Meet Boulder and Scully – two happy dogs who love nothing more than bouncing around in the park.
Boulder basks in the adoration of all she meets but Scully is nervous and hates being around men.
The sisters are happy and content with devoted owners Ricki and Claire.
But this perfect life wasn’t always the case for Boulder and Scully …
They were born at an illegal puppy farm and still bear the scars
Their early lives were spent in filth-infested cages at a disease-ridden outbuilding.
They were two of 60 dogs seized by the SSPCA from Balnamoon farm, near Keith, in September 2019.
This summer, the father and son behind the outfit received a decade-long ban from keeping animals.
The undercover inspector who raided the farm tells us about the horrific scenes she witnessed …
‘Bells were ringing in my head’
It’s September 2 2019 and Susan Smith, not her real name, is on her way to Moray to buy a puppy.
Not having bought a dog before, she asked Susan to come to see it with her.
After a few texts back and forth, a meeting was arranged.
But the seller – a woman – continued to change the location.
“The whole way through she was saying about being just outside of Buckie.
“Then suddenly it was on the Cullen road just outside of Keith…
“Then it was Grange crossroads…
“There was something not right. The bells were ringing in my head.”
What they found horrified them.
“It had always been a woman my daughter had been speaking to and she said she worked from home. But Hessin said she was at college … so clearly not working from home. It was all just sounding wrong.
“I said to my daughter that if I give her a look she was just to go along with me and anything I said.”
Susan’s suspicions proved warranted when Hessin presented them with the French Bulldog puppy.
“The poor soul was filthy. It was petrified and immediately cuddled into us,” she said.
“A puppy that age shouldn’t be scared. It should be bounding about and excited. It was horrific.
“The puppy honestly smelt like something I’ve never smelt before. It was the vilest thing I have ever smelt. I can’t even explain it.
“That’s when I started asking questions …
“I asked if I could see the mum. He said they didn’t have the mum there but they had the dad. That’s when I followed him into the house.
“He went into the kitchen and shut the door straight away, leaving me in the corridor. It was filthy with mud up the walls.
“And the smell was horrific. The filth was horrific. I have never seen anything like it.
“He returned with a dog and claimed it was the dad – but it was nothing like a Frenchie, it was like a British Bulldog.
“He also claimed we were getting the pick of the litter, which I knew wasn’t true.
“I had a lot of questions for him then, and he was getting flustered. He didn’t like the questions.”
They cancelled the sale immediately and left – but the fate of that little French Bulldog still torments Susan to this day.
“I don’t think they still had that puppy when the SSPCA raided. I hope that’s because it found a forever home, though. I can only pray that it did.
“I keep thinking back to that and it will haunt me for the rest of my life.
“I can’t even explain how heartbroken I am about it all.”
Choosing not to buy is the only way puppy farming will stop
Susan said the tough decision to walk away without handing over cash was the only way cruel puppy farmers will be stopped in future.
“My daughter would have taken that puppy 100% had I not been there because she felt so sorry for it. She wouldn’t have thought about the consequences – she would have just taken that puppy.
“I felt so bad leaving that puppy there. But I just knew something was not right.
“The only way these setups will end is when people stop buying from them. If people keep buying then they will keep doing it. It’s supply and demand.
“For me to walk away was tough. I came home crying. It broke my heart but I knew I had to walk away.”
“We called the SSPCA as soon as we got back to the car and explained to them what I had seen and that this puppy needed to be taken into care.”
SSPCA phone call sparked investigation and raid
She did the right thing. That phonecall would spark the beginning of the end for the Balnamoon puppy farm – and save the lives of dozens of animals.
Lesley Boyce was an undercover officer for the SSPCA at the time and led the raid at the farm in late September 2019.
She told us about the conditions she witnessed at the property and the serious health conditions the dogs were suffering from.
“When you actually approached the property it wasn’t just within the building and outbuildings that were dirty, the whole area was quite dirty and muddy,” she said.
“People had bought pups that had health conditions.
“So that’s a huge, huge red flag for the SSPCA.
“We knew a lot of those had been advertised on Gumtree so trading standards had been building up a pattern of what they were selling and when.”
Who are the Hessins?
The Hessin family – including Samuel Ronald Hessin, 49, and Samuel Arthur Hessin, 22 – moved from Ireland to the north-east in 2018 for a “better life” and bought the 105-hectare Balnamoon Farm, along with its five-bedroom 1880s farmhouse, for more than £1,050.000.
But with failing finances the younger Hessin had taken up a Northern Irish friend’s offer of some dogs to sell on.
The animals were imported to Scotland but the Hessins pretended to buyers that they were family pets or their offspring.
By using fake names and multiple email addresses, the rogue dealers were able to advertise the dogs on websites like Gumtree and Freeads.
The crackdown into their illegal business was codenamed Operation Delphin and involved teams from the SSPCA, Moray Council trading standards and Police Scotland.
Hessin Snr and Hessin Jnr, along with two other family members, were charged with posing as legitimate breeders and selling animals who were suffering the effects of mental and physical neglect.
Once charges against the two women were dropped, the father and son accepted responsibility and changed their plea ahead of a trial at Elgin Sheriff Court.
