There are many, many areas to be concerned with, wrt to this leglislation. Every dog person in Victoria needs to go through this in detail and highlight specific areas of concern.
Not sure if this has been raised yet here, but under the current wording of this documentation, if a dog you bred dies under 3 years of age, you have to give the owner their money back. Because the wording is so poor, this could include if it gets hit by a car, bitten by a snake, dies from an untreated medical condition (ie: kennel cough turning into pneumonia), dies whilst giving birth, etc, etc, etc, you would have to give that owner their money back. Oh, and no option to replace the dog either.
Also if someone buys a dog from you and then decides after 3 weeks that they don't want it for whatever reason - you need to give them their money back.
These are in contravention to current consumer laws.
The document was clearly written by people who had no idea about the VCA requirements, boarding kennel requirements, nor the greyhound code.
There are lots of small issues with the document such as:
* if you move your dog from one area to another, you must then move its identification card that has all its details on it. If you move your dogs as often as I do, I could almost employ someone to stay on top of the issue of moving cards.
* the health checks required by vets? holy smokes!
* there is no vaccination available for heartworm or worms. yet this is detailed as being available. btw, there is so little heartworm in Victoria, why is this being pushed (clearly the people who wrote the document had no idea about the transmission requirements for heartworm. (there is definitely a big push on trying to put as many poisons into our dogs as possible)
* stud dogs can not be used for more than 6 years? what the ? so if you have a dog that you use at stud at aged 2, and then only decide to use him again when he's 10, well then you can't. sorry. no exceptions.
* if you have a fabulous dog that just happens to be a carrier for an inheritable defect, then you can't breed from it. Full stop. No exceptions. Can't breed a carrier to a non affected. Nope, remove that completely from the breeding program. of course, whoever wrote the document seems to have so little dog experience that they don't seem to understand that if you artificially decrease the gene pool, you then concentrate the problems of the other remaining dogs. This is what happened in my breed in the 1980's, and in other breeds.
There is no doubt that the writers of the documentation mean well, but honestly, there are some major flaws in this that must be rectified immediately.
Oh, and if you want to breed your maltese shitzhu poodle jackrussell cross, just once to that gorgeous king charles spaniel bichon cross, you can, with absolutely no legal requirements.
off to feed my dogs some offal now.
- Jane
