Looking for a puppy
I'm currently looking for a corgi puppy. I live in Wayland, MA but am willing to travel throughout New England. I've owned a corgi before and absolutely love them. I live on a small farm so there's lots of room to run around! (My last corgi loved trying to herd our two horses.) We also live within walking distance of a large pond, great for walks and kayaking excursions. Unfortunately, due to the economy, my parents have said we can only afford to spend $500 on a new dog. I know that this is going to be difficult to find and I obviously don't want to buy an unhealthy dog from a pet store or a disreputable breeder. So if anyone knows of a good, affordable breeder, I would love to hear about them! (Or if you are one and are planning or have a liter, please let me know!)
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Joanna Kimball on
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The show ring has not changed most breeds. I know that's the line but it's really not the case if you look at the dogs and breed history.
Where the breed has always been bred for show, like the Pembroke, the dogs from the 40s and 50s would not look out of place in a show ring now. If you look at the old Rozavel, Lees, Merriedip dogs they're very much modern show-type Pems. There's been some refining of the head and the legs are a VERY little bit shorter but the difference is not large. Queen Elizabeth has always had Pembrokes from show breeders (her first was from Rozavel); the big red dog in that photo is NOT a corgi and was just miscaptioned. He was another of their family dogs and can also be seen here, with their actual Corgi: http://www.life.com/image/50680454
Most of the time when there is criticism of whatever competitive thing is going on (showing, hunt testing, sheep trials) it's from people who are not involved in it and they think that there's no way that you can have a dog who can do that who can also do normal dog stuff. I don't want to call it sour grapes, because it's not; it's just a misunderstanding because they're not involved in that world. Dogs winning field trials ALSO hunt on the weekends. Dogs winning championships spend far more time on the couch or the bed or in the field or in the woods than they do in the show ring. Dogs winning sheepdog trials and getting titles are working their sheep at home most of the time.
Where there is an appreciable show/working or show/field split, and there certainly is in some breeds, I can't think of a single instance where it's because somebody came along and "changed" the existing working breed. What happened is that someone saw a Border Collie in Australia or a Lab in the UK, and liked that a lot, and brought it over here and asked the AKC to recognize it. The show BCs are ALL from Australian lines, because the Aussies developed the heavier and showier dog; nobody took the existing US Border Collies and made them heavier and hairier. There's actually very little overlap genetically and it may be better to think of them as two different breeds. Ditto with the Labs, who are UK in origin.
If you want to show me pictures of show dogs from the 40s and show dogs of the same breed now and demonstrate a huge change, I'd love to see it. It just simply hasn't happened. The changes each breed makes in its standards are so glacial and so tiny that it boggles the mind - right now the Dane club has been arguing for months - MONTHS - over whether to change the existing line about elbows from "shall be" to "shall appear to be"; the "appear" was in the 1970-whatever standard and then was taken out in the 90s and they're considering putting it back in. That's the kind of change over time that actually happens.
And there is absolutely no such thing as the show/pet industry. Show breeders make up an incredibly tiny proportion of all breeders. Of the 200,000 Labs registered each year and the million or so who are born but not registered, about one percent are bred by show breeders. A total of a few hundred Cardigans are born each year, virtually all to show breeders. Maybe five or six hundred Pems are from show breeders. The PET industry is the huge one, the hundreds of thousands of people taking advantage of the popularity of a breed to make some money off it without having to give back to the breed at all. Whether they produce one litter or ten, they're the source of the dogs that have no place and no usefulness and end up in shelters or dead or untrained in the backyard. If your family thinks most Labs are useless, they're not talking about the well-bred field lines OR the well-bred show lines with champions fifteen generations back. They're talking about the guy who buys a Lab puppy from someone selling "blocky-headed UK-style Lab Pups!" on the Web or the family that pays $1500 for a "white" Lab and then thinks he should get three or four litters out of him to pay back his investment. And your family is totally right - those dogs ARE useless and never should have been produced.
I sometimes think that the show world has done itself an injustice because we DO sometimes talk about breeding fads and how different dogs are winning. People hear that and think that oh my goodness, the breed has changed drastically. What we're actually talking about is fractions of inches and a pound or two; differences that look really obvious to us, because we stare at dogs all day long, but would NEVER be noticeable to the average owner. I can say (and be truthful about it) that so and so judge likes a really tall and elegant dog, and some other judge likes a short heavy dog, or that the dogs in the Southeast seem to be getting really short, but the difference between those two extremes is, seriously, going to be a half-inch at the shoulder and maybe two pounds, in a breed that ranges from 25-35 lb. Changes that make us put our hands dramatically to our foreheads and get the vapors are things that absolutely nobody else would even see, much less consider dramatic.
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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By the way, if you want to see something interesting, google images of a young Queen with her Corgis; unless someone wants to tell me that the King of England went out and bought his daughter some haphazardly bred little pup, it seems apparent that the form of the Pembroke has changed quite a lot in just the past few decades.
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Joanna, I respect what you do and it sounds like you are a great breeder. And I am thrilled when I see breeders who also do other stuff with their dogs too, as they are more likely to get balanced dogs.
I would like to point out though that there is a huge difference between doing herding tests or even trials (both of which I think are very cool) and actually using a dog to work a farm.
I can crochet myself a scarf, but I have no idea how to make all my own clothes! LOL
My aunt is a Jack Russel fancier, and those little dogs have been chugging along without AKC recognition or shows for a long, long time. There is some inconsistency in size and shape as a result, but many horse farms keep them for what they were always bred for: ratters. And they are darned good at it, too.
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Permalink Reply by Sam Tsang on
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Ladies, the discussion have deviate from Jess's original post, please move your discussion and continue there.
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Permalink Reply by Jess Wilson on
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thank-you. this has all been very informative and I appreciate everything I have learned, but I really just want to know if anyone in my area has puppies available.
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Sorry for going a bit off-topic, Jess! *blush*
Good luck in your puppy search. :-)
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hahaha, that's okay!
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