If you are on this page right now, chances are you are looking to buy a Dachshund puppy. Do yourself a favor and carefully read this text, it will give you a better insight into the pet situation in the United States, as well as spare you a lot of heartache going forward.
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There is an acute shortage of pets currently in this country. You read this right, there is an overwhelming shortage. If you haven't looked into it recently, you might still be under the 1980s impression that there is "pet overpopulation" and "a lot of dogs needing homes". This is simply not true anymore. In fact, as anyone who has looked for a new dog can confirm, it is very hard to find one available. Allow me to explain to you why this is happening and how we arrived at this point.
* Currently 90-95% of all pet dogs in the United States are spayed and neutered. Spayed and neutered dogs are unable to reproduce. Where will the next generation of pets come from? We are in the process on castrating our breeds out of existence.
* Very few people breed dogs anymore, and the number of breeders is dwindling every year. Why? Because the Animal Rights extremists have been vilifying breeders for decades. When "breeder" becomes a new swear word, very few young people want to be breeders, as simple as that. Go to any dog show, go to any dog club meeting, and you will see that the majority of attendants are older, right around retirement age. We have a shortage of "new blood" among our midst.
* Breeding dogs the right way is a very expensive hobby. Most of our litters have TENS of thousands of dollars invested into them even before they hit the ground. Importing quality bloodlines, health testing them, purchasing equipment, showing, providing quality veterinary care and daily maintenance has become prohibitively expensive, further reducing the numbers of litters born every year. If you do it right, you need an independent source of income to provide for your dogs.
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How is the country managing the shortage and just where can you get a dog?
* Retail rescue.
Educate yourself on what it really is. There are thousands of shady organizations out there, most registered as non-for-profit, who are in the business of acquiring and flipping dogs. They maintain a good public profile, telling people that they rescue dogs from bad situations and find homes for them in exchange of "adoption fee". Behind the scenes these organizations import stray dogs from third world countries by planeload and sell them onto unsuspecting public, complete with exotic foreign diseases and substantial behavior issues. There is zero traceability, and there are very good chances that the dog you think you "saved from a bad owner" is in fact an import from the streets of Egypt or Equador, India or Ukraine, Morocco or Vietnam, purposely brought over to the US by the greedy evil people who make money by pushing the emotional buttons of the good folks. Remember, if you didn't pull a dog from a burning building, you didn't rescue it. If you paid money for your dog, you bought it. That "adoption fee" is in fact the purchase price.
* Shady shelters.
Having studied this phenomenon for decades, I am here to tell you that the main job of a dog shelter is to stay in business. If we run out of homeless dogs, the shelter will close, losing government funding, and the managers will lose their cushy salaries. No shelter wants to run out of dogs, no shelter wants to be closed down. With very rare exceptions, the majority of dogs who enter shelters for legitimate reasons are Pit Bulls and Pit Bull crosses that spill out of the least fortunate neighborhoods in our country. Think you will find a sweet mid age Golden Retriever sitting in a shelter waiting to be taken home? Think again. Aside of re-labeling their Pit Bulls as "Boxer Labrador crosses" to escape the breed-associated stigma and facilitate adoptions, many shelters have quietly started breeding dogs in their kennels. You have read that right. Faced with pet shortages and potential closures, shelters are breeding their haphazard stock behind closed doors in order to have pets to sell. There is again zero traceability and zero accountability, the parent animals are not tested for hereditary disorders and have no record of pedigree.
* Commercial breeders.
There are only a few large professional commercial breeders left in the US, but they still exist. While most of them have cleaned up their act in regards to their dogs' living conditions, the sheer number of dogs they keep doesn't allow for proper health care and proper socialization. Most large breeders sell wholesale to pet stores and pet dealers, and only a few sell directly to public. Many, if not most, are engaged in cross-breeding projects, because mutts "sell better". A Poodle cross puppy costs twice more than a purebred Poodle puppy, despite being an inferior quality dog.
* Pet breeders.
We still have a good number of people willy-nilly breeding their pet dogs for extra income. Some do a decent job raising the puppies, but all operate with dogs that are either non-pedigreed or have a chance bloodline. Why? Because established reputable show breeders, whose hands hold the best bloodlines, are very hesitant to sell puppies to pet breeders. Most pet breeders simply do not have access to better bloodlines, so they breed what they have. You can definitely find a pet puppy to buy from a pet breeder. It will not be very beautiful (think Volkswagen versus Ferrari) and might not be very healthy, but if you look hard enough, you will find one available, albeit likely with a waiting list. Pet breeders do not run large operations and usually have a decent length waiting list. In my estimation, the majority of purebred puppies in the US are currently supplied by pet breeders. There are good pet breeders, there are bad pet breeders, and there are awful pet breeders, and if you don't know how to tell them apart, chances are you'll end up in the wrong hands.
Most people googling breeders online find pet breeders first.
* Show breeders.
We are the elite of the dog world, we are the ones who "do everything by the book" and have the best quality bloodlines, we are the ones who invest and invest and invest into our breeding programs, not expecting much if any money in return, we are the ones who socialize and take care of our puppies right, however our numbers are very small. There are very few of us and you are unlikely to find us, because we mostly sell puppies by word of mouth, referrals from our previous puppy owners, therefore we don't really advertise. Show breeders are hard to find and even harder to get a puppy from. We only keep a few dogs, because keeping larger numbers would compromise the quality of care, and we only breed a few litters. Most show breeders in the US have waiting lists that extend up to a year or longer, and most show breeders will interview extensively before agreeing to sell you a puppy. We have the luxury of picking the very best homes from a large pool of applications and it is often said it is easier to adopt a child than to buy a puppy from us.
*Puppy scammers.
It needs to be mentioned that there are some foreign gang rings that operate a network of fake kennel websites, fishing for people who are desperate for a puppy. The way the scam works, the scammers find pictures of cute puppies online and post them on their websites as available, usually for a very low price and ready to ship immediately, but once you wire them the money, they stop responding. Needless to say the puppy never arrives. Folks who don't know that you get exactly what you pay for, folks exhausted from many months of searching for a puppy, are an easy prey. When you contact a scammer, they ask for an upfront payment, and when you issue it, they disappear into sunset. There never was a puppy available to begin with. You were had by a foreign scammer ring.
Remember that if you see free cheese, you are looking at a mousetrap.
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If you just started searching for a puppy, you might be inclined to think that there is a plethora of choice awaiting, puppies of every breed, gender, size, hair type and color patiently sitting on the supermarket shelves, waiting for you to come put them into your shopping cart and take them home. It might be somewhat of a rude awakening and a bit discouraging to learn the reality of it. There is a pet shortage in the United States. Demand far exceeds supply in the pet market, and the better the puppy quality you desire, the harder they are to find. Set your expectations right. Realistically, a perfect puppy will not fall into your lap tomorrow. It will be many months of waiting before you can have one. Something needs to be done to change the current situation, but it might be too far gone. I forecast it will only get worse from here and there will come a day when an American family will have to look abroad if they want a family dog.