Did you know, The Kennel Club have cashed the cheques and endorsed the registrations from high volume breeders (more than 10 litters per year) – the sort of breeders you and I may refer to as puppy farmers? Why does it matter? Well, The Kennel Club, you see, are keen to bring your attention to the plight of puppy farmed dogs and the horrors those pups are subjected to by the commercial dog dealers who produce them. They’re also keen to tell you that the solution lies in the Kennel Club’s very own Accredited Breeder Scheme (convenient, eh?). Tell me, please, in what other walk of life do you get to take (and bank) the money of the very people you are campaigning against and NOT be called a hypocrite for it? Puppy farming in the UK is a horrendous, ugly trade that has been left completely open for the unscrupulous to exploit and profit from for years and years and years. It’s as rife now as it’s ever been.

Puppy farmers breed dogs with the sole aim of lining their pockets. They don’t breed dogs with the sole aim of improving their breed and producing healthy, functional dogs – which should be the ONLY reason to EVER breed a single litter of dogs. Period.

Puppy farmers have been registering their dogs with the Kennel Club. The Kennel Club knows this.

Kennel Club registration, you see, adds ‘value’ and can raise the price a breeder may charge for their stock. It also leads the public in to thinking they are buying quality. That’s why they do it, see. The puppy farmer wants Kennel Club paperwork in order to present a credible façade or, believe you me, they would NOT be spending the extra money on doing it – profit margins are crucial to the commercial dog producers and dealers.

The Kennel Club has acknowledged that high volume breeders use its registry. Take a look:

Dr Sampson advised that Bill Lambert, the Accredited Breeder Scheme advisor, does inspect and completes around 50 visits per year. All breeders (mostly who own multiple breeds) who breed more than 10 litters per year have been visited and some removed from the list.

The above comes from a breed council meeting held just last year. Re-read it if you like.

All breeders – mostly who own multiple breeds – who breed more than 10 litters per year.

Let’s give the quote some context. The above response is cited in the minutes from the meeting in relation to the following:

The question was raised concerning checks on breeders premises and whether any Accredited Breeders had been taken off the list for non compliance.

Now, this is a nice hypothetical for you: If you heard about a breeder producing LESS than 10 litters per year, let’s say, oh I don’t know, maybe NINE litters? Who also owned ‘multiple breeds’ – what would you think they might be labelled as? A ‘high volume’ dog breeder?

Let’s move on. I have another hypothetical question for you.

You run a dog breed registry.

You don’t like puppy farmers. Oh no. You do NOT like puppy farmers. Or, for the benefit of clarity, let’s call them ‘high volume dog breeders’.

You don’t want these high volume dog breeders (OK, puppy farmers! Let’s call them what they are shall we?) to sully the name and reputation of your breed registry.

How do you prevent them from doing this?

A) You impose limits on individual breeders, dictating that no more than 5 litters may be registered from the same breeder and/or premises in any given year.

B) You also insist that you will not accept a single registration without a veterinary certificate validating the health and condition of the dam along with appropriate breed health screening paperwork.

or

C) You don’t do any of that, but set up a SEPARATE scheme so you can still continue to take registrations from those high volume breeders who don’t health screen their stock…. but can act like you HAVE made a leap of progress by telling people to use your ‘accredited’ breeders instead?

We have an accredited breeder scheme, we have a breed registry – one contains puppy farmers and plenty of breeders that don’t adhere to basic health screening standards and one contains breeders who might be producing 9 litters or more per year but who fall under the category of being ‘accredited’. Both breeders can register their puppies with the Kennel Club. Both get Kennel Club registration paperwork and their registrations are endorsed with the Kennel Club seal of approval and, ultimately, the Kennel Club banks the cheques from both.

So, a simple question:

If you had that kind of a set up and you REALLY wanted to no longer allow a SINGLE puppy farmer to register their puppies with you and sully your name, cause damage by association to the GOOD breeders on your registry and PROFIT from the suffering of commercially bred dogs – why wouldn’t you make this simple move:

SHUT DOWN the registry and ONLY operate the accredited breeder scheme?

Seriously. Why would you not do that?

Yes, there’s a LOT of money in that breed registry. More money, in fact, than pours in to the accredited breeder scheme. But if YOU were going to stand on a soap box and lecture people about the horrors of puppy farming, wouldn’t YOU try to make DAMN sure you weren’t still cashing the cheques from some of the very people whom you are warning the public about? Wouldn’t you feel a bit ‘funny’ wagging your finger at the public preaching about puppy farmers when you’ve got some seriously high volume breeders using your own registry and sending their cash your way?

The Kennel Club have issued a press release today that states:

The Kennel Club and Thepet.net co-founders, TV vet Marc Abraham and social media guru Andrew Seel, want people to know the truth about where badly-bred puppies come from and help them choose a happy and healthy puppy bred by a reputable breeder, rather than a sick or diseased farmed one.

Kennel Club Veterinary Advisor and TV vet, Marc Abraham, said: “I am treating more and more puppies that have come from puppy farms than ever before.

“Puppy buyers often don’t know how to spot the signs of an irresponsible breeder and so continue to unwittingly line the puppy farmers’ pockets, fuelling this cruel trade.

“It is imperative that prospective puppy buyers buy from a Kennel Club Accredited Breeder and that they sign the Kennel Club’s petition to get the principles and standards of this Scheme made mandatory for all breeders. These breeders love and care for their puppies agree to follow certain standards and agree to allow a Kennel Club inspector access to their premises. Here are my top tips for choosing a puppy:

1.      For a pedigree puppy always contact the Kennel Club first for their list of reliable and reputable Kennel Club Accredited Breeders.

