When I was a kid, you could get these things called ‘paint by numbers kits.’ A kit consisted of a bunch of little pots of different colored paints with numbers on the lids, and a board covered with outlines, each with a number. You matched the paint number to the outline number, and when you were done you had a ‘painting.’ At least, if you stood all the way across the room and squinted real hard it kind of looked like a painting.

What the ARAs are doing right now with all these pet and breeder limit laws is painting by numbers. If the number matches, you are painted as either a greedy breeder or a crazy hoarder. There is no room in the paint by numbers box for people who keep a large number of dogs but don’t breed a lot, or who simply keep a bunch of dogs and don’t breed at all. Either you are greedy and exploit your dogs for cash or you’re crazy. Or both.

My husband and I have been keeping more than a few dogs for over a decade, far in advance of our breeding efforts. We enjoy keeping lots of dogs; you see a number of behaviors you would never witness keeping just one or two. The dogs and their behaviors are fascinating, and they make us very happy. It is expensive and time-consuming to keep many dogs, but ultimately well worth it. When I first got involved in breeding, I was shocked at the number of people who were keeping fifteen or more dogs. I thought people like us were rare. But here were lots of people keeping lots of dogs: show people, hunters, mushers, you name it. Most of these people are “hobby” breeders: breeders who don’t breed enough litters to derive very much income from their dogs. They don’t make a living from breeding, and rarely make much profit. Any money realized goes right back into the dogs.

Under most of the so-called ‘puppy mill’ laws being proposed right now, we would be a ‘commercial breeder’, simply because of the number of dogs we have. That’s right, even though it’s been almost three years in between our last two litters, even though we make not a dime off of our dogs, even though the IRS considers our breeding to be a hobby, we would be commercial breeders. The entire concept of keeping a bitch intact and NOT breeding from her every single year is ignored by the ARAs and not understood by well-meaning legislators. Just because an animal is capable of reproducing does not mean that a breeder is going to automatically breed it.

In the interesting of educating those people who may believe the ‘keeping intact bitches means breeding lots of litters’ mantra repeated over and over again by the ARAs, here is how such a law would affect us:

When we buy a puppy, we have hopes that it will be useful in our breeding program. This involves growing the pup to adulthood, which for us is a minimum of two years old. Dogs typically mature more slowly than bitches, and may take three years to grow up completely. At that time a decision is made whether to include the animal in our breeding program, however, that does NOT mean that the dog or bitch will be bred immediately. Including the animal in our breeding program means it will be kept intact until such time as it is bred, NOT that we will breed it on it’s second or third birthday. Once a bitch or dog is bred from, we usually keep at least two or three pups from the litter to grow out and evaluate. Because we are outcrossing and crossbreeding, how the pups turn out is fairly unpredictable at this point, so we have to keep several and grow them up to maturity to evaluate both our breeding decisions and their future inclusion in the breeding program. Sometimes the pups turn out to be fantastic and sometimes they don’t. Because we don’t breed to make money, we don’t consider it a huge loss when a pup doesn’t turn out to be what we want. We simply exclude that dog from consideration and go back to the drawing board.

Growing pups takes a minimum of two years, since we have large dogs and they mature pretty slowly. Obviously, these pups must be kept sexually intact during their evaluation period, adding to the number of intact dogs we would be allowed to keep. Once a bitch has been bred and we have seen what she produces, we may decide to try breeding her to a different dog. These pups also will take several years to be included as breeding animals. Most of our dogs will not be bred until they are at least three or four years old. Some may be kept intact until that time only to be excluded from the program entirely because we have decided they have nothing to offer, or because a younger dog has better qualities, replacing the older one in the program. Because we are not in a hurry to produce many pups in a short period of time and our dogs don’t have to earn their keep, we can space our litters out so that each one gets individual attention.

Under a restrictive limit law, we would not be able to keep as many pups, and would have to desperately hope that those few pups have qualities that we want to reproduce. We would have to breed each bitch or dog as soon as they are reproductively capable, so that if they do not produce what we are looking for, we could spay or neuter them as quickly as possible so they do not contribute to our limit of intact animals. We would have to breed as many litters as possible in a short time, so that the parents the could be spayed or neutered as quickly as possible after reproducing and their offspring could replace them as intact animals. We would not be able to breed a bitch twice, unless we did it on consecutive seasons, without the ability to grow her pups out and evaluate them. Instead of a slow, carefully considered approach to our breeding program, we would have to do a lot of guessing and even more hoping, if we were limited in the number of intact dogs we could keep.

We are not big into conformation (dog shows) or performance events. Those breeders who are very involved in shows and performance often operate on an even slower schedule than we do, and they would be even more hindered in their breeding program by limit laws. Dogs shown in conformation here in the United States must also be sexually intact, so even keeping a dog to show with no intention of breeding it would add to the number of intact dogs any person would be keeping.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with breeding dogs to earn a living. But there is a world of difference between keeping twenty bitches and breeding each one every year and keeping twenty bitches to further a hobby breeding program, where each bitch may be bred only once, at most two or three times in her lifetime. For a breeder who makes a living breeding their dogs, there is not a lot of room for a bitch that is not being bred and earning her keep. A hobby breeder has no such considerations. Whether commercial breeders need further regulation is debatable; the vast majority of substandard breeder busts involve existing welfare and cruelty laws, not limit laws or kennel laws. If the old laws are not being enforced, how do new laws that criminalize previously law abiding citizens help? They don’t. They create more bureaucracy, and force already cash-strapped animal control departments to spend money they don’t have enforcing laws on people who weren’t a problem before. I know it is difficult when a substandard breeder is busted to look at the suffering animals and not think “there ought to be a law.” But while the number of dogs of sometimes contributes to their neglect when there isn’t enough money or time to care for them properly, there are just as many single pets out there that are neglected or abused. Painting by numbers with dog limit laws makes no logical sense and has not been proven to work to prevent neglect and cruelty. It is simply another transparent attempt to criminalize people who keep a large number of dogs, painting them as abnormal animal exploiters with a culture of greed and neglect of their charges to make a buck, which couldn’t be further from the truth. This kind of thing takes advantage of people with no real experience wtih dog breeding, and exploits their desire to help neglected animals. As with a real paint by numbers painting, you must stand far back and squint pretty hard to see these laws as actually helping animals or their owners in any way.