Special needs dog petted out to pet only special needs accommodating person understand & capable of dealing with specific issue.IMHO

Breeders pet out health pups for confirmation issues all the time (show breeders) how many here got their dog-the same breeders will occasionally (rarely I should say) get a pup with a special need that may come up in the line-we are no longer in the days of "culling" it out in an old fashioned way-there are plenty of people willing to take in & take on these babies.

No they should not be sold but appropriately "placed" again just my humble opinion.

Isn't the prediction of adult weight really just a good guess based on the information the breeder has about the parents & grandparents? ZoE was the puppy her breeder was planning on keeping. She was expected to be 6lbs. She's now just over a year old and 7.5lbs. She's not fat at all, just a bigger build, definately longer & taller than my last yorkie. Maybe it the better food we are feeding our pups now.

I'm barely 5'5" and I'm taller than my mum & nan, but my daughter is 5'8" and my son 6' 3"....don't now where they get it based on family history either...it's gotta be the food!

Technically as people we weren't (well not normally at least) bred with a standard in mind and considered matched under controlled and planned off spring outcome breeding.

But anyone who guarantees size is a liar IMHO-it's their best guess based on generations of pups produced and where they finish out at. Other wise every Yorkie would be exactly within the standard perfect clones of eachother etc, and no show breeder would re-home a pup at a year prospectively because they didn't finish within the standard.

However there are some breeders who have never had a dog out of standard and have generation after generation of perfectly size charted puppies finishing where expected.

This actually happened to me with Roscoe... I was new to the "yorkie world" but I have always wanted one and DH finally said yes. So I started searching and I could not find any breeders in my area that had a price range I was in. I found Afforablepups.com and saw a picture of a cute little yorkie that I wanted so much! The website said he was 12 weeks old. I stupidly ended up buying him and had him shipped from Ohio. When I met him at the airport it was NOT the puppy in the pictures!! I was really confused! Then when I started looking through his paperwork(AKC papers) I realzied he was only 7 weeks old!!!! I was so angry but I was so in love and so was my DH so we just let it be.

When we decided we wanted another yorkie for Roscoe to have a playmate for life we were very skeptical!We did not want to go through the same thing and be lied to. So we found a breeder within driving distance and went to meet her. My husband did not even want to go he did not want another puppy as small as Roscoe was because of how hard it was when he was a puppy. My hubby wanted to adopt a two year old from a show breeder in our area.

I convinced him to just go meet her and OMG we were so lucky! She is a wonderful wonderful wonderful breeder who loves her puppies so much!!! In fact Sukie is 4 months old and we still talk weekly over the phone and she always wants pics of her which I love!! Sukie was not a tiny 7 week old baby that should of never left her mom she was a beautiful happy spoiled little puppy who was perfect! We brought her home within a few days after the breeder met my kids and had them interact with Sukie. The thought of ever going through what we went through with Roscoe scares us!

I now know a lot more and would never adopt a puppy from a breeder unless everything was perfect and clear and I met the breeder, parents, puppies, and living condition IRL, plus got all my questions answered. In fact Sukie is named after breeder.

dazzling, how old was Sukie when you got her. IMHO you will not be able to "guess" the full grown weight until a dog is 3 or 4 months old. What no one seemed to comment on is when the thread starter picked him/her the dog was around 3 months old and already about the weight that the seller said he should top out at. Even a non dog person should realize that this will change when the puppy becomes an adult.

a good point was made when you talk about human family's and their height, my sister is 4 years younger and about 4" taller. My girlfriend and her sister are both taller than her brothers, all come from the same bloodline. Some of the traits are inherited but it is still a crap shoot when predicting the size of a very young puppy.

How would a "non-dog" person know when puppies stop growing?

I got a dog at about 5 months & was told he was about fully grown.

I totally believed it.

People trust breeder to educate them.

the guy said when he bought the puppy he was told it was 3.25 months, I would hope people's common sense would tell them that dogs, cats, pigs, monkey's, lions, tigers, elephants, goats, horses, and most other animals are not fully grown by 3-4 months.

Well no, because it's not common sense.

People get confused with dog years, small dogs etc.

My hamsters were fully grown & breeding capable at that age...some people have only had rescues before as dogs never puppies.