Doing Right by the Dog

I choose to bring dogs into the world, and I think that gives me a responsibility towards the lives they go on to have. They do not choose the body or temperament they inherit, how they spend their first weeks, or the home they first go to. Those are decisions I make, or decisions I have a substantial influence over, so I want to make them as well as I can.

Breeding always involves uncertainty. I cannot know exactly what a mating will produce or how a puppy will develop over a lifetime, but there is still a great deal I can know before making a decision. Health information, structure, temperament, working characteristics, relatives and previous offspring all tell me something. Once puppies are born, how they develop during their first weeks gives me more information, and I use that when deciding where each puppy should go.

I want to breed dogs who can move comfortably and remain physically capable as they get older. I want PSMs who retain the curiosity, persistence, independence and desire to search that make them the dogs they are, while being able to live comfortably in the human world as well. I pay particular attention to how dogs respond to stress and novelty and how readily they recover afterwards. I am not looking for dogs who never react to anything; I want them to have enough capacity to deal with the inevitable mistakes, changes and difficult days that come with an ordinary life.

Health testing is an important part of this, but a dog is more than the sum of their results. I use health information as part of a much broader picture that includes the individual dog, their structure and temperament, their relatives and, where available, previous offspring. Some results give fairly clear answers; others need to be considered alongside other information and the risks involved in a particular mating. Shows, hunting tests and sports can add information too, but none of these things tells me everything I need to know about a dog.

This also affects how I think about individual puppies. A characteristic that is easy in one home may be difficult in another, and the same puppy can have a very different life depending on where they go. When I match puppies to families, I am trying to use what I know about each puppy and each household rather than treating the litter as a group of interchangeable PSMs. This is why I do not simply let families choose whichever puppy appeals to them most.

I also keep following the dogs we breed after they leave us. Some of what I thought I saw in a puppy will turn out to be right and some of it will not. Adult health, behaviour, working characteristics, relationships with their families and the differences between siblings give me information I could not have had when the litter was eight weeks old. I want that information, including when it is inconvenient, because it influences later breeding decisions.

There are limits to what I can control. Once a puppy leaves us, their development continues in a different home and is affected by their experiences, environment, health, training and a fair amount of chance. Their family becomes responsible for many of the decisions that shape their life. I can provide information and support, and I want families to stay in touch, but I cannot take credit for every good outcome or assume that every difficulty originated with the breeder.

The first twelve weeks of a puppy's life are an extraordinary opportunity. Development during this period has a disproportionate influence on later physical and behavioural development, and for most of those first weeks the breeder controls almost everything: how the puppies are raised, what they experience, how they move and play, what they eat, how much they sleep, and how they first encounter novelty, frustration and stress.

I consider having that opportunity one of the greatest privileges of my life, as well as an enormous responsibility. For a short period I get to help shape minds and bodies that will soon leave me and become someone's companion and family member, sharing their life intimately for, I hope, well over a decade. I cannot determine who those puppies will become, but I can give them as good a foundation as I know how.

Ultimately, I want the dogs I raise to have an extraordinary life with their humans, and I want their humans to feel that they have an extraordinary life with their dog. That is the prize for me. Championships, hunting results, sporting achievements and everything else are wonderful when they happen, but none of them means very much if the dog and their person do not genuinely enjoy the life they share.

A great deal of how I think about breeding follows from that. I cannot remove every source of friction, nor would I want to breed away the character that makes these dogs who they are. What I can try to reduce are the avoidable sources of friction: physical discomfort, difficulty recovering from stress, serious mismatches between dogs and homes, or characteristics that make everyday life unnecessarily difficult. I want to breed PSMs who are very much PSMs, and then find the home in which each individual dog has the best chance of thriving as themselves.

Most of that life will have nothing to do with titles or prizes. It will simply be the life that dog and their humans share for the next twelve or fifteen years.

I have written more about my broader views on breeder responsibility on BusyDoggie. The longer article goes further into questions of structure, behavioural wellbeing, early development, health testing and some breeding practices I am more critical of.