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How to Make Millions Selling Dogs to the Government
The story of one canine entrepreneur shows that it pays to be a military middleman
At first glance, James Lyle’s life looks ordinary. The 49-year-old is married with two daughters and lives in Pearl River, Louisiana, about 45 minutes outside of New Orleans. Like many small-town dads, Lyle spends his free time attending football games at the local high school and posting on Facebook; recently, he posted a defense of a student kicked out of a football game for wearing a Trump flag, writing that he was “extremely bothered.” And, like many parents, he’s involved in neighborhood politics, having run unsuccessful campaigns in the past few years for the school board and local council.
Lyle’s source of income, though, is not so ordinary: He has earned around $3.2 million over the last decade selling more than a thousand combat dogs to the U.S. military and the Department of Homeland Security. He buys German shepherds and Belgian Malinois from European breeders overseas and spends a few months training them to detect and locate drugs, explosives, and people. He then drives them to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio or a Department of Homeland Security facility in El Paso to sell them for a net profit of as much as $10,000 per dog. In a given year, Lyle provides these agencies with anywhere between 5% to 20% of the dogs they buy. He does this all from the comfort of his home in rural Louisiana, without an office or any employees.
I spoke with Lyle over the phone last month, catching him on one of his long drives to El Paso; he discussed his business in matter-of-fact terms, emphasizing that the canines he receives from overseas are already almost ready to serve; his job is just to instill a bit of discipline. “It has to come naturally for the dog,” he told me. “What we do is we just build on what the dog naturally has and recognize what the dog is capable of doing.”
Unorthodox as it might seem, plenty of kennel companies across the country have profited by buying similar dogs overseas and flipping them to the military. But Lyle is running his canine business all by himself and still providing a sizeable share of the military’s dogs, taking home thousands of dollars for each pooch. His success as a middleman…
