Dog Registries, the "good" ones

And where I try to tone down my swearing, because I just realized how much I was writing like that. Unless there are votes for it to continue.

Anyway, speaking of North America, there are two main "quality" dog registries where the parenthood of your dog is guaranteed. In the US, that registry is the AKC, American Kennel Club, http://www.akc.org. In Canada, that is the CKC, Canadian Kennel Club, http://www.cke.ca, not to be confused with the CKC, Continental Kennel Club, which I refer to to as the ConKC since it fits.

Dogs can easily be dual registered in CKC and AKC. The CKC accepts more breeds, I believe, at this point, but the AKC's Foundation Stock Service (FSS) has more breeds than ever, but not necessarily the same breeds. The CKC has the Barbet and that's nowhere to be seen in the AKC. There are something close to 200 breeds in the US, and close to 450 or maybe a bit over internationally, to give you an idea of what you can choose from.

In the AKC, new breeds have to hang around in the FSS for a while once they've been through the hoops that the AKC asks of them, and they sit there while those hoops are held for a while. After one to three years, the AKC decides whether to give them full AKC status. The AKC takes over ownership of the studbook (which is the history of the mating of the dogs, to say it simply. Studbooks write down names of sires, dams, the amount of puppies they have. Nowadays, some studbooks kept by breed clubs even include health information in them. Notice I said breed clubs). They make sure that the dog is truly a distinct breed, and they specifically say no labradoodles or cockapoos or puggles, ever, or even those hideous mi-ki things with their shaved heads and feet, since crosses of two distinct breeds or even a dozen distinct breeds do not a breed make. While in the FSS, as things move forward the dogs are allowed to compete in "Companion Events" which are things like agility. Once the breed can do those, they may be allowed in "Performance Events" if that's what the breed does, like hunting.

No where in the AKC do you see where quality is required. All new breeds entering the AKC have to have a three generation pedigree. All existing breeds in the AKC just have to mate with an existing AKC dog to create more AKC dogs. Which is why just because AKC is tacked on to a dog's advertisement, it doesn't mean anything. The AKC does cut off bad breeders when they go out and visit after several complaints, but they don't have enough people to do that everywhere in the world, and millers have essentially given up the AKC name because the general public believes that any registry tacked onto the dogs is just as good as AKC. "Look, look, my dogs are REGISTERED!".

There is one other major registry in the US, the UKC, United Kennel Club. It's not like the CKC or the AKC. It's mainly there for performance events, and mainly for performance breeds. Some terriers are lumped into the terrier group, others are lumped into the companion group. Yorkies are stuck in the companion group, while Jack Russells are in the terrier group. Looking at the site, they do not state how many generations back the pedigrees must be, nor how long the dog has been a distinct breed. AKC expects proof that the dog has been a distinct breed for decades. The UKC though, hosts probably more events for dogs to compete in than the AKC, and you don't have to be UKC registered to do them. The UKC also holds conformation shows, but that's tricky. Many times in many breeds, there's simply no dog to show over. Points are gotten by winning over other dogs in that breed group (such as gun dog or herding or guardian dog, according to the UKC's breakup of breeds). So there's no true comparison to other dogs of the same breed, and you can get a UKC championship on your dog without ever showing over the breed of dog you own. So, want to compete more often in hunting/lure coursing/tracking/weight pull/ terrier races etc? Look for UKC sponsored shows. Just remember that a UKC breed can mean that you're getting a made up breed of only a couple generations back, since I see no where in their standard to avoid that.

Some may have heard of the IKC. International Kennel Club, which holds a huge show in Illinois every year. This is just a club that is part of the AKC, and is specific to Illlinois. In 07, over 100,000 visitors came to see 10,000 dogs show. It's huge. And a few years ago, I won two majors two days in a row at the show, thank you very much! My doggie is niiiice. He wakes me with kisses, er, he washes the morning grease off with his tongue. Actually, dog shows are often about luck and connections, but not always. My own story proves that, and I'll get to that in yet another post. Please don't confuse this http://www.ikcdogshow.com with this horror of a pet shop in NY http://internationalkennel.com/ which has at least one other website for a second store in NY, or with The International Kennel Club Consortium, for which I was unable to find a website, which is one of those "scam" registries.

