Breeding successfully requires several important partnerships, and our veterinary partners are critical. Most pet owners have a general practice vet they use, and may see a specialist such as an orthopedist or a cardiologist. For a breeder, one of your most important veterinary specialist partners is your reproductive vet.   

This blog post will cover why it's so important to purchase a puppy from a breeder who does DNA tests on their breeding stock and what to look for when provided a copy. We will cover in a future post why you might consider DNA testing your own dog, especially if you rescued, purchased from a puppy store, or bought a puppy without researching the breeder.  

Consumers have become increasingly aware that the best puppies come from reputable breeders whose dogs are part of the family. This leaves reputable breeders in a predicament as to how to make sure their animals have the best possible lives while also maintaining diversity and high standards for their breeding program. One solution many breeders rely on is the use of Guardian Homes.

The term “SEO” is thrown around a lot in website discussions. Many dog breeders don’t even know what SEO stands for, let alone how to implement an SEO strategy for their websites.

In this article I would like to help you understand what SEO is, how it can substantially benefit your website traffic and overall online presence, and how you can easily implement your own basic SEO strategy without hiring any help.

There’s no single way to wean successfully. Weaning is as much art as science. You will be most successful if you understand the basic principles of weaning and understand how to apply those to each litter. Each litter is different, even those from the same pairings, and weaning can differ from litter to litter.   

Inbreeding refers to the breeding of related individuals. Inbreeding depression is the reduced biological fitness (an animal’s ability to survive and reproduce) in a population because of inbreeding. For example, scientists researching the Australian Thoroughbred horse population found that inbreeding led to reduced racing performance.

There is a marketing term that is being used in the dog breeding world right now: Lifetime Breeder Support. I call it a marketing term because I am seeing it used more often than not as a way for breeders to add value to their puppies. However, I do not typically see a definition for this term from the breeders that use it.

The short answer - Find a breeding mentor to guide you through the testing, certifications, the actual mating and whelping process, and locating quality homes for the puppies.

Weaning puppies successfully is as much art as it is science. Weaning is a critical time for puppies and impacts their survival, their physical development, their behavioral development, and their cognitive development. Here are a few common weaning mistakes I hope you avoid.

As a breeder, I know that marketing is often the last thing on our to-do lists when it comes to running our dog breeding businesses. We just sit around all day and play with puppies, right? If I had a dollar for every time someone has said that to me…

Back in the day, best practice for breeding was to wait until a dog was at least 2 - 4 years old, had at least 3 heat cycles to breed, and also to skip at least 1 cycle between litters. Like many other things we used to do, when science is finally applied to our profession and we get information from good data, we realize that we could be doing better.

It has happened to many of us... The unexpected email or phone call that makes your heart sink into your stomach. “We don't know what else to do. We just aren't clicking with Fido. We have made the difficult decision to rehome him.”

This is another post that’s probably going to upset a few people. It’s about the predictiveness of puppy temperament testing. Temperament testing has been an important fixture in determining suitability of dogs for service work, therapy work, police and military service, and even for companion dogs.

Obesity is the most common preventable disease in dogs in North America. Approximately 25 – 30% of the general dog population is obese and nearly 50% of dogs over the age of 5 are overweight.

Lifespan in the outcome of the differential risks of a myriad of possible causes of death. While life history theory suggests that reproduction carries a potential survival cost, we actually know little about how reproductive capability affects lifespan and the risk of dying of specific causes of death. Because elective sterilization (spay-neuter) surgery is commonly performed in pet dogs, they provide an excellent model to investigate this topic. The authors studied the effect of surgical sterilization on lifespan and cause of death in a large sample of domestic dogs. They controlled for age in their analyses, which is important, because a longer lifespan might lead to a higher risk of dying of diseases that strike at a later age.