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Old July 24th, 2008, 10:05 AM
Dingo Dingo is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 222
Quote:
One idea that our national breed club has is to make breeders responsible for what they breed. We are asking that for every puppy that a breeder, who is a member of our club, sells that they give $50 to our club to go directly into Rescue. What if the CKC did the same? What if more breed clubs did it? An ethical breeder will have no problem with that. It will help fish out bybs that are hiding under the umbrella of "reputable breeder because I'm a club member". It also makes breeders really be responsible for their actions and to think before they breed. If you're cutting a check for $50, bucks it doesn't seem so bad, but when you have to cut one for a few hundred. You have to wonder if you really needed to breed that many puppies. We even suggested it be done once a year with their annual membership. How much harder will that check be to right if you have to write it as one lump some? If you breed 20 puppies in a year, it doesn't seem like a lot at the time, but when you cut a check for a grand, it's a totally different thing. And it would help a lot.
Interesting idea. The catch of course being that breeders will simply add that $50 to the price of the puppy. So rescues will be getting a much-needed boost, but I wonder if any real difference will be made to backyard breeders and puppy mills, who can simply bill it as "CKC fees" or something similar that may give them a veneer of legitimacy.

Personally, I would like to see microchipping promoted as an alternative to licensing. Perhaps this isn't the place to get into it, but microchips would be a far more effective method of identifying and returning lost pets than a license tag. And the technology could potentially be used to prevent puppy mills too: if every puppy produced by a breeder (or sold or adopted) had to be microchipped, and if the microchip also carried some information about the breeder, it would be easy to determine who's producing large numbers of dogs and (for example) charge them additional fees accordingly. There's no reason I can see for any reputable breeder to be producing more than, say, 30 puppies a year; perhaps a "large-scale commercial pet breeder's licence" could be created that would cost, I dunno, $10,000 per year. That might make people think twice.
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