On the subject of purebred dogs

[Anonymous]

I was reading the thread about purebred puppies and scoffing to myself. The vast majority of people will say they went with a “reputable” breeder but you know that statistically that can’t be true, right? Most people get their dogs from backyard breeders or even puppy mills and either don’t know or don’t care. These individuals are producing puppies for a profit, not to further the breed. They are not doing any of the extensive genetic and health testing of the parent dogs that is necessary to know if their puppies will be healthy (for example, such as x-rays of their labs’ or goldens’ hips and elbows) because this is expensive and time consuming and will possibly result in making it unethical to breed their dogs. They're not showing their parent dogs or competing with them in dog sports because this is, again, time consuming and expensive and counterproductive to making a profit. But you need the genetic tests, the x-rays, eye exams, cardiac exams, etc. and show results to tell you if the breeders are producing puppies to breed standard. Once the puppies are born, most BYBs are not socializing them properly because this is expensive and time consuming and they take advantage of the fact that most first time buyers are unaware that they should be doing this. They’re breeding their dams (female dogs) several times a year in order to make a profit and don’t care about the mother’s health or comfort.

A “reputable” breeder will only breed their dam once a year and only 2-3 times total. So it’s more like a really expensive hobby that occasionally brings in income than a job. Demand for dogs is much higher than responsible breeders can produce so hence BYBs puppy mills abound.

Also if you have a doodle, you went to a BYB by definition. Doodles are not a breed.

[Anonymous]

OMG. My eyes just rolled right outta my head and across the floor. Stop with the self-righteous crap.

[Anonymous]

My doodle breeder does extensive testing on all the potential dams and sires. Get over yourself.

https://www.goldendoodles.net/our-dams-and-sires/

[Anonymous]

OP’s tone might be preachy but they’re not wrong. It’s why so many breeds have serious health problems from pugs to GSDs to retrievers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My doodle breeder does extensive testing on all the potential dams and sires. Get over yourself.

https://www.goldendoodles.net/our-dams-and-sires/

18 adult dogs is not a reputable breeder. This is backyard breeding, approaching puppy mill territory depending on how the dogs live day-to-day, and they say that they don't even test for the things on that list if the parents were "cleared."

[Anonymous]

As long as dogs are bred in a healthy way (no furthering or generating genetic defects or disease), treated well and there is a market for their adoption, who cares?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My doodle breeder does extensive testing on all the potential dams and sires. Get over yourself.

https://www.goldendoodles.net/our-dams-and-sires/

The problem with doodles is that you’re deliberately breeding for a mishmash of traits that you can’t predict. You can end up with the worst health problems of both.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As long as dogs are bred in a healthy way (no furthering or generating genetic defects or disease), treated well and there is a market for their adoption, who cares?

Most importantly, from a moral standpoint the dogs at these operations are very rarely treated well. They're bred too frequently for their health and starting at too young of an age, they're kept outside or unsocialized, the health of the mother is not prioritized. They spend some money on a website and that's all it takes to convince people this is a good place.

Less important to me, but there's also the fact they're charging people $5k/dog because that's the price set by breeders who are actually trying to improve the breed, ensure the puppies' future health, and take care of all the dogs on premises. That price is a ripoff if it's just people collecting several of the same "breed" of dogs and letting them go at it twice a year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As long as dogs are bred in a healthy way (no furthering or generating genetic defects or disease), treated well and there is a market for their adoption, who cares?

Because they’re producing dogs with temperament and serious health problems.

You might say temperament doesn’t matter but it ends up with dogs being surrendered to shelters because their owners can’t manage them.

[Anonymous]

Not OP but recently read about a study finding a high level of inbreeding in dogs. More here: https://gizmodo.com/most-dog-breeds-are-super-inbred-study-finds-1848158540/amp. Essentially they used a “genetic database made up of results from commercial DNA tests of nearly 50,000 dogs, encompassing 227 breeds in total. Then they analyzed the average genetic similarity of dogs within a breed in order to estimate their level of inbreeding on a percentage scale from 1 to 100. To further check their math, they compared their results to data from past studies that studied smaller groups of breeds.”

And found “that the average level of inbreeding within these breeds was around 25%, or about the amount of genetic similarity you would see between two siblings.”

[Anonymous]

I don’t understand what OP is saying about statistical impossibility. Wouldn’t you need data on the number of puppy Mills and the number of reputable breeders to know whether it’s statistically likely that most pure breeds come from reputable breeders? I’ve never seen that data. If there are only 1000 puppy Mills in the US and 100,000 reputable breeders, it’s not statistically unlikely.
Plus—this should be obvious—DCUM posters are not a random sample such that you could make those conclusions about statistical likelihood. There are a number of confounding variables including that posters are concentrated in a region with relatively few puppy Mills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As long as dogs are bred in a healthy way (no furthering or generating genetic defects or disease), treated well and there is a market for their adoption, who cares?

they are not “ adopted” if they’re from a breeder, they’re sold. There is a difference.

[Anonymous]

As human beings we need to do better by the animals that live on this planet with us. There are hundreds od dogs euthanized daily because they’re not adopted while we pay breeders to breed others so they look a certain way. It’s madness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand what OP is saying about statistical impossibility. Wouldn’t you need data on the number of puppy Mills and the number of reputable breeders to know whether it’s statistically likely that most pure breeds come from reputable breeders? I’ve never seen that data. If there are only 1000 puppy Mills in the US and 100,000 reputable breeders, it’s not statistically unlikely.
Plus—this should be obvious—DCUM posters are not a random sample such that you could make those conclusions about statistical likelihood. There are a number of confounding variables including that posters are concentrated in a region with relatively few puppy Mills.

Agree with everything except for the part with few puppy mills...there are plenty of puppy mills in easy driving distance of the DMV. Tons of them in Pennsylvania for example. And VA outside of NOVA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As human beings we need to do better by the animals that live on this planet with us. There are hundreds od dogs euthanized daily because they’re not adopted while we pay breeders to breed others so they look a certain way. It’s madness.

I hear you. And I know about purebreds because my family bred them, showed them in dog shows, and trained them for skills competitions on our farm.

But unless you're really into the dog show lifestyle and circuit (I call it a lifestyle), I'm not sure why one would get a purebred. Even if you're into the skills competitions agility is probably the most "fun" and the best show of pure athleticism and I've seen mutts do excellent in agility.