The CKC I know less about, but the breed I'm in has many Canadian fanciers so I've gained some information by osmosis, since the website is not as forthcoming with information as the AKC site is. It seems a bit more friendly towards registering specific dogs from another reputable registry (more internationally than the country below Canada, and not talking simply about the AKC. I don't know if the UKC would qualify, but I'll ask). They were ahead of the AKC in giving guidelines to avoid petshop puppies, and they seem much more quick to make changes for the welfare of the dogs. But, again, a CKC on the dog's papers doesn't mean quality. It just means that it's really truly that breed.

Unless the breeders lied.

You just can't rely on those three little letters when choosing a dog. These registries were never set up to watch for the health of the animals. That's not their purpose, and that is what many people seem to misunderstand. The letters do not guarantee anything about the health or behavior of the dog your get. Letters != quality. Repeat that mantra when you go about looking for a dog. And, maybe shockingly, there are dogs that are high quality, well bred, known pedigree, in a studbook, that are not recognized by the AKC or CKC that I would personally be thrilled to own.

Note: my own shorthand for a dog that has been bred with health and temperament in mind, including any and all health tests possible and appropriate for the breed, is the word quality.

Flea Markets

In the state I live in, and the state next to it, it's illegal to sell animals at Flea Markets. However, in this state, someone was selling a dog cage with all the contents included. A puppy was in the crate. Broken tail, obviously starving. Very badly starving, almost dying. A woman took pity on the dog, bought the crate, and immediately brought the dog to a highly respected rescue. Someone fostered the dog for a few months until it was relatively healthy. Someone close to me adopted the dog, based on my recommendation on a dog that would match well with his other dog's personality. The dog was a Pointer. At 9-10 months old, he weighed 19 pounds. As adults, they are supposed to weigh 55-75 pounds, depending on if they are 25-28 inches at the shoulder. At 9 or 10 months old, they should be weighing close to 50 pounds. So, this dog was about 25-30 pounds underweight. The someone close to me (SCM) was awesome, and gave him the care and support and the love he needed. Broken tails that have healed cannot be fixed, so the end of the Pointer's tail was always at about a 40 degree angle. Not only did this dog fatten up, get heavily muscled, but you could see the bones in his legs straightening over time, because of the nutrition. He was finally able to run like a regular dog, instead of a fucked up way of running because the bones in his legs were actually soft and rubbery, instead of hard like they should be. His personality was completely unscathed, thankfully. Happy, loving, a joy to be around. He was about 55 pounds, I believe, something like that, not an inch of fat on him.

He had a helluva nose on him. SCM's other dog was a type of pointer, and they hunted. He didn't get the second dog with the expectation of hunting him, but he turned out to be a great hunter. When he turned three, he died. SCM had him for just a little over two years. At three years of age, Pointer's immune system failed and he had massive Mast Cell Tumors all over his body, internally in his intestinal system, you could see a tiny spot of tumor grow to the size of a quarter over just a matter of 3-4 days. When he started pooping pure blood, he was put down. Unfortuantely, it had never bothered him emotionally. He was the same cheerful, loving, happy dog that we had to kill. And yes, I was there and held him as he went.

He was a product of hunter greed. Many many shit hunters breed a litter every year, try and sell off the puppies to keep just one. They dump the puppies in shelters or on the sides of the street, for all I know, to just keep the one that they will hunt with for a year. Then they dump that dog in the off season, because it's too expensive to keep a dog for a year. But somehow it's less expensive to breed every year?

On the other hand, there are extremely responsible hunters who do not do this, who rescue the dogs of the breed they choose (you can't rescue everything, no matter how much you'd want to, and by choosing to rescue the breeds they hunt, that means those dogs won't end up in shelters, which relieves the overall burden of dogs in rescue).

So, watch out at your local Flea Markets for this thing. It happens all the time.

Note: I got the initial weight of the dog wrong so I fixed it. It was less than I remembered. Plus, I checked his history with the rescue, and the information on the site was different than what was given to SCM. It wasn't very different, so I'm not going to bother to change it, other than it happened in this state. The end result is the same.

What should I post next?

I'm working on a post about dogs from millers to petshops, and an additional post about millers to auctions to millers. Those are more intense research and I'm probably having a surgery next week, as well. So, some shorter topics would be best right now for me.

