Before I get to the idea, I would like to share a few things about myself as a breeder. I’m not a big breeder by any means, and just like everyone else, have made a lot of mistakes and keep making them. We all keep learning, and we never will have learned everything there is to know, so in full disclosure, being the editor of a magazine like The Dog Journal doesn’t make me an expert in the dog breeding industry. In fact, one could argue, it proves my unprofessionalism, because if I were a professional dog breeder, I wouldn’t have the time or skill set for this project! That’s why we rely on, you, the professional breeders! 

Ever since I’ve read the Big Red book, back when I was in school, I’ve been fascinated by setters. Long story short, I’ve bred Irish Setters for a few years, and now more recently, Gordon Setters. When first looking for my setters, I would try to start off as far up as I could go, and ideally, I would look for championed sired puppies, or at least puppies that were show quality. I never got very far with that, and here’s why. 

I would always try to take shortcuts, and I handled myself very unprofessionally. Potential sellers, which were often handlers and breeders of very good setters, would get the feeling that what I really wanted was the best dogs I could get, but I wasn’t interested in putting in the effort to get them shown, health tested, etc. Also, I realize that most, if not all of these breeders, were only breeding once in a great while, which meant they rarely had puppies available. Add to that the fact that after putting in years of blood, sweat, and tears into their breeding program, they simply weren’t going to sell to the first breeder that came along. 

So, I often fell flat! This forced me to buy cheaper and less than the best grade of setters, and then the door opened to all types of problems. Health problems, dogs that weren’t conformationally correct, etc. Also, it helped to widen the gap between myself and the professionals because they now had proof that I didn’t care. You couldn’t argue that the dogs I had weren’t going to be able to make the breed better, and that’s really all they cared about. And once one breeder had me marked, they all knew who I was.