I'd like us all to be very careful when posting about other people, owners, breeders, whatever. If you are posting about positive experiences, it's not an issue. But if you are posting about negative experiences, it can be very tricky. I don't want lawsuits threatened, I hate seeing that happen. It's happened with people on this List, and it always makes my temerature rise. Trust me - you do NOT want to be in the same geographical area with me when I get an email with a threat of a lawsuit in it. I find such a threat to be a particularly distasteful method of resolving differences.
We have a breeder who is being discussed on the List. She is not a member of the Berner-L to my knowledge. She happens to have bred a dog that an owner is having some degree of diffulty with, and we have some people who are working with the owner to help provide support. We'll leave that situation alone. We have information that someone bought a puppy from this breeder and had many problems. We all know that can happen, and it can happen with any breeder. She also states that she emailed the breeder and got no response. That can happen too, computers break. People can also contact the Canadian Club Rescue Chair (or the BMDCA Rescue Chair) for information about a number of dogs that have entered rescue with no support from their breeders. Patterns can emerge very quickly to allow people to make assumptions about the level of support that they might expect from a breeder that refuses to assist rescue efforts of dogs that they have bred. And patterns can also emerge when a breeder has a large number of dogs that enter rescue, either from poor temperaments, health issues, or poor placements. If a breeder never has any of their dogs enter rescue, that also says something. Either they don't place many, or place well, or always take their dogs back (and do they keep them, rehome them, or destroy them?). It can still be difficult to make any valid assumptions. I'd love to see more public accounting for where the Rescue Funds that I help raise and donate actually go. I'd like to see the names of the dogs rescued, and whether the breeder a! ssisted or not. Some do, some don't. Gather information privately, and be very careful about what you spread publicly. Understand what is second hand information and what you know personally as fact based on your own experiences. And please, spare the negative comments and relay facts carefully. We have not yet come up with a good way to determine what makes a good breeder versus what makes a bad breeder, or who should make that sort of judgement. Even if we were able to distinguish, we haven't figured a way to share that information in a reasonable manner. We all want to see it, we all want to prevent other people from having the same problems that we've had, and we need to develop a means of doing that. Pat Long (& Luther) List Co-Owner Berwyn PA ________________________________________________________________________________ Check any e-mail over the Web for free at MailBreeze (http://www.mailbreeze.com)
