sandgrubber

Hip/elbow tests can be iffy as well. I dropped out of breeding in large part because the lovely girl I kept from my last litter had a bad score on one hip. She's now 10 1/2 and has no sign of arthritis. She also failed the vet examination eye test... No sight problems either.

Asking for a video would be reasonable, though not as satisfying as a physical meeting. It's a seller's market so I wouldn't push very hard. It would be easy for them to refund your money and find another buyer.

Depends. Hips and elbows can't be scored on babies and most people don't score them until 1 or 2 years. DNA tests on both parents may clear the whole litter of being affected by a recessive gene, but if one parent is a carrier, the he pup should be tested if to be used for breeding.... It goes on and on. Name the breed and condition and you will get a clear answer.

Just advertise on Facebook or Gumtree for tyres, or ask around at Tyre shops. Given that you have to pay to dispose of tyres in most places, free ones are easy to come by. Those look like tractor tyres... if you want that type, try a tractor supply shop.

IFF your dog doesn't eat them.

Many dogs find living (and dead) things particularly interesting, and like to use their noses. I don't know what your neighborhood is like, or how much prey drive your dog has. But having a bit of habitat for critters is a good thing. If your dog won't kill them, chooks are entertaining. My dogs would like to have a nice heap of manure as well, but that has disadvantages .

$650 was 1992. The dog landscape has changed greatly since then. Sorry. I didn't say it well. My point is that the exercise of linking price to cost is full of arbitrary decisions, unless you are treating puppy selling as a business. From the various responses here I see that the decline of 'hobby' breeding and rise of for profit dog businesses has resulted in increasing prices, at least in Australia. (Less so in many other countries). Against that backdrop, hobby breeders can and should raise prices. Your many posts show you come from a perspective of loving dogs and dog sport. In that model, breeding is a part of devotion to a hobby which allows you to replace your own dogs as they age and share some quality-for-purpose dogs with people who share your enthusiasm. Meanwhile it partially offsets the costs of the hobby. Long ago I got a masters degree in agricultural economics. From that perspective, there's no need to justify puppy prices in terms of costs when you are providing a superior 'product' at a lower price than other segments of the market. Citing cost from an atypically expensive litter is unnecessary, unless you're dealing with the ATO.

Why apologize for changing market prices? Better luck with the next litter. If I had had such bad problems with every litter I would have quit after one or two. I had to do Cesars < 20% of the time. My average litter was 9. I only had bad mastitis once. I decided on the stud a year or so before breeding and that only required going to a few shows. But there were many many hours of unpaid work, the cost of living in a kennel zone, fencing costs, and costs for maintaining the bitch, etc..

Some people do. But in all the years I lived in US, I never saw it outside of the South.

It's more complicated than that. There are some long time breeders who could be accused of being puppy farmers if you look at the numbers of puppies they sell, but who know their bloodlines like the palms of their hands... who import to improve bloodlines and who do loads of health tests. On the other hand, there are people who have only the occasional litter who judge bloodlines by the number of titles in the pedigree and have only a rudimentary understanding of genetics. Given the increasing restrictions on breeding and the 2 dog rules, I think Ozzies can expect to see more for profit dog breeding. Not all of it bad.

So... supply is down, demand is steady, prices go up. Breeders have taken a lot of flack, and aren't hanging together in the face of a lot of pressure. Older breeders retiring, not many new breeders coming on to replace them. It's harder to get a prefix, hard to buy on main register, hard to operate under a two dog rule... and dog shows don't appeal to younger people. I predict that with all the cuts to travel, we'll see boarding kennels (now going broke) convert to small scale puppy farming. Btw, I'm in NZ. Puppy prices are a lot lower here, but it's easier to keep multiple dogs, and I have a feeling that not so many people bother with pedigrees.

I'm retired from breeding. Breeders have long maintained that the expense of puppies reflects the cost of raising them. There's a lot of room for differences in how you calculate costs. Is the time spent counted in? If so, at what wage? How about the cost of owning a property that's appropriate for multiple dogs? Do you count the cost of purchasing and raising the bitch, and caring for her between litters? And so forth. In my day many of us regarded dogs as a hobby and breeding as a labor of love. I felt rewarded at $650/puppy, and well rewarded when it rose to $1300. (Labradors, usually 9 or 10 puppies in a litter). I'm a little shocked to see how high puppy prices have gone. I guess people are counting differently and not writing as much off as hobbies and labor of love.

Another double post

Try DOL breeder's listings. https://www.dogzonline.com.au/breeds/puppies.asp

I have scripts for both (for osteo arthritis). They are different and can be complementary. I tend to avoid the Tramadol because it gives a nasty blow to the head when combined with alcohol... probably not a problem for dogs. They help a bit, but the pain doesn't stop.

It's not very predictable. Consider getting a rescue from a shelter that will allow returns.

I knew a GCh Lab with a grade 2 elbow who did quite a bit of retrieving and never had any symptoms of elbow trouble. Radiometric scores aren't reliable predictors of actual outcomes.

Dogs' emotions or predict their likes and dislikes of other dogs (or puppies) will always be a mystery. I'd recommend going slowly and doing some testing before you commit. My old girl (10 yrs) recently lost her daughter (6 yrs) to cancer. In general she seems to be happier/livelier/more energetic without her daughter, except she's taken to doing a lonely sounding barking from time to time that I cannot interpret.

You should be able to find some lamb based dry puppy foods that aren't that expensive (Google lamb based puppy food for a list). Personally, I don't think it's so awful that tapioca is an ingredient... no worse than giving kids sandwiches on white bread. Of course you want to see it as the main ingredient. Dogs evolved from wolves as scavengers, and most can be healthy a wide variety of foods. And your vet is right, he may grow out of it.

I'd love to see disease sniffer dogs at the airport.

Yup. Doesn't take much. And dogs like staffies that don't have much hair on their bellies are prone to belly rash. Feet are often itchy too.

Could it be a contract allergy? Tradescancia (aka wandering Jew) or some sort of lawn grass?

It's worth noting that the C3 is a combination of three vaccines. It's possible to have a bad reaction to just one of the three. In my boarding kennel days, I once had a client state that her pup was deadly allergic to just the distemper portion of the vaccine. Apparently the reaction was pretty much like getting distemper. I was skeptical and checked it out with a vet that I trust. She said it's very rare but possible, and given that every other dog in the kennel was up to date with distemper jabs and distemper hadn't been seen for years in our area, it was safe to admit the pup with just the parvo and (what's the other one?) jab. Given how common parvo is, I'd try to give it as a single jab if at all possible.

Sure beats having a swab stuck up your nose!

On the other hand, a month or two after people go back to work there may be quite a few dogs looking for new homes. Sigh!