The Goal

Most puppies are sold as pets.

What does a family need in a pet puppy?

A person who wants a working dog is looking for an extreme in behavior - that is a large part of what made the types of dogs what they are.

If you want a greyhound, you want a sprinting dog. If you want a tracking hound - you want a dog that will follow his nose for hours.

If you want a herding dog, you want a dog with such ingrained behavioral traits that he lives to herd sheep - and he does it right.

But if you want to produce good pet dogs from a collection of working and hunting breeds, what you want is to delete those genes that code for extreme behaviors.

You don't want to breed huskies that want to run all day.

You don't want to breed dogs that obsess over birds or sheep.

But you want to produce healthy puppies. No fair breeding flat faced dog who aren't hyper because they have to work just to breathe. NO fair getting nice lap dogs who seem so sweet just because they are too in pain to be active.

You want to breed out the hunting, herding, fighting, competing genes. Work to produce dogs who have good social skills with other dogs and people.

Produce dogs who are not startled or upset by noises, or activity, but who are responsive to people.

Produce dogs who can be left alone, loose in the house, are easy to housebreak, who don't bark often, and who really are good with people.

Finally!

Yes, that is the whole idea.

The way we are breeding dogs needs to change with the times - to modernise.

It doesn't make sense for a person in an apartment, who never herds sheep, who has only seen sheep out of a car window, or at a fair, to work at producing dogs that herd sheep.

Such a person, lacks the knowledge about sheep, which they need to be able to properly control the future of sheep herding dogs. That is best left to sheep ranchers.

Ditto with coonhounds. They can be great pets, but if you sell them as pets, breed them to be good healthy pets. If you sell them as coon hunting dogs, then breed them to be good at hunting raccoons.

One of the problems, is what to do with the puppies who are not good at what they were bred to be?

When you mate 2 dogs that do the same type of work, and who are from dogs that have all been good at that type of work for several generations, than most all of the puppies will be good at that type of work - with some training.

This is because you are only insisting that the dogs be able to do the work well.

When dogs are bred for competition, then looking like a show dog, or just doing the event well, is NOT good enough - people who want dogs that win, want dogs that win.

So only the most likely to win puppies are needed - the others aren't wanted for the use they were bred for.

And that is a problem. Pit bull puppies bred to fight, but who lack what it takes to fight, are sold as pets. Border Collies who lack what it takes to find a rancher to buy them to work his sheep, are sold as pets.

And in even larger numbers, puppies bred to be show dogs are sold as pets.