My male and female, to breed or not to breed?

Ken, Here's the problem as I see it.....you have a litter of 6,8 10 puppies..... if you are lucky one or two have the right stuff for your needs, so you keep them..... if you are not a well known breeder/trainer etc......who gets the rest of the litter or worse yet what if you can't sell them or find homes for them?

I love puppies!!! Would love to have a litter a year myself. Enjoy taking care of the pregnant bitch, staying up for two days birthin babies and then spending the next 8 weeks doing nothing but babies. It's like a little piece of heaven for me. However, working breeds are powerful dogs and the responsibility of getting the right puppy into the right hands is something to be taken seriously. This is why I am not a breeder. It is cheaper in the long run to buy a puppy from an upstanding knowledgeable breeder...... even then it's a crapshoot.

These are just a few things to think about. Could go on and on.......

Debbie

Jeff Oehlsen said:

Quote:What do other do with pups that don't make the grade.

Answer: CULL

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Yeah, that's the right answer. Even "garbage" mutts out of your litter might be too much for people to handle. How would you kill them (seriously)?

Just to play devil's advocate, Ken...you're new to these types of dogs, though I recognize your experience with hunting dogs. You said you want to be a great trainer...what's that have to do with having a litter of pups?

Just wondering if your goal is to be a great trainer why you'd not focus on learning and titling dogs in the sport/work areas of your likings, get a feel for the lifestyle and commitment (particularly in a house with working pups), getting ethically comfortable with the notion of culling for trait purity, having numbskulls take dogs off your hands if you're not comfortable with that, enabling people to view you as a service provider for vet, health, diet, training, behavioral issues etc...and if you do happen to do someone "wrong" (in their perception), just surf around the chatrooms (other than this one 8) )...you'll get your name in lights, highlighted, with "CALL ME BEFORE YOU BUY FROM THIS BREEDER!" in caps. My teeth hurt just thinking about it.

The group of people from whom I'd ever consider buying a pup now is WAY smaller than what it was when I began. In all honesty, it would never include a newb breeder (that's not a knock on you).

I don't know, just strikes me as a PITA of the highest degree when you will ALWAYS have the chance to get a better dog (and cheaper dog in terms of real money and opportunity cost) from professional breeders and will ALWAYS have a learning curve for training from which raising puppies can only detract. It's not like there's a deficit of breeders out there claiming to raise working dogs from top lines. It's a very small group of people in the US who actually can separate wheat from chaff and select a quality dog.

JMN(newb)O. Having a litter for me is up there with why I don't ski and why I don't golf: too much pain, time, and money for too little payoff. It's easy to get caught up in the glory of pedigrees...I get kind of jazzed about Annie's and it's a rush when people tell me that I should breed her...but at the end of the day nothing she throws, short of a freak genetic twist, will match anything that some of the people here and elsewhere have in terms of real GSDs, Mals, and Dutchies.

I genuinely struggle 95% of the rationale people use to breed. I mean, whatever raises up your freak flag is your deal, but subjectively, my thought is that you can accomplish the goal you've posted (i.e., training) without having to put up with afterbirth splattered around your mud room. And snapping necks on puppies who just a few hours ago had the neighborhood kids cooing all over them...

I third what Woody said.

To comment on the culling, though, culling doesn't always HAVE to mean killing. Culling can be spaying/neutering and placing in a pet home, or on a nearby farm where it can learn to herd sheep or cows, or with a local SAR or drug detection team, etc. Speutering is also considered to be culling, though it typically means killing. For you to be able to tell if a puppy is going to 'make the cut,' so to speak, it's going to be more than just a few hours old. It's going to be several months old, and then you're going to have to either have it speutered and try to place it in an appropriate home, or explain to the vet exactly why you're wanting to euthanize this happy, healthy, beautiful puppy. And being so new to the world of working dogs, are you really going to be able to pick the ones that should be culled and the ones that shouldn't?

Just another newbie opinion.

Jerry Lyda said:

Culling does typically means KILLING. I know what you're saying Kristen and I see it the same way.BUT to newbies they understand culling as killing. We should be careful how we say things for the newbies that are on this and other lists. I don't want any of them to think that I'd SNAP the neck of a pup just because I thought it wouldn't make the grade as a working dog. I believe in limited registeration and in speutering. Not the outright killing of dogs and pups. There is places for people that do this. To me that's as bad as fighting dogs. Nuff said.

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Culling is killing a portion of an animal population for the purposes of breed management. That's the only context I have ever heard it used. Newb to working dogs, not newb to animals. I think it's inexact to call what Kristen and you are describing as "culling." Culling is a very explicit word with a very specific meaning.

And what you are describing is "ethical" breeding, IMO. But it's another PITA. Let's say you're a breeder with one good pup out of six. But you don't cull. So now you have the additional five pups you must feed, raise, vaccinate, place in GOOD homes, become a lifeline for Fluffy questions, make sure they're spayed/neutered...and are you morally responsible if one of those pups, in four years, ends up at a shelter and is put down because you had lousy buyers? That scenario is a lot more offensive to me than culling a pup.

Again, my overall point is that all of these concerns--plus the fact that there are better dogs out there by people who have done this professionally for decades--make me wonder why you'd ever want your own litter.