WAYNESBORO and BEAVER FALLS, Pa. (WHTM) — In early 2023, when life as everyone knew it ended in East Palestine, Ohio, frantic dog owners rushed to one of the closest places that could take care of their pets while they figured out everything else: Darlington Paws, just over the border in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Some dogs stayed there for months.

“They’re literally seven minutes from me,” said Craig Glass, who owns the boarding kennel. “So last year I was able to help.”

And this year?

“I wouldn’t have been able to, especially last minute,” Glass said.

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That’s because of what kennels are learning Pennsylvania’s new dog law says, or at least seems to say, based on information they say they received, both written (when they received their license renewal notices) and orally (from the local Department of Agriculture inspectors who visit their kennels, typically twice a year), as well as the text of the law itself.

The changes, as they understand them, come after Senate Bill 746 passed Pennsylvania’s House and Senate by wide bipartisan margins; Governor Josh Shapiro (D) signed it into law.

One new section says: “The owner or operator of a boarding kennel shall require the owner of each out-of-state dog for which the boarding kennel is taking control to provide a certificate of vaccination and an interstate certificate of veterinary inspection at the time the dog enters the boarding kennel.” Elsewhere in the text, the law says that certificate of veterinary inspection — or CVI, as the document is known known — must come from an accredited vet in the state where the dog owner lives.

The Pennsylvania law doesn’t stipulate these next parts, but the practical impact of that for John Conlon of Hagerstown, Maryland, who boards his two-year-old black lab Ellie at Marsh Run Kennels in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania?

A $179 certificate (that’s what a vet charged him) good for just 30 days (that’s how long the Maryland certificate says it’s valid). Conlon says the certificate is redundant with other vet records he always provided the kennel owners — at no cost or hassle in addition to Ellie’s routine veterinary appointment — to prove she is healthy and vaccinated.

Betsy Stevens, who owns Marsh Run, felt so bad telling Conlon about the requirement — as she understood it — and then hearing what he paid that she gave him a discount for the full amount when he boarded Ellie at the kennel earlier this month while he traveled to New York to celebrate his brother’s 70th birthday.

But Stevens says footing the bill for every Maryland customer’s certificate would be unsustainable: Some of them board their dogs for short periods all year long and would seem to need as many as 12 certificates per year, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

So why not just give up on out-of-state business?

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Being located where she is, Stevens says 43 percent of her business comes from outside Pennsylvania. The immediate impact? Plans for what she says will be a new quarter-million-dollar, state-of-the-art building on her property are on hold.

“I’ve had people cancel their reservations with us because they said, ‘I can’t afford $200 every 30 days,'” which is how much she says some vets have quoted other clients — the $179 Conlon paid, in other words, was not an aberration.

Glass said some of his most lucrative past business has come from people who were moving to Pennsylvania and brought their dog ahead of time so they could focus on packing and moving, sometimes for a month or more. Lately, he has had to tell those kinds of prospective customers about the CVI requirement.

“They just basically said, ‘Thank you,'” Glass said. “And that was basically the end of the conversation after that.”

Exasperated, Stevens says she called the office of Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Chambersburg), who represents Waynesboro, and learned he actually voted against the new dog law. So did Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-York), whose district next to Mastriano’s also borders Maryland. Mastriano and Phillips-Hill were two of just seven dissenters among 50 state Senators; six of the seven represent districts that border other states.

But another Republican in a border district — Sen. Elder Vogel (R-Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties) — was the bill’s primary sponsor.

Vogel’s district includes Beaver Falls, where Darlington Paws took in the dogs displaced by the Norfolk Southern derailment, as well as Enon Valley, Pennsylvania, where abc27’s call was the first Brandy Gingras — who hadn’t yet received her annual renewal paperwork — had heard about the change.

She made a few phone calls and verified the change — or at least, what everyone who has heard anything understands to be the change unless everyone is mistaken.

“I’m hoping that they can see that this is just not a great idea in any way fashion or form because it’s going to hurt a lot of people,” Gingras said. “If I lose my Ohio customers, I’m going to lose my business.”

Could this all be a big mistake? Or an unintended consequence of a broad law intended to keep dogs safe and healthy — and to prevent the spread of communicable diseases in places where dogs come into contact with one another — which received the support not only of legislators in both parties but also some animal welfare organizations?

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And regardless, will anyone consider doing what the kennels and customers on both sides of state lines are asking for: either clarify that this is all a big misunderstanding or update the law again to remove or relax the CVI requirement?

Sen. Vogel’s office referred abc27 News to the Department of Agriculture, which didn’t immediately respond.

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