{"id":722,"date":"2013-02-12T21:17:45","date_gmt":"2013-02-12T21:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/?p=722"},"modified":"2013-02-13T01:15:02","modified_gmt":"2013-02-13T01:15:02","slug":"a-letter-to-breeders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/a-letter-to-breeders\/","title":{"rendered":"A Letter to Breeders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Dog, and other animal,\"Untitled-3\"<\/a> Breeders,<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, dog breeders have been included in much controversy, and I want to take a minute to address all \u201cserious\u201d dog breeders directly:<\/p>\n

Thank you!\u00a0 Thank you! Thank you!\u00a0 You have so deeply enriched and improved my life, and the lives of nearly every person I know, and I want to encourage and implore each and every one of you to keep breeding and know that your efforts are well recognized and understood by many of us, even if that truth is sometimes lost in the clamor\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Johnny014\"<\/a>Dog breeders are often vilified by Animal Rights zealots, by well-meaning but woefully misguided members of the public who have been persuaded that breeders are causing overpopulation and filling \"justsheep\"<\/a>shelters, by rescuers and shelter workers whose views of the world have become so skewed by the war they are waging that they have lost all perspective, and by those in the media who prefer drama to truth.<\/p>\n

Breeders are the solution, not the problem.<\/strong> You are the true heroes stewarding the present and the future of dogs.\u00a0 You are the ones creating healthy, well-structured animals with great temperaments and excellent early socialization. You are the ones funding health research. You are the ones devoting your lives and resources to the betterment of the species. You are the ones who put in twenty hour days giving your puppies everything and then wake up three times during the night to check on them. You are the ones whose dogs are virtually never<\/strong> in shelters because you do such a good job screening and placing and taking back dogs. You are the ones who have virtually eliminated overpopulation within your realm and in fact created a shortage<\/strong> of good dogs such that it often takes years of waiting before a puppy is available.<\/p>\n

\"Clip0039\"<\/a>That another, completely unrelated, group of idiots allows their dogs to keep reproducing for no good reason and filling shelters; that a few profit-driven miscreants breed countless dogs in horrid conditions; that rescues and shelters keep placing horrific dogs in homes so that they bounce back and keep the system full; that naivety motivates the unnatural and unsustainable notion of no-kill, that by nature dogs produce more puppies than are needed and so some excess and attrition are unavoidable\u2014these things are not<\/strong> your fault!<\/p>\n

\"nap\"<\/a>Yes, there are issues that breeders need to improve\u2014breeding towards extremes, prioritizing the wrong goals, breeding too young, over-breeding certain lines, placing excessive value on breed purity, hostility towards differing opinions, elitist attitudes, undervaluing balance\u2014and I hope breeders will continue to improve.\u00a0 And yes, there are some awful breeders out there.\u00a0 But all in all, it is you who have created the wonderful dogs of today, and you who will create the wonderful dogs of tomorrow, and my gratitude for that is nearly boundless. And while there are some lovely accidentally bred dogs in shelters (I have a few!), and some awful dogs being produced by breeders, at the end of the day the quality of dogs generally being produced by careful breeders is leaps and bounds higher than what is generally available in shelters.<\/p>\n

All th\"hose\"<\/a>e mindless anti-breeder rhetoric is nothing more than misleading hate-mongering that points the blame in the wrong direction: if breeders, and the public, buy into this mindless propaganda, we will lose all the good dogs in a few years, with virtually no reduction<\/strong> in the number of poorly bred dogs filling the shelters.<\/p>\n

So please, keep up the good work and know how much you and your hard work are appreciated. And above all, know that the fabulous creatures you produce are dearly loved and valued.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Clip0034\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"blueboy\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Dog, and other animal, Breeders, Over the past few years, dog breeders have been included in much controversy, and I want to take a minute to address all \u201cserious\u201d dog breeders directly: Thank you!\u00a0 Thank you! Thank you!\u00a0 You have so deeply enriched and improved my life, and the lives of nearly every person […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,4,108,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animal-rights","category-ethics-of-animal-ownership","category-random-thoughts","category-uncategorized","category-48-id","category-4-id","category-108-id","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-line-bottom","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}