i was having a good think about all this on the weekend, what steve has said for many years about all this and others.
I think that overall its a good thing to raise awareness in the community about puppy farms and the message is getting out there and more and more people in the public are learning its not good. puppy farms/puppy farmers are people who breed their dogs for profit. a farmer. this is what everyone is against.
good breeders we have said so and defined it on this forum for years, are breeders who breed for a purpose and show that by what they do. i.e. spend thousands of dollars on testing, keep their elderly dogs, treat their show dogs as pets, try to breed for health and research for that.
however i do get what steve is saying here, the people who are heading this, do not understand fully about breeders who are doing the right thing and we are being bunged in with the farmers who are out there to make a profit on dogs and don't really care about breeding for quality and health.
i've come up against this myself with these very same people who are leading the way, i got told that i was not to promote pedigree dogs but what i was promoting was what i knew about breeding and how cross breeds are not health tested and no bloodlines are researched yadda yadda yadda. in the same sentence i got told that a few reg breeders had been caught out and were ALSO breeding designer dogs along with their pedigrees. So in essence what it said to me was that 1. how can we be sure that these people are against ALL BREEDING of dogs and not interested if the breeder is doing everything right by some sort of a standard that these people set. yes steve, it bothers me that there are some people who have no idea what reg breeders who are ethical do that they have no idea why we breed for show all they see is the program Pedigree Dogs Exposed and think we are all like that and we all breed unhealthy exagerated pedigree breeds without actually talking to clubs and the breeders who are working to do things right. i also observed a little dog with its tongue sticking out and this couple went up to the animal people in front of me i hung back to listen to what was being said, the couple said this dog had a "long Tongue" and it had been rescued from a breeder! Good on you was the answer and why is the tongue hanging out like that?
I have a vet that writes articles in the dogsvictoria magazine each month so he is well respected in Victoria he knows his stuff has been a vet for over 35 years, he is a damn good vet. so i already knew the answer but i asked him is there such a thing as "long tongue"? that is not possible, what is possible is the jaw was overshot and the dog was missing alot of front teeth ALLOWING the dogs tongue to protrude. so this excuse was used as an example of a bad breeder which really bothered me. i went up to this organiser and told her the truth.
i have ever only told pet owners the truth about why its not a good idea to farm animals, different angle but not all accept it. my angle is: cross breeds bred by farmers are not health checked, are not health tested, no one knows the bloodlines, no grooming advise for mixtures of breeds with non-shedding coats and shedding coats mixed in because no one really knows how to look after that type of coat really unpredicable. the list goes on. rather than focusing on the way the farmers treat the dogs and they justify it by saying they have a state of the art premises, the dogs are in a clean environment they get exercised and they have staff looking after the dogs. they preach this to the council who fall for it all. they also say how all their dogs are very friendly when breeding dogs for over 30 years i know that breeding for temperament isn't that easy!
the animal people did not like me going on about these other aspects and gaining attention so they told me to be quiet. so i did. LOL all i was trying to do was educate about why its not a good idea to farm these animals rather than looking like extremists because i think thats how the councils see them and also the government. In all of these emails to council from public who approve the most permits for puppy farms in Victoria, council was saying "crazy animal people" an email got leaked from the then mayor that i happened to know off. so i wrote to him and told him a few home truths about breeding and why and how and gave him a real run down of why its not a good idea, i didn't go down the avenue of dogs being treated like crap not denying that but i wanted to make the former mayor think and spread it to the other councillors so i told him about breeding and genetics and why the crosses are not bred for health and no history is available and the other side of the coin that no one mentions. i also mentioned the thousands of dogs being PTS every year and why we don't need to be adding to that by factory farming our domesticated animals. So it got brought up how we farm livestock so why not dogs? so i had to launch into the whole thing again why cows, sheep and goats etc. don't sleep in our beds and are not required to spend their lives with us humans in our houses so different kettle of fish.
we reg ethical breeders who do the right thing have no voice, we have no one to speak up for us at all. it all gets drowned out by all this going on which im not saying is not good, its good but reg breeders like me are just wary of whats really going on here especially when i got told to shut up and i got told that i think that pedigree dogs are superior and also reg breeders meanwhile i've written on my website about farmers coming in all shapes reg or not and i've rescued shelters dogs and have a rescue dog (cross bred) at the moment so i don't think i think pedigrees are superior somehow, my message was about farmers and about dogs in general! we don't know for sure whether these people are against breeding of all dogs their message isn't clear. DogsVictoria had a seminar on puppy farming and made a committee and now what do they do, we haven't heard what they do they seem to have disappeared, DogsVictoria should be giving us a report on what this committee is doing? some say VCA did that to save face a toothless tiger.
I see from my suggestions they've changed the wording on oscar law./prisoners for profit site to say that they aren't against reg breeders just backyard breeders and puppy farms. so they have listened to a certain extent because they probably realise its not good to have ANKC and reg breeders against their message i suppose.
i guess when you look at it, face value, oscar law is about creating awareness to shut down factory farming of our dogs, to stop petshops selling live animals to stop people farming animals. i don't think its about creating a law to take to parliment its only about creating awareness to stop something and as they said, its in the publics hands to stop all this no law will stop it the people will by learning.
*edited for typos
