Trish Wamsat's AdobeDogs Puppy and Dog Training

Here is a short list of do's and don'ts you can ask a breeder about on the phone or by email.  This is a very brief and limited list and is really intended ONLY to decide if you should even consider the puppy.   For the full story, click here

DO!

• meet the dad if possible, though his personality has less impact on the puppy than Mom's, unless they are actually raised WITH him.
• pick a puppy that is happy and playful, and keeps coming back to the humans while playing with littermates.
• choose a puppy who has had FULL access to his mom for at least 8 weeks
  
• MEET THE MOTHER DOG.  (watch out if mom's somewhere being a "therapy dog" or belongs to a friend or relative somewhere else and the person is "trying to help" by selling the puppies)

DON'T

• trust that the person is being truthful.
• buy a puppy without meeting the mom
  
• just because an adult female dog is on the premises, doesn't mean she's the mom
• forget to ask for the correct health and lineage paperwork; a real breeder will always have the parents' information on hand.
• forget that this will be a puppy for only a VERY few months, you need to make sure you want the dog he will become.
• forget to research the breed you're looking at.  What it was originally developed for will have an ENORMOUS affect on how he will act as an adult.

• a breeder that knows shipping schedules and costs
• trimmed whiskers
  
• a trimmed and groomed puppy
• a story that the mom is somewhere else being a service dog or the puppies came from a sister or......
• a website lacking pictures of dogs winning dog shows
• a website with more than 1 or two breeds/mixes
• a website that lays out how the puppy will be shipped
• a seller who doesn't ask invasive questions about how the puppy will be cared for
• 
  

About Puppy Mills

A puppy mill is a large scale breeding operation, for profit.  They often have more than a thousand dogs living in tiny cages and horribly neglected.  Puppy mill puppies are sold at 5-6 weeks old to the major distribution warehouses where they are groomed, vaccinated, dewormed (for the 11th time) and sorted by which part of the country they will be trucked to, then loaded onto trailers.  I know this because I worked with a puppy store in Las Vegas and witnessed the conditions of the trailer they arrived in every week, as well as the condition of the puppies.  We frequently received puppies off of trailer loads of over 140 puppies. I became friendly with the drivers to find out more about their employers, by pretending to be an "insider".

Why does this matter to you?  Well, besides the fact that everything they're telling you is a lie, the puppies are off to a terrible start. 

• They've learned to pee and poo in their cages, often making housebreaking incredibly difficult. 
  
• They have not been raised in a home so have not learned about things like TVs, phones, different kinds of footing (including grass), and
  
• have been denied the very essential lessons that their mom should have given them about "no means NO" and "don't bite too hard", and "people are good". 
  
• Their temperaments are questionable, as is their health as they become adults.  

Since I've been back in the Bay Area, I've seen puppy mill puppies be euthanized for aggression, physical deformities,  and unrelenting fear; as they mature, we've seen horrible autoimmune problems, orthopedic problems and severe allergies.  None of the owners of these dogs saw the problems until they had already become very attached.