Legally and practically, as Horowitz observes in her 2019 book, “Our Dogs, Ourselves,” pets are property. Humans buy them, collar and leash them, cut off their tails and ears, govern their sex lives, yet consider them family members. We buy them beds and toys, and forgive them their trespasses, even as we grumble about other people’s dogs—O.P.D.s—the way we do about other people’s children. Dog owners will sometimes tell you they love their Maxes and Bellas (the most popular dog names nationwide, according to one survey, though it’s Murphy in Vermont and Sadie in Delaware) more than the people in their lives. Some humans evince discomfort with the arrangement; they won’t call themselves “owners.” Petco opts for “parents.” In Boulder, Colorado, it’s “guardians.”
“We like the dogs that look like us, or our conception of ourselves,” Horowitz said. “It’s so easy for people now to get the dog with the specs and features they want. It’s weird that you can shop for an animal by plugging in your variables and then just clicking on the dog. It’s pretty dystopian—for animals.”
“Shelter” dogs have become “rescue” dogs, perhaps the better to signal the hound’s plight, and the human’s virtue. “The way our parents dealt with dogs is different from the way we do, and I suspect it will be different for our kids,” Horowitz said. “Maybe ownership will be regulated, or forbidden, a remnant of a bygone idea.” We are already creating breeds of dogs that can be left inside, engineered for the wee-wee pad, segregated from the natural world, like succulents on a windowsill. One imagines robot dogs, like ’Lectronimo in “The Jetsons,” or shareable pets—Zipcat. “It’s entirely possible that in a hundred and fifty years we won’t be owning dogs at all,” Horowitz said.
Tony Pagano, who is fifty-eight, grew up on an apple farm in Ulster County, surrounded by huskies and strays; when he was a teen-ager, his father, who ran a construction union, got him work on big demolition jobs. For decades, he has had his own construction company and has built out law firms, restaurants, the headquarters of the N.B.A. and the N.H.L., and, after September 11th, a replica of the New York Mercantile Exchange, in a defunct airplane hangar on Long Island, to be deployed in the event of the destruction of the one in Manhattan. Plugged in with New York Republicans, Pagano has countless stories of his wranglings with the city’s power brokers. One, about a big-deal lawyer, begins, “That individual that fucked me . . .”
Pagano’s wife’s family is from Puerto Rico. Visiting the island, he noticed all the “sato” dogs, the stray mutts that wander the streets and beaches. There are some five hundred thousand strays in Puerto Rico. Pagano owns a logistics company, called Globalink Worldwide Express, and he started arranging to pick up sato rescues who were arriving on flights from the Caribbean to New York City. At times, there were dogs coming in every night. He fostered some himself and tapped into other foster and adoption networks. Engine 14, the fire station down the street from his apartment, near Union Square, adopted a pit bull, but Pagano, having fallen in love with it, took it back—a so-called foster fail.
In 2017, a staff member from No Dogs Left Behind, familiar with Pagano’s Puerto Rico work, asked him for logistical help. Pagano went out to J.F.K. to meet Jeff Beri, who was arriving on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow with nine dogs. At the time, Beri was flying dogs as excess baggage. “Here comes this guy passing out twenty-dollar bills to the skycaps like it’s candy,” Pagano said, of Beri. “He had nine dogs. Each one had its own cart. I was, like, ‘I can’t believe this shit!’ I offered to take over the operation from there.”
Pagano refers to himself as N.D.L.B.’s director of global logistics. He’s a licensed pilot (“I can fly jets, but I don’t fly the big tin”), and has connections at the carriers (“American Airlines loves me”) and the airports (“I’m tight with one of the union reps for the airport police at LAX”), and so has been instrumental in getting pallets of Chinese rescue dogs to the U.S. “The dogs fly in my name,” Pagano said. “I’m on the A.W.B.—the master air waybill. I’m there on the loading dock at the cargo terminal. I’m the one handling the dogs, and they are a constant reminder why we give a shit.”
One morning, shortly before Beri left for his latest trip to China, Pagano and I drove out to Jersey City to meet him. He was holed up at N.D.L.B.’s new “base station,” as Pagano called it, in a modest vinyl-sided house in the Heights section owned by an activist who helps direct N.D.L.B.’s operations. Pagano called Beri on his phone to tell him we’d arrived. “I’m still in bed,” Beri said.
“He works through the night,” Pagano explained. “China is twelve hours ahead.”
We waited outside for Beri to shower and dress. A tall young man named Ian McMath joined us on the porch. He had on black jeans and a black jean jacket emblazoned with N.D.L.B. slogans. McMath, a rock musician and a filmmaker from Arkansas, had been living for years in Beijing when a friend recruited him to do some work on behalf of the animal rescuer Marc Ching, who, according to McMath, wanted incriminating footage of Beri, in order to discredit him. “Jeff has a lot of adversaries,” McMath said. “There are a lot of competitive and egocentric operators.” Ching, who had solicited the support of Hollywood figures such as Matt Damon and Joaquin Phoenix, has been accused by the Los Angeles Times of, among other things, paying butchers in Indonesia to blowtorch a dog to death on camera—effectively perpetrating the horrors he was purporting to protest. Ching denied these charges, blaming them on rival rescuers, and told the Times that “groups slander each other constantly.” (Ching is also facing criminal charges for making fraudulent claims about a pet-products business he runs, the Petstaurant. Pretrial hearings are this week.) He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“He’s a very nefarious individual,” Pagano said. “He was using Yulin to get famous.”
“That guy hired my friend, who sent me out to do a hit on Jeff,” McMath said. After seeing Beri in action, he switched sides, and became his primary videographer: “I’m like a propaganda lieutenant.”
Beri greeted us at the top of the stairs. Thickset, with dark hair and some stubble, sockless in gym slides, he was dressed, like McMath, in N.D.L.B. merch. His T-shirt bore the dates and locations of rescue operations in China, as though recounting a concert tour. (His Budokan: June, 2019, Guangzhou, thirteen hundred dogs.) The house had been freshly renovated. There was one room for six dogs, carpeted with fake turf, another for computer servers and film equipment, and a bedroom for passers-through like Beri. In a conference room, with four analog clocks on the wall set to different time zones, a giant TV was tuned to Bloomberg News, on mute, and classic rock played loud. McMath seemed to be filming us.
Beri began enumerating canine horrors, amid a confusion of places and dates. I mentioned that I’d been deeply upset by a video that Pagano had shown me of a golden retriever being blowtorched alive. “I hate people,” Beri said. “It’s hard for me to be in public. I suffer panic attacks, anxiety.”
Beri was born in Rego Park, Queens, and grew up on Long Island. His parents, from Hungary, were Holocaust survivors. They always had dogs. Beri studied jewelry design and engineering in Budapest and then became a master jeweller. For a decade, he was the director of product manufacturing and quality control at David Yurman. (“He’s a force of nature,” Yurman told me. “He’s like Robin Hood. Sometimes he doesn’t know when enough’s enough. ‘Jeff is manic’ is ‘the sky is blue.’ ”) Beri had been manufacturing jewelry in China for decades but didn’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese. His first dog trip to China was in the spring of 2016, with Marc Ching, with the avowed goal of rescuing ten thousand dogs before the annual Yulin spectacle. But Ching had nowhere to kennel the dogs in China. Beri built out a couple of what he called safe houses in Nanning, about two hours from Yulin.
