What is a Responsible Dog Breeder?
There are a lot of people out there who call themselves a “dog breeder”. Just because you happen to own a few dogs, and you regularly breed them together to produce puppies, it doesn’t make you a professional or responsible dog breeder. There’s a lot more to it than that. As dog breeders we are dedicated to the betterment of the French Bulldog breed, as a whole. We promise to produce Frenchies that look like a French Bulldog should look, that act as Frenchies should act, that are fit and healthy, that are free from disease and genetic defect. If we keep a puppy it’s because we see potential in them, something that sets them apart from the others and makes them more “perfect” a Frenchie than their parents before them. If, for some reason, that puppy doesn’t live up to that expectation, they miss the mark and are a lesser quality dog than their parents before them, then we won’t keep the dog. We get them sterilized, and we find a lovely home for them to live out their life as a beloved pet. Just because they’re a pedigree French Bulldog, doesn’t make every dog right for breeding from, and only the best will be kept. That is the role (and the burden if you like) of the responsible dog breeder.
Dog breeding, just like many other enterprises in the human world, is a subjective thing. There is a breed Standard for the French Bulldog, a set of rules that the Frenchie should adhere to, but this is open to vast areas of interpretation. What is a “strong head”? What is a “gentle expression”? and so on. What one breeder considers to be a “perfect” French Bulldog is different to the next person. Also, when breeders work specifically to improve health and to remove defects from the French Bulldog, they will invariably have to diverge from the breed Standard to a certain extent. But there is a fine line between making the Frenchie a healthier breed of dog, and allowing them to digress into something that neither looks nor acts like the French Bulldog that we all know and love. Being a miniature breed, the Frenchie will quite easily revert back to a much larger dog if we don’t keep close control of the size of the puppies we keep.