[jmwoody]

I saw this on another board & wanted to share

In my opinion~

Puppies need more than just five minutes of your undivided attention.

Puppies need to be stimulated, held, loved, spoken to and played with several times throughout the day.

What we do as breeders is crucial to the temperment and trainability of the puppy for it’s entire lifetime.

Puppies raised in garages, basements and barns as an "After Though" for a little extra income can suffer lifelong problems as a result.

When someone sees a hyper or ill tempered purebred, it is the REAL breeder who spends hours defending the breed we love.

We also spend hours educating and consoling the buyer who had to relinquish their uncontrollable pet.

In many cases, we are fostering and rehoming that pet. To be honest, I am tired of cleaning up a few other "breeder’s" messes.

The "breeder" who sold the puppy through the classifieds has changed their phone number or can’t help the new buyer now because "They are not really breeders" and "this was just a one time thing"....It’s not that I don’t want to help anyone ~ but there are only so many hours in one day.

I don’t want one of my buyers to be the next irresponsible breedre selling puppies through the classifieds and more importantly, I don’t want one of my puppies to be the mother of the litter being advertised in that ad.

Unless you are prepared to take back any puppy you produce for any reason, at any time.....You should not breed even one litter.

Do you have the room, the time, the patience, the finances?

It is not easy and it is not always profitable.

It can be very costly.

While you may want to produce "just one litter" because all your friends and relatives LOVE your dog.....and want a puppy "just like her", One emergency vet visit can leave you in the red.

Those same friends and relatives usually find an excuse for not wanting the puppy once it becomes available.

When you have puppies to place at the age of 8 weeks ~ believe me, you will be in a panic and feel desperate. Ten 8 week old puppies can be difficult to deal with if you aren’t prepared.

If you are having your first litter ~ Trust me....You won’t be prepared.

I really hate to be this graphic, but there is no other way to get my point across. I recently recieved a call from a person wanting to know if their dog could be in labor.

I ask if the female’s temperature had dropped. The response was "I don’t know". I ask her to take the dogs temperature - and after telling her "how" to take it... the voice on the other ned of the phone said "EEEEWWWWWW" Belive me, you will be doing much worse things than inserting a termometer in the dog’s rectum. If it makes you squeemish...you should not become a breeder. If you call me on the phone to ask if you rfemale could be ready to breed and I ask you if her vulva is swollen... it would be in your best interest not to ask..."HER WHAT?!" If you do, you will probably hear a loud "Click". I am not interested in providing stud service for people who stammer and stutter when they hear the word "vulva". If you gasp and feel faint at the thought of wiping her with a tissue to let me know what color the discharge is....... Please spay your dog.

Please, please, please THINK before you breed.... Heartbreaking things can happen during whelping. They still happen to me and they can also happen to you. Whelping females can get eclampsia during and after whelping and die. Do you know how to prevent it? Are you familiar with the symptoms?

Puppies get stuck in the birth canal and die.

It is often on a Sunday or in the middle of the night. Emergency C-sections are not cheap.

What do you tell your children when you arrive home with no puppies?

Even worse, what if their beloved Molly comes home as ashes in a cremation box?

Whelping mothers can chew the cord too short on a puppy and the puppy can bleed to death right before your eyes.

PUppies are sometimes born with their insides on the outside.

Whelping others have been known to accidently bite off a paw while chewing the cord or stimulating the puppy.

Puppies can be born DEAD.

Puppies can be born perfectly healthy and fade from "Fading Puppy Syndrom" for no apparant reason.

What do you tell your children then?

Puppies can die from cleft paletts, toxic milk, round worms, coccidia, giardia, parvo, distemper, upper respiratory infections...and the list goes on...Some mothers have no milk. Some mothers have bad milk.

Are you pre pared to bottle feed 10 puppies around the clock ever few hours until they can drink formula from a dish? Do you know how to tube feed the small ones who are too weak to suck?

Some puppies get colic....and you wamr and rub their tummies and walk the floor day and night praying for some sleep and listening to them cry in pain.

What do you do with the puppies that don’t survive in the middle of winter in a cold climate? Are you willing to work on a puppy that appears to be dead for twenty minutes to see if you can revive it? Are you able to emotionally hanlde it if you can’t save it?

Are you willing to suction mucus from a newborn puppy’s nostrils using your own mouth if an emergency requires it?

Do you know what after birth smells like? What about the mothers who retain puppies or placenta?

They can get a severe infection and die on the operating table because you didn’t know what signs to look for or how to give a shot of oxytocin.

What will you do when a puppy is being born feet first already out of the sack stuck in the birth canal, and the only way to get him out is to break his bones?

Warm and fuzzy?????

You and your children have plenty of life’s experiences to enjoy.

Whelping is not one of them

It is not always the warm and fuzzy experience you are expecting.

The things I’ve mentioned on here are some of the less graphic.

What about studding out my male dog? Do your dog a huge favor and research brucellosis. If you think you can just put two dogs together and let nature take over ~ you need to think again.

It’s a bit more complicated than that.

Have you ever seena male that had a huge portion of his face destroyed by a female who wasn’t ready to be bred?

I have and it’s not a pretty sight.

Is it worth it for that one time stud fee?

Do you REALLY want to breed your dog? Good luck

~~Author unknown~~