Back to the original question - call the new puppy owners out? That won’t accomplish anything - they already have a puppy. The new Weimaraner pup is going to need some extra work, but alienating the owner won’t serve to educate.
(Creds - I have worked as a trainer, instructor and full-time shelter employee - along with having dogs from shelters, breeders, and breed rescue)
Get to know them. Admire the pup, and ask if they know about the dangers of Parvovirus presented by bringing an underage dog to a public place. Let them know of good training facilities in the area. Get them around knowledgable dog folks, and they will learn before they get another dog. If you find out who the BYB is, THEN you have somebody to go after.
While I have no objection to someone reasonably discussing what they consider the relative merits of obtaining pets from the numerous available sources - as well as the best age for getting a pup, IMO if someone were to “call someone out” for getting a dog from a BYB or pet store, then that person out to be called out for being an asshole who ought to mind their own business.
For some of us, it is our business. We dedicate our lives to keeping animals safe and humanely cared for. We take the mothers of the puppies sold in pet stores who have never been out of a cage into our homes and nurture them. We rehabilitate and nurse them back to health, we teach them how to be dogs.
We heed the call when a puppy mill is raided and the shelter now has 150 more dogs to take care of. We go in and clean cages, help evaluate the dogs and place them in the proper situation, which sometimes means being the one who has to cradle a sick dog as the vet releases it from its misery.
If that makes me an asshole or a bitch, I’m happy to be that person. If I can stop one person from buying a badly bred dog, I have done something.
Most breeding operations are either puppy mills or backyard breeders – I’m not saying your “artisan” breeder is, but the number of the other two types utterly dwarfs the artisan breeders, thus my use of “most.”
And those commercial breeding operations unquestionably mean death, death in bulk, usually death with a lot of suffering, for companion animals.
Stopping THAT is unquestionably the business of civilized people.
It’s often true that people doing evil want everyone to mind their own business and leave them alone. People with slaves said this, people with little girls locked in dungeons say this, people dumping toxic waste say this, spouse abusers, animal abusers, the list goes on.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” * – attributed to Edmund Burke*
I feel like I’d want to say that to someone but I’d be too scared. I remember our neighbors a while ago had a puppy from a pet store, and it was a really nice dog but I guess they shouldn’t have bought it from a store. I would have felt weird saying anything. Plus I was a lot younger.
I have always had mixed-breed dogs from shelters, and they’ve been fine. A friend of mine has used breed-specific rescue agencies, who do a home study and all that bit, and she has ended up with two dogs who are not completely housebroken, and apparently never will be (they are adults).
I couldn’t deal with that. She said one reason was they are dachshunds. My first dog was a doxi-beagle mix, and she was the most housebroken dog ever so I question that.
One of my shelter dogs was supposedly six weeks old when I adopted her. She and her littermates had been dumped at the shelter–eight of them–and the shelter people were guessing. Six weeks is pretty young to take a puppy away from its mom & family, but I figured we’d be better for her than the shelter and I think I was right.
When she was still pretty young, more than one person asked me where I got her. I don’t know if they were about to call me out, but when I said “Dumb Friends League” they changed their demeanor to approval. So, a backyard-bred dog that goes through a shelter = okay, but a backyard-bred dog that’s adopted informally = bad?
I think the thought process in this case is that the money is going to the shelter, instead of lining the pockets of people who might be mistreating the animals.
The larger point does make sense, though. The unhealthy pet store puppy is going to be even more of a headache after it goes to live with people who bought it because it was cute, chained it up 24/7 because they couldn’t house train it, then took it to a shelter because it kept barking at the neighbors and jumping on the kids.
Accredited by whom? What sort of things does a breeder have to do or not do to keep that accreditation? If it’s an accrediting organization that doesn’t allow dogs to be bred too often and doesn’t allow puppy-mill conditions, then that’s good. If that’s not the case- that’s not so good. Pet stores that sell puppies might claim they get puppies from “accredited breeders”, but the vast majority of them, if not all of them, get them from puppy mills or backyard breeders.
Uh, being a responsible breeder who linebreeds, why do you have an automatic problem with a pedigree with a dog in there twice?
In some breeds, you really cannot find a line that doesn’t have some tendencies towards genetic problems. Popular breeds get overbred by those looking to make money, and some of their genetic disasters make their way into legit breeding programs.
