What exactly is a commercial breeder? How do we define one? Our regular readers know I’m not into the numbers game, simply because I have a lot of dogs, and I have friends with a lot of dogs, and we are definitely NOT in it for the money. I made a grand total of $775 selling pups last year. Actually, I made less than that because Minimog was over four months old and had to have a rabies vaccine, which my vet charges out the wazoo for. So with the health certificate, the rabies vax, the fecal test, crate and office visit, I actually lost money on her. My ‘profits’, such as they were, wouldn’t even pay for a month’s worth of food for my dogs.

I am kind of a lousy business-woman, no?

To me, being commercial means you make a good portion, or even all, of your income from your endeavors. I think that’s a reasonable definition. Brett and I are commercial artists. We whore out our skills for cash to buy food for our dogs. Making money is the whole point. To be sure we actually make money, we have to work within certain guidelines. Brett does not, for example, get paid enough to make spending a week on a page viable. He’s got to crank those things out. That means he takes shortcuts, makes compromises, to make the work go faster. He still tries to do quality work, but it has to be tempered with the knowledge that this is a money-making endeavor, and there has to be a balance between the time and the money. Or you simply don’t make enough money.

I do not expect to make a living off of puppies. If I did, I would be breeding a lot more, and I’d have to do a much better job of balancing my expenses with my income. I’d probably stop feeding a home made diet, and I’d have to spend less time with each litter, since I’d be having a lot more of them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making money by breeding dogs, and I think it’s just plain stupid to expect every single breeder to pursue such an expensive hobby with no thought of, at the very least, breaking even. I’d love for my dogs to pay for themselves, but that’s just too many litters for me. I’d have to cut corners in ways that I wouldn’t be comfortable with, especially regarding the placement of pups, and food. I’m pretty obsessive about the dog’s food. Those are not corners I’m willing to cut, personally, just to have my breeding program pay for itself.

All this blah blah blah about money is really me complaining about an initiative in Missouri, called, interestingly enough, the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act. Now, there’s a load of things wrong with this initiative, not the least of which is that most of it’s provisions are covered by other laws, but the kicker for me is the definition of ‘hobby breeder’: breeders who have custody of no more than ten covered female dogs. (Covered means the dog is over the age of six months and has intact sexual organs.) I have more than ten intact bitches. Not only does this initiative define me as a large-scale commercial breeder, but it also calls me a puppy mill. Gee, how flattering.

So now we get to that new dog breeder math: more than ten intact bitches equals large-scale commercial breeder. Doesn’t matter how many, or how few litters you produce. Doesn’t matter whether you operate in the red, just cover your expenses, or make your entire living from your dogs. To these math-challenged idiots, intact bitch means bred bitch.

Sigh.

Our Afghan Sheepsie is intact. She will never be bred. Sheepsie has food allergies and I don’t want to perpetuate that. Houdini is a year old. She’s intact. Will she ever be bred? Maybe. I can’t tell you that at this time. Certainly not for two or three years, at least.

Here’s my breeding equation: more than ten intact bitches, plus two litters in 2009 plus last litter before that in 2006, plus a definite litter planned for 2011, plus a possible litter planned for 2010, equals someone with a hell of an expensive hobby! The IRS would laugh in my face if I tried to declare my dog breeding a business. They expect a business to make money. Whoever thinks that just the number of dogs you have should define whether you are a large-scale commercial breeder must be using math from an alternate universe.

Let’s grow up and stop pretending these types of things are actually about protecting dogs, especially since, under this initiative, you have can as many dogs as your community will allow, as long as you chop out their sexual organs. Anybody with half a brain can see that just having an intact animal does not mean it’s going to be bred. This initiative first and foremost changes the definition of hobby breeder from one who doesn’t make a living from breeding, to one that has less than eleven intact bitches regardless of how many litters or how much money they make off their dogs (with ten bitches, by the way, I could have between ten and twenty litters in a year, if the bitches cycle on the right schedule.) This initiative is expressly designed to expand the definition of commercial breeder (and apply the pejorative ‘puppy mill’ to anyone who is not a hobby breeder), and to make it considerably more difficult to have a number of intact animals, whether you breed them or not.

Cuz we all know, intact equals bred. I suck pretty badly at math, but even I know that doesn’t add up.

Glad I don’t live in Missouri.