Hi. My name is Diane, and I am a Breeder. 
I am good at it, and I am damned proud of it. 
I bought my first show dog in 1969 and whelped my first litter in April, 1975. 
I have, since that inauspicious beginning, in partnership with my long 
suffering husband and a few good friends produced a few dozen 
champions, some top producers, a handful of Specials, and a lot of 
superb close-working grouse dogs and well loved companions. We kept 
a fair number over the years and sold the rest. (NOTE: I said sold, 
not 'placed'...we'll address that particular idiocy later.) We owned 
a kennel for many years, and trained gun dogs. This involved the 
killing of untold numbers of game birds, all of which we ate. I 
have more recipes for pheasant, grouse and woodcock than you can 
shake a stick at. We showed our hunting dogs and hunted over our 
show dogs. 

I do not believe for a minute that the whelping or sale of a 
single one of those purebred dogs is in any way responsible of the 
euthanization of a million unwanted dogs a year at the shelters 
around the country, any more that I believed that cleaning my plate 
when I was a kid could in any way benefit all the poor starving 
children in Africa, no matter how much the nuns or my mother tried to 
make me feel guilty about it. I couldn't see the logic then and I 
can't see it now (although today I would maybe refrain from 
suggesting that we bundle up Sister Edlita's meatloaf and actually 
send it to the poor starving children in Africa.) 

Look at it this way: 
If I go to a bookstore specifically to buy Matt Ridley's The 
Human Genome (which, as it happens, I recently did) and that 
bookstore does not have it, I will do one of two things - I will 
order it, or I will go to another bookstore the does carry it and 
purchase it there. What I will NOT do is take the same money and buy 
Martha Stewart's latest cookbook instead, because this is not what I 
want. 

Guilt without logic is dangerous. Show breeders are simply not 
responsible for the millions of unplanned and unwanted mongrels 
produced in this country. Period. So don't let anyone make you feel 
guilty about it. I do not understand why the top horse farms in this 
country are not in the least embarrassed by the fact they make a lot 
of money doing it, yet in the world of dogs if one is to be 
respected, one is to lose one's ass financially. That is a load of 
horseshit, pure and simple, yet we accept it meekly and without 
question. 

Why is that? 

Basic economic theory suggests that if we are not turning a 
profit, one of two things is wrong - we suffer from poor management, 
or we are not asking enough for our product to cover our production 
costs. What are our costs? 

Well, if we are breeding good dogs, besides basic food and 
veterinary costs we ought to be adding in the costs of showing these 
animals, and advertising, and health testing, which are not expenses 
incurred by the high volume breeders (puppy mills). OK, so we have 
much higher costs involved in producing our healthier, sounder 
animals. Yet the average pet shop puppy sells for about the same as 
the average well bred pet from show stock, and often they sell for 
much more. 

What's wrong with this picture? 
We're stupid that's what's wrong. 
Q. Why does a Jaguar sell for ten times more than a Hundai? 
A. Because it's worth more and everyone knows it. 

"And everyone knows it" is the key phrase here, folks. But somehow no 
one knows our puppies are worth more and we're embarrassed to tell 
them. Why is that? The difference between the sale price of a multi 
million dollar stallion and what he's worth as horsemeat on any given 
day at a livestock auction is quality. Yet we cannot address this 
issue in dogs because we are embarrassed to talk about money and dogs 
in the same breath. 

Why is that? 
OK, I'll tell you, because someone has to come out and say this 
sooner or later. 

There is a war going on. 
Unlike most wars, however, this one actually has three sides rather 
than two. 

We have Show breeders, who are producing a small number of 
purebred dogs. We have High-Volume breeders who are producing a large 
number of purebred dogs. We have Animal Rights Activists, who believe 
that neither group has the right to breed or even own purebred dogs, 
much less make a profit at it. 

While the first group is busy trying to get rid of the second group 
because they don't like the way they breed dogs (which by the way 
ain't gonna happen as long as the American public wants purebred 
dogs and the first group won't produce them) the third group is 
winning the war. 

You think I'm making this up? Then how come we've started saying 
we "placed" our puppies instead of sold them? We talk about the 
new "adoptive homes" instead of their new owners. 

What's next? Instead of price of a puppy, we'll charge an "adoption 
fee?" What's wrong with this new language? 

I'll tell you - We didn't come up with it, the Animal Rights 
Activists did - we are just stupid enough to use it. We are stupid 
because it's based on the premise that we have no right to own dogs. 
It is based on the premise that dog ownership is the moral 
equivalent of human slavery, and that the species homo sapien has no 
right to use any other species for any purpose whatsoever, be it 
food, clothing, medical research, recreation or involuntary 
companionship. 

Now, I don't know about you, but my politically incorrect opinion is: 
Our species did not spend the last million years clawing our way 
to the top of the food chain to eat tofu. The stuff tastes like shit 
no matter how you cook it, and there is absolutely no sense 
pretending otherwise. 

Zoology 101: 

Animals who kill other animals for their primary food source are 
called predators. Their eyes are generally on the front of their 
skulls, they have teeth designed to tear flesh from bone, and a 
digestive system designed to digest meat (like us). Animals that live 
primarily off vegetation are called herbivores. They have better 
peripheral vision, flat teeth for grinding, and the most efficient of 
them have multiple stomachs, which we do not (like cows). And lastly, 
Animals who live primarily off what other have killed (carrion) are 
called scavengers (think about that one long and hard.) Man like the 
canid, is a pack-hunting predator, which is probably why we get along 
so well. (If that fact bothers you, get over it.) 

How did we get to the top of the food chain? We are the most 
intelligent and efficient pack-hunters ever to suck oxygen from the 
atmosphere, that's how. We are certainly intelligent enough to 
understand that maintaining that position on this small planet 
depends on responsible stewardship, not guilt. And we are so damned 
efficient that we can support a tremendous number of scavengers in 
our midst. Like the Animal Rights Activists, for instance. Me, I 
think we should dump the whole lot of them buck naked in the Boundary 
Waters and see how well this equalitarian philosophy of theirs plays 
out, but that's probably too politically incorrect for anybody 
else to consider. Sigh.) 

So what do we do? 
Well, to begin with we need to regain control. The first way we 
do this is with language, which is the tool they have been using on 
us. These people who don't want us to "own" dogs are likening 
themselves to Abolitionists. That's a fallacy, unless you accept the 
premise that dogs are really little humans in fur coats, which 
frankly is an insult to a species that has never waged war on the 
basis of religious differences. 

No, the group they really resemble is the Prohibitionists-remember 
them? A particularly annoying bunch of zealots who firmly believed 
and somehow managed to convince our duly elected representatives that 
alcohol was a bad thing, and any beverage containing it should be 
illegal in these United States of America. Very few Americans 
actually agreed with this, by the way, but by the time Congress got 
its head out of its collective you-know-what, a whole new industry 
had developed - Organized Crime. 

We look back at that whole debacle now and wonder how anything 
that stupid and wrongheaded ever happened. 

Well, boys and girls, in the inimitable words of the great Yogi 
Berra: Its's Déjà vu all over again. The Prohibitionists are back. 

And once again, we are buying it. Amazing. 

BFANCITP@msn.com

Interested in a web site?
Click the poodle!