Most of you on here are doodle lovers, so this is somewhat of a non-issue (until you post photos of your adorable doodle online and get the occasional friend or family member to jump on their soapbox).
None of this is to say that adoption is bad. Rescues and shelters do great work, and there are so many people out there with big hearts who are adopting/rescuing and even rehabilitating dogs. Every life matters. Every dog’s life matters - whether it’s bred by a puppy mill, backyard breeder, accidental litter, purebred breeder, or designer breed breeder, ethical, reputable, whatever.
I get so many hateful comments on my posts sometimes about my doods, coming from these “adopt don’t shop people” who don’t know me or how my program is run. I often click over to their profile, and see words like “dog-lover” and “animal-lover”, and I think to myself, my doodles are dogs too!
Granted, breeders do tend to have a negative reputations. There ARE “bad breeders” out there, who don’t provide proper vet care, socialization, health testing (for parents), sanitary environments, and who avoid all responsibility for their puppies once they go to their forever homes.
Ethical breeders will be licensed and inspected in accordance with their state’s laws, and meet standardized sanitation and space requirements. Ethical breeders provide proper vet care to both their moms, and puppies! Ethical breeders health test their dogs to ensure, as far as is humanly possible, that the parents will produce healthy offspring. Ethical breeders socialize and desensitize their puppies, and even go the extra mile of crate training, start puppies on potty training, etc. Here’s the big one: Ethical breeders will always take a dog or puppy back, so that none of the dogs that they produce ever end up in a shelter. They also have a strict spay/neuter policy to promote responsible dog ownership, so that we don’t end up with unwanted pregnancies that would potentially result in more dogs in shelters. Ethical breeders provide a health guarantee, and lifetime breeder support.
Ultimately, we can all be curious about and respect each other’s decisions, as long as those decisions don’t result in harm to each other, or our sweet doggos. (But if you think about it, if people chose to support ethical breeders, instead of backyard breeders/puppy mills/bad breeders, eventually, the world would be a better place for our dogs!)
Comments