· Samuel Hessin Snr admitted failing to meet the suitable environmental needs of dogs and puppies at Balnamoon between May 31 2019 and September 9 2019.
· Samuel Hessin Jnr admitted two different charges of misleading trading practices and causing the animals unnecessary suffering.
Phones and paperwork seized by Moray Trading Standards showed that between December 3, 2018 and September, 19, 2019 Samuel Hessin Jnr had placed multiple adverts on Gumtree and Freeads under various email addresses and contact names.
He used 18 different names and mobile numbers, 11 email addresses and three separate locations to mislead buyers into thinking they were buying family pets from a family home.
Money was motivator for Moray puppy farm
It’s estimated that they had made around £10,000 from the puppy farm operation.
Hessin Snr averted his eyes in the dock as footage of the squalid conditions was played during their sentencing.
His son’s solicitor said the pair’s illegal bidding was an attempt to shore up the “horrific figures” in the account books of the family farm.
The younger man was described as a “bit of a daft lad, not a criminal mastermind” who “just let it get out of hand”.
Each man was given a 10-year ban from keeping animals and ordered to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work.
Susan, who reported them, thought that was a “pretty pitiful” punishment, given what she saw during her traumatic visit to Balnamoon Farm.
“It’s awful. Of course, they should be in jail,” she said. “From what I saw alone they should have been in jail, never mind what I didn’t see, which was worse.
“It doesn’t seem right that they have only got a ban for 10 years and community service.
“How these poor dogs must have felt and how scared they must have felt … it really breaks my heart.
“I think it’s pretty pitiful what they got.
“It just makes me so sad and very angry.”
Moray puppy farm not the only one in the north-east
The Hessin farm is the third illegal north-east outfit to go before the courts in the past three years.
In 2019, Frank James was convicted of running Scotland’s largest illegal breeding site, near Fyvie, and jailed for nine months.
The then 54-year-old kept a huge number of dogs in cages for up for 24 hours a day and in horrendously dirty conditions with little-to-no human interaction.
SSPCA officers even found the charred remains of puppies in burned-out vehicles on his Aberdeenshire farm.
And just last year, Stacy McPhee was handed an animal ban after she sold seriously ill puppies on Gumtree to unsuspecting buyers from her Inverurie home.
The then 23-year-old pretended the puppies had been checked by a vet but all actually had serious illnesses including heart murmurs.
And those are just three of several across Scotland, that the SSPCA has dealt with over the past few years.
On top of this, more than 70 people were prosecuted for animal cruelty offences under the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006 between 2016 and 2020, with more than 60 people each of those years convicted under the act.
Following the raid at Balnamoon Farm, Lesley and the rest of the SSPCA team seized 60 dogs…
… but two of them were pregnant.
A new life for Scully and Boulder
Claire Inkson and her husband Ricki rehomed Scully and Boulder two months after they were seized from the puppy farm.
The Staffy-Collie cross dogs are now unrecognisable from the ones discovered by the SSPCA inspectors.
“Scully is still nervous,” Claire added. “We don’t know if that’s stemming from the puppy farm.
“She hates being around certain males.
“Boulder got her name because when they got her she was curled up in a little ball and with her colours she looked like a boulder.
“Boulder is different. Anybody and everybody she adores.”
Norman, another of the dogs rescued from Balnamoon Farm, was found close to death and given just a 50/50 chance of survival.
Unlike Boulder and Scully, though, Staffordshire Bull Terrier Norman – who was formerly known as Goose and bred at the farm alongside brother Maverick – faced a much tougher battle for a second chance at life.
“Norman was very scrawny and he had to be isolated from Maverick and the other dogs that were seized because he was passing a lot of blood in his poo,” his new owner said.
“We visited Norman twice as we were volunteering to help the centre team cope with all the dogs.
“Norman wasn’t like the other pups, who just wanted to play, because he was so poorly. The team at the centre were really honest with us and when we expressed an interest in rehoming him – they told us we could, provided he pulled through. They rated his chances of survival as 50/50.
“Thankfully in the run-up to Christmas 2019 he got the all-clear and we were able to take him home.
“He was really nervous at first and was shaking like a leaf the whole car journey home. But it didn’t take him long to settle in and to follow our older dog George everywhere. Now the two of them are as thick as thieves.”
‘Why is it different for animals?’
The suffering of Boulder, Scully, Norman, and all the other dogs seized from the Hessins, is now over.
For Claire, the joy she sees in her dogs’ faces as they bound after a ball in the park is tinged with sadness about how their lives started.
“If that was people, what would have happened?” she asks. “Why is it different for animals?
“Don’t tell me they don’t have feelings.”
As Ricki tosses the ball and Scully and Boulder race across the grass to fetch it, she smiles proudly and says: “I would love to meet the woman who reported the Hessins and shake her hand.”
Credits
Words and interviews by Kathryn Wylie
Scrollytelling by Emma Morrice
Graphics by Mhorvan Park
Video editing by Drew Farrell
Photography and filming by Kenny Elrick and Steve Macdougall
SEO by Jamie Cameron