What would you like to hear about? Craigslist throwaway dogs? Newspaper ads? Puppies and dogs sold at flea markets, in an illegal way, which is how I can tell the story of a dog that someone close to me got, and what happened to the dog in the end, which is sad, and had nothing to do with the care he got. That one might make everyone cry. Yeah, you know, that's what it will be. Feel free to list what you want to hear in the comments, and I'll do my best to keep up during the next couple of weeks.

The suck

No post today. Birthday combined with horrible surgical procedure = the suck. More tomorrow, probably.

Screw you, Oprah

The talk show host superhero Oprah went to a puppy mill in the desert in California. She was stupid enough to FILM it and put it on her website.

Two things on her site. One is a photo set where the description says "where dozens of Golden Retrievers awaited new homes" Um, hey stupid, don't the "dozens" of animals tip you off somehow? http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200509/20050919/slide_20050919_350_201.jhtml

Or, maybe, just maybe, all these puppies in little pens for her to choose from? Just watch the fun filled video of all these poor animals!
http://www.oprah.com/video/200509/tows/tows_20050919_2.jhtml

Even worse, the breeder let her take THREE dogs home. I don't know a single good, responsible breeder who would let someone take multiple puppies home with them. It's damn hard to train one puppy, let alone three. And just because Oprah has a team she can hire to take care of the work, still doesn't make it a good choice. Also, way back when, before she had her Cockers, she had Goldens. That were littermates or something, and they died of cancer. Well, guess what? Goldens still have issues with cancer. It's genetic. And I bet all the money in the world that that crummy breeder certainly didn't follow pedigrees and breed as best as possible to dogs that didn't croak of cancer at a far too young age. Also, I think that the Cocker that Stedman gave Oprah had Parvo, which is another clue that that dog came from a crappy breeder. I'll have to dig up that site where I read that.

Oprah, you should know better. You could have just plugged in some words in Google and found out all about puppy mills. You like to seem so knowledgeable on your show, and your fans now think that the way you got your dog is the way to go.

Plus, screw you Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and Mischa Barton and all the "starlets" who have gotten dogs recently from the pet store, one of the most hideous places you can get a dog. Soon, a post that shows how it goes from miller to pet store, oh, the horror.

Color breeders

Just like horses, as http://fuglyhorseoftheday.blogspot.com has shown, the dog world suffers from breeders who breed simply for color.

Some breeds have a solid color(s) and brindle, like Mastiffs. Some have a couple colors and dilute forms of those colors, like Dobermans. Labradors have three accepted colors, yellow, black, and chocolate. We'll get into crappy color breeding of dogs like Labs and Dobes in another post.

There are breeds that are bred for color that have merle coloration. Border Collies, Collies, Shetland Sheepdogs, both sizes of Daschunds, Catahoula Leopard Dogs, Australian Shepherds, Great Danes, Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, Cardigan Welsh Corgis, even freaking Poodles now are the ones that first come to mind. Merle is an awesome color, and that's why it's so popular. In Doxies they call it dapple, but it looks nothing like dapple on horses.

You can have blue merle, which is the merle gene acting on a black coat:



Responsible breeders breed only merle to solid. That means some pups are solid, some are merle. That's just how it goes.

Then you have what the crappy BYBs do to get more merles, which is breed merle to merle. the problem with that is twofold. A bunch of pups die in the embryo stage (thankfully), and 25% of those that are born have the chance of being double merle. That 25% is just an average for a litter, and it's a 25% chance of each pup being born that way. That's why you can have a litter full of double merles, and have another litter of none. Some breeders feel the 25% chance is worth it to breed more moneymaking merles. And this is what you get when it happens:
Looks just fine, right? Wrong. This dog is deaf and blind. It gets prettier, too.




Doesn't she look gorgeous, with her bright red tiny pig eyes? Some of these dogs are born without eyes period. Want a closer look? http://lethalwhites.com/eyes.html

Note that some homozygous merles (double merles) do have normal hearing and site, if there is enough color around the eyes and in the inner ear. and some heterozygous merles and solids can be deaf, if their white coloration doesn't cover those important areas. Also, there can be pigment, but not enough to prevent the nerve endings from dying off and atrophying in the first few weeks of the puppy's life, causing deafness.

