastic black crate, legs dangling, in the back room at Citipups. 

 

The walls were lined with packages. In recent months, the store became an Amazon drop-off location to generate some additional revenue. 

 

Ortiz talks with his hands, eyebrows, and shoulders. When a point overtakes him, his arms extend like tree branches; when his sentence concludes, he slouches back into himself, a human accordion. 

 

Ortiz felt “heartbroken” when he first concluded that Citipups would not survive the new legislation. “I was doing TV interviews, crying about it,” he said. “For the longest time, I didn’t want to believe it.”

 

Recently, however, “I realize I got too caught up in the fight,” he said. For the time being, he is staying on to help with Citipups’ online sales, but he admits to feeling burnt out and ready for a change. He plans to take some time off, and has an idea of how to spend this respite. 

 

“I’m Dominican but I don’t know how to dance,” he said. “I’ll probably take salsa classes.”

About the author(s)

Bella Bromberg is a master's student at Columbia Journalism School and a staffer at The Moth, a storytelling nonprofit.