Finding good breeders means more than avoiding the bad ones

People frequently ask for a list of the warning signs of a bad dog breeder, and like most pet writers, I've answered that question more than once. But like anything else, it's both easier and more useful to simply tell people what to seek out, rather than an endlessly expanding list of what to avoid.



Walt Hutchens of the Pet-Law website published a piece there that does pretty much the best job I've ever seen of explaining the importance of home breeding, why it's threatened, and why that would be a huge tragedy for dog lovers:

As with humans, much of what a dog becomes depends on the care taken with his early health and training.



Commercially bred dogs are whelped and raised as livestock, then sold to owners who begin helping them fit in to a human family eight weeks or so from the start. Most of these dogs do become satisfactory pets, however, those of us who have known many dogs believe that the best pet dogs are whelped and raised within a human family, handled and cared for as family members from the first hour. This way, each lesson can be started as it is needed, and the step from the breeder's family to a lifetime owner is small – a change of names, faces and style, but nothing like going from 'livestock' to 'pet' status after some wrong lessons have already been learned.



Personalities develop early; the home breeder knows them all and can match the two-fisted active tomboy with a human family that wants that type and the quiet "I just love you" pup with a soulmate.

He then debunks myths about home breeding being a way to make money (the opposite is true; the careful home breeding of dogs is a very expensive hobby). Then he explains just why we should care about this issue:

Home breeding has another significance: It is where purebred dogs come from. Because home breeding must be small-scale, individual dogs are rarely bred over a few times; often just once. Home breeders, moreover, are the keepers of what the breed 'is': Should a Pomeranian weigh 40 pounds? Should a whippet be built like a pig? Should a collie chase and kill small animals or try to bite a stranger?



These questions and thousands of others are answered in a 'breed standard' kept by the clubs for each breed and expanded in the hearts of the home breeders of that breed. Large commercial breeders may use purebred stock, but they make little effort to breed according to the standard.



[....]



One of the most important cost-saving measures for commercial breeders is using the same breeding stock as much as possible. This is the reverse of the policy of the usual hobby breeder and because home breeders are small-scale, hard to do for even the for-profit home breeder.



The deepest significance of home breeding is that it is the main storehouse from which the genes that produce each breed are drawn, generation by generation. Home breeders keep and use to produce the next generation perhaps ten times the genetic material as an average large commercial breeder, thus preserving the genetic diversity needed to keep our breeds alive.

He also points out that most home breeders "offer lifetime help if you have problems and have a lifetime ‘take back' guarantee if you can't keep your dog," a practice that greatly benefits the public and keeps those dogs out of shelters. But home breeding is under increasing threat:

Because hobby breeders and nearly all other home breeders care about their pups as individuals, they must cast a wide public net in order to find homes. When laws are passed that make home breeding illegal, home breeders are easily found and eliminated.



The one sentence picture of the future of dogs in America is this: On the present lawmaking road, home breeding of dogs is about to be wiped out in our country and as this occurs, purebred dogs will all but disappear.

Or at least, the carefully bred, lovingly placed ones with the safety net, the ones with the healthiest and true-to-breed-type genes, and the broadest gene pool. The big commercial breeders have powerful lobbies and coroporate interests behind them. Those who sit up late at night on whelp watch in the family room, not so much.



Full article here.

Comments

[The OTHER Pat]

I tell people that when you buy from a Responsible Breeder, you're buying from someone who's making choices and taking actions designed to look out for the best interest of the *dog* - both individually and collectively. And so - by extension - that is also good for *you* as a buyer because you become the beneficiary of those dedicated efforts.



Whereas if you buy from one of all the OTHER kinds of breeders, you're buying from someone who's making choices and taking actions designed to look out for the best interest of them*SELF*. And that is not good for you, and certainly not good for the dog you're buying, or for dogs as a whole.



Anyone who opts to buy from a breeder and who truly loves dogs is doing ALL dogs a disservice if they buy from anyone OTHER than a Responsible Breeder who does the right things for the right reasons - for the sake of the *dog*.

[Carol]

As someone who is currently not just on whelp watch, but fading puppy watch, it's so sad it's almost funny to think about all the money I'm supposedly making doing this.



Two weeks of missed work, timing testing, supplements, AI with frozen semen, delivery, and now caring 24/7 for the one puppy of the two resulting pups that I had highest hopes for, but fully expecting him to not make it through the week.



If we didn't do this for love, and love of our breed, no way on earth would we go through any of this willingly - let alone thinking that there's any money in it.



I shudder to think of this pup being born at a commercial facility, and how short his life would have been.