Where to buy a puppy
Posted under: Where should you get a puppy of any breed?
We first want you to consider rescue. However, if you decide that your home or your family is better served by purchasing a purebred dog, you have three choices: A show or performance breeder (this would include those who show steadily in conformation, agility, obedience, flyball, herding, etc.), a non-show breeder, and a pet shop.
Many people think that because some breeding is wrong (and it is), then all breeding must be wrong. They think that because we have a homeless dog problem, nobody should ever breed dogs or produce puppies.
This objection brings up two important questions:
1) Do we *need* dogs, and
2) Do we need *more* dogs.
The first is a question of function, the second of numbers.
First, function. Thankfully, there are many dogs in the US that still serve a vital function. Those MUST be bred pure in order to have predictability of size, temperament, and ability. For example, police dogs, military dogs, herding dogs, livestock guardian dogs, sporting dogs, hunting dogs/hounds, etc. None of those functions can be reliably and safely filled except by carefully bred purebreds; this is just a fact. Good breeders fill a vital niche in terms of producing dogs that are truly predictable.
If I need to invest thousands in training a police dog, I cannot just go to a shelter and get a German Shepherd Dog. If it will do bitework at all, the bite will probably be hectic and the dog won’t be trustworthy.
If I need to have a dog beside me to retrieve the ducks I kill for my family to eat, I can’t take a chance on just any Lab mix.
Well-bred Cardigans are a very reliable herder and farm dog; people looking for a herding dog can’t risk failure with a random-bred collie mix.
Some breeders put the same amount of care and high expectations into producing mixed-breed dogs as many of us do into purebred dogs – the deliberate hybrids produced for flyball, for example; the lurchers; the bear dogs. However, those mixed-breed dogs are produced for a reason and their breeders have a definition of success or failure that is very similar to mine as a show breeder. These breeders care about structure, their dogs must do a job, they keep and breed only the exceptional ones. If you are considering a deliberately bred mixed-breed, insist on the breeder being just as invested in dogsport as any show breeder.
In addition to those owners who have to have a working dog, there are many other dogs, in companion roles, that live in families that do not feel comfortable, and never would, adopting a dog. They purchase a dog because they need the reassurance that their puppy comes with the warranties and support of a breeder who is an expert of decades in his or her breed. This ideal suitability for companionship can be seen as a function as important as any protection dog, because many families need dogs with characteristics that are predictable and unique. If you’re a couch potato who hates hunting or the outdoors, bringing a hound or a beagle from the shelter would be moving a dog from one prison right into another prison. It would be a prison with nice couches, but no less wrong and frustrating for the dog. Without good and responsible breeders of purebred dogs, those families could ethically own NO dog, because if you can’t be not just an OK home but a GREAT home for the particular dog you shouldn’t own him or her at all.
There is honestly a desperate need for good breeders in this country. You see, every single dog had a breeder. Aside from the very few truly street-bred litters coming into shelters, every one of those dogs is a breeder-produced dog. You can’t get away from the ethical conundrum by just going to a shelter; you are either adopting an abandoned breeder puppy or buying a carefully produced breeder puppy. It’s just that bad or irresponsible or careless breeders outnumber good breeders by a thousand to one.
Now, about numbers. We actually know about how many millions of homes are open and are being filled by a dog (purchase or adoption) each year. A VERY generous estimate is that 5% of these are being filled by carefully bred (show-bred or working-bred) purebreds. Perhaps another 10 or 20 percent are filled by puppy-mill-produced dogs. That still leaves TONS of homes. In fact, there are many, many millions more homes than there are homeless dogs. The idea that shelters are filled with “overflow” dogs is largely an illusion. The problem is that people are not obtaining dogs from good breeders or from shelters/rescues, which are the only two ethical ways to get a dog. They are purchasing puppies (almost exclusively) from careless and unethical breeders.
These breeders, which are inaccurately called “backyard” breeders, are the ones producing purebreds or fad crossbred dogs with little thought to quality or to either perpetuating or increasing the quality of a breed. Some have 10 dogs and call themselves great breeders. Some have two dogs and have a litter “for the kids.” Tens of thousands of them breed to “recoup” what they spent on the bitch, or as a profitable side business. They are producing dogs in the tens of millions, dogs that should never have been created, that have no function and no intended place in the world. They make the cheap, cute puppies that are bought on a whim and then when the older dog doesn’t get along with it the older dog is dumped. They sell to owners who have no stability and who dump the dogs in the shelter on the way to the next apartment. They come to new homes with health and temperament problems that the owners feel they can’t overcome, so when they’re not tiny and soft anymore they’re taken to the pound.
The shelters are crowded with untrained, out of control, big and small dogs that had homes as puppies but were abandoned as ADULTS. If people would perceive dogs as lifelong commitments who must be trained and socialized and cared for, if buyers would insist that sellers put some commitment behind the dogs they sell, our “overpopulation” would be over. So many people are serial puppy buyers–buy a puppy, get it to one or two or three years old, it eats the couch or poops on the rug or chases the cat and they blame the dog or the breeder or whatever and dump it. But the kids “need” a dog, right? So they go buy another puppy, and the same stupid mistakes repeat themselves.
The puppy-dump-puppy cycle leads to an artificially inflated market for puppies, when in fact if they were keeping the dog they originally had they would have owned ONE dog for 12 years, not four or five. And if they were not out there buying puppies like crazy, the bad breeders and careless breeders and puppy mills would find that their sources of income were falling and they’d quit making so many puppies.
So, to answer your question, YES, we do need purebred dogs. YES, we do need more carefully and ethically bred dogs. YES, we need to educate buyers so they’ll realize that they should be obtaining dogs from one of those two places (show/field breeder OR shelter/rescue). If we do those things, eventually careless breeding won’t be so fun or so lucrative; if careless breeders have to keep entire litters because there’s no demand for their puppies, careless and unethical breeding will stop in one generation (because it is no fun to keep a whole bunch of poorly bred, unhealthy, rambunctious puppies). That’s where the energy should be going.
How do we work to make sure that our Cardigans don’t end up contributing to the rescue population? I carefully screen owners, and trust me if you can leave here without knowing that this puppy better be important to you and better be TRAINED then you weren’t listening. I also force (via a contract with a liquidated damages clause) owners to return any dog to ME if they can’t take care of it–it may never be transferred to another human or given up to a rescue or shelter. I require my name to be listed as a second contact on the dog’s microchip so I can be called immediately if the dog is turned in to a shelter. And what I do is absolutely standard procedure for good and reputable breeders. In fact, many do even more.
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