AMES, Ia. — Mindi Callison has a bone to pick with famed singer Sarah McLachlan.

It’s not that the 29-year-old has anything against McLachlan personally, but Callison detests those American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals commercials where “In The Arms of an Angel” plays as pictures of sad, cold, hungry dogs flash across the screen.

Don’t get Callison wrong, as the founder of Bailing Out Benji, an anti-puppy mill education and advocacy organization, she’s a bona fide bleeding heart when it comes to animals.

During a turbulent childhood marked by homelessness, Callison found regularity and peace nursing stray cats back to health. She organized seven years of protests after discovering a local pet store sold puppy mill dogs, ending the demonstrations only after the shop closed in January.

And Callison’s walls are so covered with pictures of dogs she’s spirited from puppy mills to forever families that her house feels like a monument to four-legged friends.

That deep love of animals, rooted in a difficult past, is why Callison loathes those ASPCA ads. When people hear that sad sax interlude, they change the channel, she said.

Callison is sick of people changing the channel, and it’s become her life’s work to figure out how to wake up the public to the horrors of puppy mills.

This year, Callison, who is one of the Register’s People to Watch for 2019, has the chance to reach more people on a larger stage than ever before.

After almost a decade of educating, protesting and agitating for dogs in her off-time from being a preschool teacher, Callison has been handed a grant that will allow her to work exclusively on Bailing Out Benji for five years.

With Callison fully dedicated to fighting puppy mills, the venture capital firm funding her hopes Bailing Out Benji will become as influential as charities such as Mercy for Animals or Friends of Animals.

Now, Callison — whose passion is infectious, but who has no formal nonprofit experience — is tasked with growing into the shoes that have been put on her feet so she can save a lot of paws.

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Which brings her back to McLachlan. You simply can’t change minds with McLachlan, Callison said. Even with something as emotional as the suffering of man’s best friend, you must stay even-keeled.

“You want to be calm and you want to have facts because if you don’t, you're that person who's crying or you're that radical who believes all dog breeding should be outlawed,” Callison said. “As soon as you are labeled that way, you are not going to get anywhere, and no dogs will be saved and we’re back at square one.”

So, Bailing Out Benji focuses on numbers, such as how Iowa is home to 10 of the nation's 100 worst puppy mills, a term for large-scale breeding operations where profits from puppies are put above the health and well-being of their parents, according to the Humane Society of the U.S.

Or how this year the Jasper County Animal Rescue League and Humane Society has taken in almost 100 dogs from derelict breeders — a handful of which had such serious medical conditions that they died almost immediately after being surrendered.

And if all else fails, Callison has a meme for that: Like the one she released on “Star Wars” premiere night that showed Darth Vader surrounded by rescued puppy mill survivors emblazoned with the phrase, “Even the darkest force in the universe hates puppy mills.”

“She’s a brand genius who is fighting an industry that has cute puppies in front and ugliness in the back,” said Rory Kress, an investigative journalist who has written about puppy mills. “She takes this smart, savvy, humane angle that no one else in the field is taking, and I think it's absolutely brilliant.

"If anyone is going to get the public and legislators and law enforcement to listen to these dogs, it’s going to be Mindi.”

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Tethered to reality

After momentary excitement over the doorbell, Callison’s five dogs — some of whom are survivors of puppy mills — settled into various states of repose as episodes of “The Office” blared in the background.

Callison plays the show on repeat during the workday because, after years of being a preschool teacher, she needs noise.

“People are always like, 'Woah, you have five dogs? That must be crazy!' But, no, this is my life,” Callison said as one of her dogs let out a big sigh.

Callison and animals have always had a symbiotic relationship, with each offering the other much-needed comfort and serenity.

Callison’s young life was marked by parents who struggled with addictions and were unable to land stable jobs. Callison and her sister, Brandi Webber, 18 months her junior, were enrolled in at least 14 schools before either started middle school.

During the worst times, the family lived in tents or motels or out of the back of their car.

By the nature of their frenetic lives, the siblings happened upon stray cats regularly. They’d bring them back to the campsite and nurse them to health, always promising to find them a better home.

