My Way, The Highway, and Hell

By Kat Smith

A little kid sat on a park bench, eating happily out of a bucket of candy.

An older man approached the kid and said, “You know, you shouldn’t eat so much candy, it will kill you.”

The kid looked up at him and said, “My grandma lived to be 100 years old.”

The man said, “Did she eat a lot of candy?”

“No,” the kid said, “But she did mind her own $#!@ business.”

It’s not the funniest joke, but it’s a good bit of wisdom for the purebred dog community. If we want to survive, we need to get better at minding our own business.

Follow up joke: What’s the only thing two breeders can agree on?

That a third breeder is doing it wrong.

The AKC’s Government Relations wing sent out an article a few weeks ago, No Animal Was Harmed: New “Animal Cruelty” Regulations Turn Good Dog Owners into Criminals. It detailed the wide reach of arbitrary regulation, such as not being able to have a dog outside above a certain temperature, regardless of duration or breed. We all nodded our heads in agreement and shared the article widely.

And yet, we do this all the time. We criminalize people who feed a certain food, even though their dogs are healthy. We criminalize people who breed a certain way, even though the resulting puppies are just fine. The way they groom, the tools they train with, the crates or pens or kennels, the exercise, the number of litters a bitch has: we constantly criminalize people whose dogs are not being harmed. It’s time to stop.

Repeat after me: As long as no dogs are being harmed, it is none of my business.

I think we do this because we see ourselves as experts. And really, we are. But my way or the highway is a cousin to kennel blindness: we stop seeing things for what they really are. I’m not saying you can’t have an opinion – I certainly have mine – but they are shared with only a select few, only when relevant, only in private, and without damaging words.

Every time we call a hobby breeder a “puppy mill” because they had a third litter this year, we are diluting important messages about animal welfare.

Short URL: https://caninechronicle.com/?p=164629

Posted by Alex on Jul 1 2019. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.