Definitely agree with all of that! I worked the shelters for so many years, and still do rescue and so many of the dogs in there are dumped because they people who owned them either didn’t know what they were getting in for, or couldn’t be bothered once the cute puppy became an obnoxious teenager. And since most pure breeds have rescue programs, what you are mostly going to find in a shelter these days are mixed breeds of uncertain background both in genetics and temperament, and poor quality purebreds of the really popular breeds. And good lord, the prices have gone up on those dogs in recent years!
Actually, in many if not most breeds, you cannot get a pup from rescue all that often. I’ve been in my breed for 40 years and can only think of one time when our rescue had any pups.
I just got a shelter dog. He’s a puppy and so far he’s a pretty good boy. My SO was leaning in the direction of buying a specific breed, but I saw my dog and fell in love (we are open to the possibility of him buying a purebred down the line).
We’ve looked at a lot of dog websites online. It seems that the good breeders sell their puppies before even breeding their dogs. You put a deposit on a spot and when the breeder has enough deposits, the dogs are bred. That seems responsible to me. Then you have the more backyard breeder who tries to sell their puppies though the newspaper, at the sporting goods stores (we ran into some people at the pet food store who had a tiny puppy and said there were people selling many different breeds of puppies outside Cabela’s) and so forth. You can tell a lot by websites who is in it for the money and who really cares about the dogs.
There are certainly breeders who have dozens of dogs poorly maintained on a farm and are breeding on a “puppy farm” - dogs poorly cared for and socialized, and simply too many of them. Those people are criminals under our local laws.
There are people who breed show dogs - they are particularly careful of the lines and the breed standards. Want a dog from one of these people, go on a list, wait for the dog to breed - it might be a year or two before your puppy arrives - its like adopting a child.
But between these two there is a lot of room and not all families want a show dog. Someone who breeds their family pet or farm dog once or twice, or doesn’t spay early enough because the dog got fecund far earlier than they thought (good intentions, poor execution) really doesn’t deserved to be lumped into the “30 dogs on a large lot behind an eight foot fence” of a puppy farm. They might not be “accredited” breeders. They may not be looking after the line (or even give a damn about breed), but if the puppies find homes, I’m not sure what the problem is.
In some regions (mine), there is a dog shortage. We haul our rescue dogs in from other parts of the country - and rescue “puppies” are rare. It was HARD for us to find a mutt that met our needs (still a puppy, short hair, “dog” sized, and preferrably a mutt.) Frankly, around here we need more backyard breeders to meet the needs.
While it may be common for “puppy mills” to get rid of their puppies as quickly as possible, and while its true that a puppy should be left with its mother for longer than four weeks, there are circumstances where a dog might need to be removed from its mother at a very young age (I’ve bottlefed my litter of kittens, and my litter of puppies - and frankly, if someone wants to take a puppy off my hands earlier so I don’t have to bottlefeed six of them - it increases their chance of survival). That exchanged look doesn’t have to mean puppy farm guilt - it might mean “momma dog got an infection” or “the litter was too big and we got the runt that was rejected.” And its none of a stranger’s business. And if you care to make it your business, the way to go about it is not calling them out on it, but to say “gee, that seems awfully young to be away from Momma and out at the dogpark…but he sure is cute.” Maybe then you’ll have a conversation that involves you being able to educate them in a fashion that doesn’t leave them feeling attacked, or like shit for not having done their homework.
But if it was four weeks only and they had a good reason to keep it away from the mother, why would they have it at a dog park? It doesn’t sound safe to have a dog too young for its shots out in a dog park.
Yeah, I was too meek to do anything but give an ‘Oh really?’ look so if I’d said anything it would have been something along those lines. I think I was just totally surprised by the pup’s age and expecting them to fill me in on its story.
Again, I’m currently communicating with someone who works her ass off for a no-kill dog and cat shelter (one among hundreds in her area) and while she’s not a complainer, there is the sense of fighting a losing battle. And yet, as I mentioned, I could be part of the problem. While my dog is a sort-of rescue (from a friend who got her at a dog store), maybe my having her, and her being so undeniably adorable, is encouraging people to get a certain breed of dog. I’m not saying I produced Lassie or 101 Dalmatians, but it is something I’ve wondered about. I love doxies and recommend them to everyone. But I’ve only seen two in the local SPCA over the past three years.