The routine of caring for the animals "tethered them to reality,” said Callison.

“We could forget what was going on in our lives to take care of somebody else,” Callison said.

That benevolent streak continued even as their parents kicked their habits and settled down. In high school, the sisters sprang into action when a rumor circulated that several seniors were messing with a turtle in the parking lot.

Planting themselves in between a dozen wrestlers and the amphibian, they refused to move until someone called animal control.

“Mentally, for us, that was just like you are not going to hurt this thing that is smaller and weaker than you,” Webber said, “and if you do, well, you’ll have to hurt us first.”

'Silly little girl'

Like all good millennial stories, the tale of Bailing Out Benji starts with a blog.

As a student at Simpson College, Callison, away from her sister and homesick, soothed herself the only way she knew how — with animals. She would stop by the local PetLand and ask to play with the puppies in the window.

She fell in love with a little husky and noticed that as days went by and the dog grew, he wasn’t being moved to a bigger cage. And a few times, he had messed in his cage and walked around in the feces, leaving his paws red and callused.

When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she bought the dog and brought him home.

Not two weeks later, a local news station did a story on the puppy mills where PetLand purchased their dogs.

"What horrors had her little puppy seen before coming to her apartment?" Callison wondered.

“I was 19 and I really couldn't see past my own toes,” she said. “My dog could have been sick. My dog could get a genetic disorder and die. My dog had suffered. But I didn't see the big picture.”

At least, not yet.

That night, a spark was lit and Callison began spending her off-time researching puppy mills.

A few years later, pushed by her husband to put her investigations online, Callison started her blog, "Bailing Out Benji."

"Bailing Out" was a nod to how in the late 2000s banks and car manufacturers were getting bailed out, and "Benji" just sounded like any dog. America was reaching out to save these industries, Callison said, but who was helping the dogs?

Callison’s online research led her to have offline encounters at pet shops across Iowa, including the local Ames store, Dyvig’s Pet Shoppe.

About seven years ago, Dyvig’s owner told Callison where he purchased the dogs he sold. She pulled inspection reports on those breeders and discovered they all had multiple violations.

She went back and told the owner that he bought from breeders with horrible histories that were, for all intents and purposes, puppy mills.

The owner gave Callison a look so cold and piercing that it still haunts her today. "Silly little girl," she remembers him saying, "you have no idea what you are talking about."

Within days, Callison organized a protest outside the store and scheduled another one for the following weekend and another the week after that.

“We were there when it was minus 20 degrees or 105 degrees,” Callison said. “Even if we were just protesting for 20 minutes or whatever, we were there consistently every single Saturday and Sunday.”

What Callison didn’t know as she posted regularly about their protests was that people all around the country were starting to wake up to puppy mills — and they wanted to do something about it.

Dogs in 'heartbreaking' condition

In Round Rock, Texas, just outside of Austin, Rachel Yarger had her eyes opened to the horrors of puppy mills when she got a four-legged friend from a pet store she later found out bought from a large-scale breeder.

Yarger and a group of concerned citizens tried to ban the sale of puppy mill dogs in their little town, going to city council meetings and talking with the mayor.

Nobody would listen.

Their Plan B was to get some buzz going by holding public education events, but starting marketing materials and research from scratch seemed daunting.

What if, Yarger thought, they could become a chapter of an already established anti-puppy mill nonprofit?

Enter, Bailing Out Benji.

“We needed to reach our entire public, all parties, and Mindi took a moderate, intelligent position on puppy mills that I think did that,” Yarger said. “It wasn’t 'all breeding is bad and the only solution is adoption.' It was 'promote adoption first, but there is a difference between good and bad breeding and we are against bad breeders.'”

Callison thought a while about Yarger’s offer to form a chapter of Bailing Out Benji. The group had been her baby for so long, but franchising would help spread her message, so she ultimately couldn’t say no.

Three years later, Bailing Out Benji has 20 chapters in 15 states. And not a moment too soon.

