The group at PAWS has officially launched the long awaited and worked on Kennel Assistance Program, also known as K.A.P. This program was designed for breeders by breeders, for the simple mission of helping each other improve the industry and public perception of dog breeding one breeder at a time. Here’s the cool part, it doesn’t cost you as a breeder anything to participate, and you don’t even need to be a PAWS member.

 What is the K.A.P program? 

The K.A.P program is exactly what it sounds like. Kennel Assistance Program. After about two years of lots of work, time, and effort, the team at PAWS and Patrick Keith, former USDA Compliance Official, have come up with this set of standards that a breeder can voluntarily become evaluated and scored on. There are three team members on the K.A.P. board, and upon being asked to, will come out and evaluate and score your facility based on this set of standards. The standards were created with the USDA and PA Dog Law’s requirements in mind, and the hope is that once you as a breeder participate in the K.A.P program, you will feel confident enough about your facilities and breeding program that you are ready for the inspectors (USDA and State) when they arrive for their visits. The USDA and State inspectors will tell you what you as a breeder can’t do, but K.A.P is here to assist in helping you understand what you should do.

What’s in it for PAWS, and why would they offer a program like this at no charge? 

Well, PAWS is an organization of dog breeders working for the betterment of animal husbandry and dog breeding, and the board members of this organization keep rotating, which means it can include every reputable dog breeder in the state, and is not controlled or manipulated by any certain people. Therefore, they are for the success of every willing breeder, and this program is one way in which willing breeders can step up the game in their breeding practices and start that journey of continuous improvement. 

As part of the kickoff for this program, the team hosted a meeting/training workshop at the Rapho Township Building in Manheim PA on April 26th. I took the opportunity to participate, and thoroughly enjoyed it! The meeting started at 9:30 with Patrick Keith taking the stage for about 2 ½ hours, and really diving into specifics of how this program works, etc. At around 11:30, we grabbed some quick pizza and snacks, and then headed over to a local kennel to actually conduct an onsite inspection, as if we were the K.A.P team. Very enlightening, very fun, and very educational. What I thought was so neat about this day was the fact that there was USDA inspectors, PA Dog Law inspectors, commercial kennel owners, and start up breeders all in the same workshop, all working for the same cause. The feeling of comradery you experience from walking through a kennel or doing a workshop with these people is amazing, and as a breeder myself I was able to start building a relationship with these figures of authority that I never would have otherwise. 

One thing Pat really stressed was to understand and know the regulations, both with USDA, and the state. Pat is from Indiana, and has helped them grow and improve their KMA program, which is similar to K.A.P.. The team in Indiana has grown from one group of evaluators to six groups of three people, all in about six years, so he is somewhat of an expert in this field. As he quoted “If we don’t know the rules and understand how they apply to us, an inspector could tell us to do anything, and we are at their mercy. If they tell us to paint our kennel “sea foam green” because that relaxes the dogs, and we might not know that the word “sea foam green” does not even exist in the rulebook, and so we’ll probably do what they say.” Read the regulations and understand them. You need to know what’s in the regulations, and you need to know how to apply those rules. This is not about beating the system, it’s about understanding them, becoming compliant, and then staying compliant.”