Shady dog dealers are illegally selling puppies out of the trunk of a Mercedes SUV for thousands of dollars, The Post has learned.
At least two men were caught on video Oct. 23 and posted on TikTok brazenly hawking close to a dozen miniature and toy poodles in broad daylight in the Diamond District — despite the state banning dog sales and the city outlawing backyard breeding last year.
“You can probably get $3,500 to $4,500 for the dog,” barks one of the men to about eight people gathered around the car on West 47th Street.
“Because they’re going to be so small,” said the pooch peddler, dressed in black, about the price. “They got everything – they got shots,” he said of the tiny 9-week-old pups packed in the back of the SUV, which had sawdust spread around the trunk.
“They’re almost – they’re basically going to be teacups,” he bragged about the cuddly merchandise. “Because this is considered a toy.”
The man also boasted the puppies were AKC certified – a designation from the American Kennel Club that recognizes a dog as purebred.
The men popped up on more than one occasion. On Oct. 17, a Post reporter witnessed the men plying their trade at the same spot on West 47th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues around 2 pm.
Some eyewitnesses were horrified.
“I couldn’t look at them, it just made me so sad,” said one passerby and animal lover.
“This is 100% illegal,” Allie Taylor, President of Voters for Animal Rights told The Post. “That’s why we passed the backyard breeder bill, because we knew that going after pet stores wasn’t going to be enough – that there were multiple sources where people were getting dogs from.”
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The truck sales have been going on since at least the summer.
A white Mercedes SUV with no license plates was spotted on Canal Street and Broadway on Aug. 1, in a photo shared on Facebook.
“Absolutely horrible,” raged the anonymous social media poster, who said the puppies looked “sick” and that they called police.
The NYPD did not answer The Post’s question about the August incident.
An Instagram video shared the next day by the account New Yorkers showed the same puppies in a shopping cart on Canal Street, amid a sea of knock-off Saint-Laurent and Goyard wallets.
“Yo, Canal’s anything,” a man is heard saying in the video. “Buddy got dogs for sale. You heard on Canal Street. Buddy got dogs on Canal Street for sale. I swear you could buy anything from here.”