How not to buy a puppy!

When we bought Millie, we really had no idea about health testing, responsible breeders, byb or puppy farms. We decided on our preferred breed, bought a copy of Loot and looked for springer spaniel puppies. We rang various numbers on the Thursday looking for a bitch puppy, visited a breeder on Friday and collected Millie the following Monday. She was 6wks old.

There were three bitch puppies sitting in the whelping box but the dam was nowhere to be seen, and although we weren´t happy about it, we accepted the breeder´s explanation that as the puppies were now weaned, their mother had been taken for a walk by her son.

Millie stood out straight away with her liver face and multitude of freckles. The other two were mostly white and whilst they sat back she came straight to us without any hesitation. The breeder wanted us to take Millie there and then but (a) we weren´t ready for her at home, and (b) she wasn´t yet 6wks at that point, so we paid a deposit and arranged to collect Monday.

Then, the breeder asked whether Millie would be a pet or a working dog and we told her she was going to be a family pet. She responded by saying Millie was the best choice for this as the other two pups had better working pedigrees. Up until that point, we´d assumed all three pups came from the same litter but clearly this wasn´t the case. To make matters worse, once the pedigree papers came through from the KC, the breeder was shown as a man and not the woman we had visited.

Since then, we have had our eyes opened to the mistakes we made, and although we love Millie to bits, if we´d known then what we know now we would never have visited that “breeder”.


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If any of you wish to avoid the mistakes we made and become "puppy farm aware", please click the links below:-

http://bepuppyfarmaware.webs.com/

http://www.puppylovecampaigns.org/