2.      Ask to see the puppy’s mother, who should always be with the pups.

3.      Always see the puppy in its breeding environment and ask to look at the kennelling conditions, particularly if they were not raised within the breeder’s house. If you suspect
the conditions are not right, then do not buy the puppy.

4.      Be suspicious of any breeder selling more than one or at most two breeds.

5.      Be prepared to be put on a waiting list – a healthy puppy is well-worth waiting for.

6.      Ask if you can return the puppy if things don’t work out. Responsible breeders will always say yes.

7.      Never buy a puppy because you feel like you’re rescuing it. You’ll only be making space available for another poorly pup to fill.

8.      Consider alternatives to buying a pedigree puppy like getting a rescue dog or pup, and remember that every breed of dog has its own breed rescue society.”

People can sign the Kennel Club’s petition, which asks the government to enforce a mandatory set of standards for all breeders, based on those already followed by Kennel Club Accredited Breeders and that put the puppies’ health and welfare first and foremost.

OK.

Some sage words there. No doubt.

But let’s dig, shall we?

Be suspicious of any breeder selling more than one or at most two breeds.

Really?

30 seconds.

30 seconds is all it took me to find Kennel Club Accredited breeders who breed more than two breeds. I did a quick search on the Kennel Club website for Accredited Breeders and within just a few clicks I located accredited breeders who bred more than two different breeds.

So, I’m confused.

I should be “suspicious” of these (accredited) breeders yet….

“It is imperative that prospective puppy buyers buy from a Kennel Club Accredited Breeder”

I must reiterate, it took me less than 30 seconds to find Kennel Club accredited breeders who breed more than two breeds.

And here’s the thing, I have absolutely no qualms whatsoever in accepting that a quality breeder can happen to breed more than two different breeds and a horrendous breeder may produce just one litter in their entire lives. The point is that there is confusion, muddied communication/advice and, ultimately, rampant hypocrisy at play.

How can we be expected to listen to a lecture on the horrors of puppy farming when it is coming from an organisation that accepts the cheques of the very people it is seeking to warn us about?

Most right minded people want puppy farming to become a thing of the past. I am absolutely certain that the Kennel Club would like it that way too. But, fact is, the Kennel Club is running a two tiered system which means they ARE enabling puppy farmers to operate under a veil of implied credibility. If you cash the cheque yet have the means to set the standard rather than take a ‘do as we say, not as we do’ approach, then some questions need to be asked.

But let’s remember this. Let’s focus on it. Let’s draw attention to it. Let’s ask it, out loud:

If the Kennel Club believes in its Accredited Breeder Scheme so much. If the Kennel Club believes ALL breeders should comply with the standards of the Accredited Breeder Scheme, then why don’t they simply do away with their flawed registry and ONLY operate the Accredited Breeder Scheme?

Surely if they want to be taken seriously on an issue like puppy farming and their commitment to eradicating sub standard breeding practices, they could take a giant step toward that goal by NOT allowing those very breeders who they publicly condemn to register their puppies with the Kennel Club and tacitly give those breeders the credibility they so clearly crave?

Let’s wind the clock back to February of this year  when Caroline Kisko of the Kennel Club informed Dog World newspaper that they (The KC) would not insist on operating the standards of the Accredited Breeder Scheme on a wholesale basis across all of the breeders who register puppies with the Kennel Club unless it applied to ‘all dogs’.

The question was put to Ms Kisko that all breeding dogs be subject to compulsory health screening. Here is her (verbatim) response:

Well, that to us is, is one of those things that if everybody joins something like the Accredited Breeders’ Scheme, and I’m not saying it has to be a Kennel Club’s one, but if everybody follows the requirements of something like the breeders’ scheme, then you would have that in the palm of your hand, but we, the Kennel Club is not going to go down that route for every Kennel Club registered dog as long as it’s not a requirement for other dogs, because all that’ll happen is that you’ll have the bar set at one level for Kennel Club registered dogs and the bar set way down low, in other words probably non existent for all the other dogs, and that’s actually completely unfair on both Kennel Club registered dogs and people buying dogs because… ok, you can say, well, that way we’ll know that those are the crème de la crème. What about all the other dogs? Do we not care about how they’re bred? Of course we do, and because of that, the Kennel Club will hold out against this idea that you can set one set of criteria for Kennel Club registered dogs and a different set for other dogs.

This is bizarre thinking.

Imagine if The Telegraph newspaper informed its readers that it would not insist on strict, high quality editorial standards unless all other newspapers agreed to follow exactly the same, over and above those minimum requirements according to the laws of the land? “We’ll only adhere to the same editorial standards as The Beano unless we’re forced to do otherwise”. No. It doesn’t work that way. Why would an organisation not set its own standards as high as it possibly could rather than simply ask to be judged against the lowest common standards expected of every other Tom, Dick and Harry?

By worrying about ‘every other dog’ the Kennel Club continues to allow sub-par breeders to thrive. I believe they know it, too.

The Kennel Club knowingly operates its very own two tier system:

1) The Accredited Breeder scheme – which it implores you to acknowledge as the best, most foolproof method of buying a quality puppy

2) The Kennel Club registry, which contains puppies registered by commercial/high volume breeders (you know, PUPPY FARMERS!).

What lies at the heart of these obvious double standards?

You decide.

But please, focus on the issue of puppy farming and give your full, unequivocal support to Puppy Farm Awareness Day via these superb groups:

I guarantee this: NONE of those organisations are cashing cheques from puppy farmers. They don’t operate double standards and they are in a position to give you sound, clear advice on how you can help to fight the cruel trade of the commercial dog dealers.