Hi all, I have not been on this forum for eons and no longer have any idea what my password was! So here I am as ShelbyBT aka RosieFT if anyone remembers me and my now passed, Fox Terrier :-) .
Anyway, I had to join as I read this thread and it is something I have been pondering myself of late. My father has had to says goodbye to his Bichon frise and is looking for a new companion and so I have been looking for an older dog for him to rehome. It has really hit home about the scarcity of purebred dogs! I have looked down the rescue route and see that most of those dogs are medium to large bull breed/mastiff/kelpie crosses. Or if they are smaller dogs, they have some behaviour problems that wouldn't work for him. Purebred dogs are few and far between, and on gumtree (which I only looked at out of curiousity) I see oodle crosses selling for $4000 + . I would assume that these oodle crosses are using un health tested dogs of any temperament to create cute bundles of $$$ joy. On gumtree there are 100's of wanted ads from people looking for purebred dogs who obviously do not know about Dogzonline lists or of centralised state Dog centres that they can enquire at.
My father told me today that he met a new person at the golf club he plays at, and he found out that this man's job was selling puppies. He told my father he sells poodle crosses of any description for $5000 and upwards to $6500. His greatest problem is sourcing enough of them to sell. :-(
My current dog is a border terrier that I was lucky enough to get from a breeder in a different state to where I am and so had to take a bit of a gamble in buying her. On the border terrier page I am on, there are always people asking about where they can get one from only to be told it would be a 12month wait and that waiting lists are already very long. A good friend of mine paid more for her 'cavoodle' puppy than I did for my purebred BT and she at least went to a breeder who she could visit and meet the parents of the puppy and get proof of health checks. This breeder has waiting lists a mile long.
I think as a responsible dog owner i wouldn't dream of breeding my own dog, but perhaps when people used to do that more often, there were more puppies to go around from dogs that were raised in a family home and who's puppies were then exposed to everyday life before they were moved onto their new homes? I read an article not long ago about how perhaps the best dogs were being missed as breeding opportunities as they were in pet homes, and that pet owners spend so much time with their dogs that they know if they have a great dog that is worth breeding from. Unfortunately, I see people who think their pet dog would be a great mother and I can see it is timid or not put together quite right, so I am not sure that is the way to go either! Before I had my girl sterilised, I had 3 offers of homes from people trying to convince me to have a litter from her, desperate for a BT dog.
I don't know what the solution is, but after trying to find a dog for my father, I can see why people do spend the $$ and buy a mixed oodle breed from gumtree.