So, why aren't White Shepherds (aka white German Shepherd Dogs) deaf? Or Samoyeds, or West Highland White Terriers? Well, they aren't actually white. Their noses are black, the skin around the eyes is black. They are actually extremely pale buff colored. Same with Bichon Frise, and that's why you sometimes get an "apricot" Bichon. It's also how the fad of white Golden Retrievers (thanks Oprah!) happens, and how you can get "white" yellow Labs, and the opposite of the spectrum, "fox" or "foxy" Labs, which are yellow labs that are red colored. The yellow gene in dogs is quite versatile, and that's for another post, maybe.

Anyway, Puppy millers and BYBs are the real source of double merles. While looking for photos, I found merle APBTs, merle Cockers, merle everything. Merle is hot shit, apparently. Me? I've always been fond of a black or black bi smooth Collie.

What is a responsible breeder?

It took me a while to decide what to post next, since there are so many issues. I've decided that the easiest thing to do would be to describe a good breeder so people have something to compare it to. I have proof of a famous person going to a miller to buy their dog, and I think it would be easier to list what makes a breeder good, than to try to list everything that makes a breeder bad at first.

So, a responsible breeder:

• Belongs to a breed club, national and local and conforms to the club's code of ethics if the club has one
• Participates in activities that judge a dog's worth. Conformation shows, obedience, agility, hunting/field trials, earth dog trials, tracking, lure coursing, to name just a few
• Focuses breeding on health and temperament, not color or size
  
• Belongs to a legitimate breed registry, like the AKC, CKC (Canadian Kennel Club) and not a "scam" registry like the Continental Kennel Club, America's Pet Registry, etc.
  
• Enters their dogs in a health registry like the OFA, and checks the quality of hips, knees, elbows, eyes, heart, hearing, and thyroid, to name just a few things. Some tests are done for all breeds, others, like BAER testing for hearing, are not. I'll explain more about this in another post. Even if the dogs they have are not to be bred, they should be tested, because that gives more information about the overall health of a dogs' pedigree
• Besides physical testing, there should be ways that the breeder contributes to the overall health and welfare of the breed, such as supporting rescue
• Breeds a limited number of breeds. Generally, this number is two. It takes a lot of work for a breeder to be competent and up to date with all the issues of more than two breeds.
• Breeds a limitd number of litters. Most, one litter or fewer a year. In some toy breeds, where only one or two pups are born, a good breeder may breed more than once a year.
  
• Gives a spay/neuter (aka altering) contract, as well as solid, legally enforceable consequences of not altering the dog
• Accepts the return of any of the animals they breed, for any reason, at any age of the dog
• Carefully matches up each pup with the prospective owner
• Is willing to discuss anything about the dogs, show proof of health tests, volunteer information on genetic health problems within the breed, knows the test results on close relatives of the dog they are breeding
• Offers a health guarantee for at least two years (more on this later)
• Socializes the puppies and does not sell them any younger than seven weeks of age. In some states, it is illegal to sell them younger than eight weeks

This is just a short list of what makes a breeder good. I will eventually make a longer, more complete list.

Introduction

So, what exactly is a puppymill? For that matter, what is a backyard bred animal, aka BYB?

Everyone has their own definitions of it. The USDA requires "high volume breeders" to have a license, and they must have it if they produce a certain amount of puppies every year. I'll get into those regulations in another post. Probably the most accepted layperson's definition of a puppymill is someone who breeds a ton of animals every year, keeps them in cramped quarters, doesn't bother with veterinary care, constantly breeds bitches litter after litter, and really doesn't care at all about their "livestock". The animals to them are livestock, and not pets or potential pets.

A backyard breeder is someone who breeds on a smaller scale than a puppymiller. The smaller scale can be up to one puppy or litter less than the USDA standard. They can be breeding for a profit. They want to show the "miracle of life" to the kids. Their dog is such a sweet dog, they'd love to have a litter from her. It's a bit of side income, especially when they don't take the animals to the vets. They are too lazy to alter their animals, so they have litters as a result. A miller is in it for the money alone. A BYBer can have a greater variety of why they breed. The only true difference between the two are volume.

I may plan to talk about specific millers/BYBers here, as a critique. Show how you know you're getting a good breeder. Discuss health contracts, and what they really mean. Point out egregrious breeding practices. Talk about the overpopulation issue and what it really is, how to combat it, how things like CA's "alter all animals" is a misguided approach towards animal population control, and more things than I can list right now.

Feel free to offer suggestions for topics in the comments, and if enough people want me to help them figure out if a breeder is quality, I'd be happy to do that for them.