After President Donald Trump took office in 2017, inspection reports on dog breeders that had regularly been posted were suddenly removed. The administration cited privacy concerns due to dog-breeding operations being at people’s homes, but the decision was chastised by politicians on both sides.

Recently, a few heavily redacted inspections have appeared again, which has allowed organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States to track violations, but not who is committing them.

"We are seeing more puppy-millers just aren’t letting inspectors on the property to inspect, so more ‘no access’ violations," said John Goodwin, senior director of the Humane Society’s Stop Puppy Mills Campaign. "But the bigger trend that we are seeing is a complete lack of the enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act at all. The USDA is giving out significantly fewer citations, and when I say significantly fewer I mean that in August there was none."

"There’s no way that they have gone from having a high volume of violations to none because, ‘Oh, hey, everyone is suddenly following every aspect of the law,’” he said.

In Iowa, dog breeders regularly surrender animals deemed too old or otherwise deficient to local shelters and rescues.

At the Jasper County Humane Society, which has accepted almost 100 puppy mill dogs this year, the animals are surrendered in "heartbreaking" condition, said Rachel Long, the shelter’s executive director.

Almost all of them have severe dental problems, Long said. Other issues run the gamut from overgrown toenails to open sores to infections to cancer.

"These guys literally have to learn how to be dogs,” Long said. “But to watch them come from that life and grow into being a beloved pet is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.”

Callison has seen her share of sick surrendered dogs over the years. Their faces flashed in her mind every time she protested outside Dyvig’s, reminding her why she was spending her Saturday standing in the cold.

After seven years of protesting, the store closed in January. A dozen people came out for the final January gathering, where wind chills clocked in well-below zero.

When the doors finally locked, the protesters decamped to a party, celebrating with a cake that read, "Silly Little Girl."

"It was our way of taking that back from him," Webber said. "You think Mindi is a silly little girl? Well, that silly little girl just shut you down."

Doing something about it

Since Dyvig’s closed, Callison has been going through an identity crisis. She used to have a hands-on-puppies job, but her new role is a boardroom position.

Her days now are filled meeting with consultants about fundraising and strategies to build a foundation that will make Bailing Out Benji a household name.

Nothing about this new life feels comfortable yet and she has a lot of questions, but Callison is used to finding the regular in the irregular.

"Mindi wasn’t a lobbyist," Frees said. "She wasn't a politician, and what could be a more exhausting job than to be a preschool teacher. But she heard about a bad breeder and was like, 'no, I am not going to stand for that' and she did something about it. That’s powerful.”

Cut away the researching and the blog and the protesting and the grant and everything else about Bailing Out Benji’s rise and what’s left is Callison’s passion. It's that devotion to animals that was born when she was giving what little food she had to strays and watching them grow.

She and those strays were kindred spirits, each helping the other walk through trauma and come out better on the other side. She feels the same about the dogs she’s saved from puppy mills and seen flourish.

Callison hasn’t celebrated Dyvig’s closing because she didn’t actually want him to close. She wanted him to partner with a local shelter; she wanted him to help discarded dogs survive.

Looking at her own dogs, still lounging, she sighs. Even with the progress she has made across the country, this fight is just beginning, she said.

"The dogs can’t speak for themselves, so I have to speak for them," she said. "And believe me, I’m not going anywhere."

COURTNEY CROWDER, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. You can contact her at (515) 284-8360 or ccrowder@dmreg.com. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.

About 'People to Watch'

The Des Moines Register's "15 People to Watch in 2019" are movers and shakers, givers and doers. They were chosen by Register news staff from scores of reader nominations. Their stories will run in the Register through Jan. 6. To read about past People to Watch, visit desmoinesregister.com/peopletowatch.

Mindi Callison

BORN: August 1989 in Des Moines

RESIDENCE: Ames

EDUCATION: Simpson College, bachelor's degree in early childhood education

OCCUPATION: Executive director of Bailing Out Benji

CLAIM TO FAME: Transforming a blog about puppy mills into a national nonprofit

FAMILY: Husband, Jason; five dogs; one cat

WEBSITE: BailingOutBenji.com

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