Fear and Loathing- the moral tightrope of puppy acquisition choices.

There are a few creators that keep appearing in my Facebook feed the last two weeks. Relentlessly. Both are young women who make content focused on the importance of choosing ethical breeders when acquiring a dog.

Neither is a breeder nor has any particular qualification for the expert role they have assigned themselves but that, alas, seems to be the way of things these days. Confidence and snark seem to be the only qualifications needed to become an internet expert on almost anything. Sigh.

One of them, Jess Shark I think is her name? has a page called “To Catch a Backyard Breeder” on which she posts recorded calls to breeders pretending to be a puppy buyer and asking questions. She always starts with the usual checklist of items known to the flying monkeys of the worst parts of the traditional dog breeding world like:

How many litters have you produced? (Anything more than a meager number of fastidiously curated obviously money losing litters is proof you are unworthy)

What health testing do you do?

This is a fine question but it’s too bad she doesn’t actually know that just doing breed club recommend testing is not proof of much since many breed clubs don’t require critical tests (lest they need to do something about abysmal failure rates) or that there is no way to health test your way out of genetic bottlenecks or overwhelming rates of disease.

Usually by the time she gets through the first couple questions the conversation begins to break down because either the breeders answers are abysmal and or evasive, or one or both parties gets defensive and it turns into an argument.

Since I’m between litters and menopause is making me pretty snarky myself I decided to comment on one of her posts and invite myself for a call and she invited me to do a recorded interview on TikTok live with her. Why not? I abhor TikTok but it also fascinates me. I can’t look away.

I’ve been watching some of her previous interviews to prepare.

Heather Gibson of Big Hearted Breeders- who is certainly experienced and obviously knowledgeable, was the most interesting one so far. She held her own despite an attempt to pull her into an irrational wormhole where somehow if she doesn’t know the name of every puppy she’s ever produced it proves she doesn’t care about them and also- why aren’t you fostering rescue dogs?!

She got shamed and lectured and told that dogs are dying in shelters because of people like her. That she should get honest with herself and realize that what she’s doing is wrong.

Heather wisely ended the call shortly after the demand she begin fostering rescue dogs. After Heather left the conversation, there was much laughter and scorn and snarky confidence about the fact that she was obviously wrong about everything and obviously she has no ethical basis behind her breeding program and that it’s only for money. I turned it off.

I was left with the echo of the moral certainty in Jess’ voice. She is very sure that if high volume breeders like Heather would stop breeding that all the dogs in shelters would have homes.

This ignores all of the statistics, which Heather to her credit, tried to reference in the interview, but they fell on deaf ears. The reality is that in order to maintain the current dog population in the United States approximately 7-8 million new dogs need to come into the system either as imports or puppies and dogs going through the shelter system are only a small fraction of that number.

We need many millions of puppies being produced by breeders of some sort in order to maintain the pet dog population. The question is not really whether dogs should be bred, but by who and using what method and selection criteria.

This is a common misunderstanding and I understand and it’s comes from a place of caring. When people see homeless dogs, or dogs in shelters who are euthanized for space, which does happen sometimes based on regional patterns, it’s easy to think “stop breeding!” would be an easy fix.

While I was thinking about all of this, I read a story about a family in Colorado that stopped me cold.

On February 4th of this year, a 7 year old boy was killed by an 89-pound pit bull mix inside his own home by a dog his mother was fostering.

The dog had been surrendered to the Montrose Animal Shelter in December by a family who had adopted him through the Montrose Bully Breed Club when he was about a year old. A shelter technician described him in a text message as “like a monster,” wanting to attack every dog who passed by his kennel. A volunteer walking him fractured her wrist after he lunged and her wrist got caught in the kennel door. He was on anxiety medication. He was days away from being euthanized.

Then the Montrose Bully Breed Club, the same rescue that had originally adopted him out stepped back in. They took him on January 9th under a contract that released the shelter from liability for any personal injuries. Their vice president posted publicly that the dog needed someone who could “nurture his confidence while providing exceptionally clear boundaries.” She wrote that it was his “last call.”

The rescue placed him in a foster home. That foster home had two young boys. The foster mother was a veterinary technician, someone who presumably trusted the rescue to tell her what she needed to know. It’s still not clear what she was told.

Three and a half weeks later, her son was dead.

The rescue said the dog had “No documented history of aggression toward people.”

As if a dog that lunges at every animal in the kennel, that fractured a handler’s wrist, that was on anxiety medication, that was described as a monster by the people caring for him daily - as if that dog is a safe bet around a second grader because it hadn’t bitten a *human*. Yet.

People in the rescue and shelter system seemed to care more about the life of this dog than the safety of the human children in the home where he was placed. I don’t know how else to read this.

Sourcing a dog is complicated. There are good breeders and bad ones. There are good rescues and bad ones. There are dogs in shelters who will make wonderful family pets, and there are dogs in shelters who should never go home with anyone.

Simple answers and the shaming of whole groups of people by self appointed experts with minimal experience and no sense of nuance is not a solution. It’s content. It performs well. It feels righteous. But it doesn’t make a single dog healthier or a single family safer.

Volume isn’t the question. Health testing alone isn’t the question. Mixed breed vs pure isn’t the question. These are simple frameworks people use to feel like they’ve figured out the moral landscape when they’ve barely looked at the terrain.

Choosing a puppy should be joyful. The online discourse about it is the opposite. It’s a minefield of moral judgment and tribal loyalty, and the people yelling the loudest are only the most confident, not the wisest.

There is real fear of making the wrong choice and being shamed for it. And underneath that, for many parents, a much more primal fear of bringing a dangerous animal into the room where their children sleep.

Many of the people that come to me for puppies are parents looking for a safe pet. This weighs on me. My worst fear is producing a puppy that grows up to bite a child. I don’t understand how a rescue could be so brazen as to allow an 86 pound “monster” to be in the home of some one’s little boy.

Maybe I’ll get a chance to explore some of the nuance with Jess on May 4th on her TikTok at 7pm EDT.

Maybe not. But it’s worth a shot. I hope some of you can join us. I’ll post details when it’s closer.