Page 9 - K9 News - Issue 15 - March2021
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- as they embark on a voyage into the realms last time, there are some pretty unscrupulous
of dog breeding, with the aim of establishing breeders of pedigree dogs out there that have,
a business based on making money out of unsurprisingly, also jumped on the bandwagon.
designer dogs!
I’ve already covered this particular subject, the
Making money out of designer dogs? Making ethical standards of healthy dog breeding, fairly
money out of breeding any type of dogs? Have comprehensively before, so I won’t dwell on it
they completely lost the plot? Did they ever have here. But it is interesting to see how some of
the plot? these Greeders have started to attempt to justify
their greed by claiming that they have to charge
For goodness sake. Talk about pouring fire on
more because of the cost of health testing! Yes,
an already out-of-control inferno! And all funded
you read that correctly, the cost of health testing.
by us, the licence fee payer, just to add insult to
injury! Nice try.
Needless to say, the concept, once aired But the rest of us, the ones with ethical
publicly, generating a massive backlash. And not standards, accept that these costs are (and
just from the usual directions. There were some always have been) part of the ethical breeding
pretty big names voicing their horror. process. And, as such, are swallowed into
the not-inconsiderable range of costs that we
As an aside, I would like to point out that if the
automatically incur, and readily accept, as part
BBC really wants to put out a documentary
of what we do as a hobby. And as we are not
about young people breeding dogs, then I could
actually breeding for money……. well, I rest my
name a fair few youngsters that have grown
case.
up in the canine world and are now making
their own mark as knowledgeable breeders of However, all of this makes the life of the ethical
considerable talent and vision. The BBC could breeder that much more difficult. It’s hard
do a lot worse than talk to some of them. enough doing battle with Mother Nature (and
the BBC!), but now we have to fight our corner
Now, as I stand here and write this (yes,
just to be able to gain access to the valuable
bizarrely, I write standing up. Feel free to ask
services we have been using without hindrance
next time we meet!) there are rumours that this
for years. And we are finding that we are having
misconceived ‘documentary’ project has been
to justify our charges - not because they are
shelved (in BBC speak this usually reads as
high, but because they have, in the eyes of the
“dropped into the section of the future-project-
public, become suspiciously cheap!
archive that nobody is allowed to visit, and never
seen again”). Let’s just hope the rumours are And of course, there’s the fact that costs are
true. driven by demand, and when that demand is
on the increase, especially during a time when
But, having said that, going by its past record,
fulfilling the demand is made harder by the
the BBC is more than likely to bulldoze ahead
Covid Pandemic, as it is with health testing,
anyway in the face of considerable opposition,
costs are going up.
citing ‘public interest’ and ‘rights of free speech’
etc., and in spite of what is bound to be a high And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, brings me
level of factual dubiousness and undisguised nicely to my next subject.
bias. Pedigree Dogs Exposed springs to mind!
But we shall see. Vets
Of course, the evolution of the Greeder What ever happened to the good old-fashioned
phenomenon is not just confined to the massive country vet? You know the ones. Not necessarily
surge in cross breeds (mongrels, designer James Herriot as such, but somewhere along
dogs, call them what you will). As I mentioned those lines.
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K9 NEWS DIGITAL / MARCH 2021
