Overall Wit & Wisdom

Bill Chitwood for Progressive Dairyman

I have been asked to come back again this year and talk to a group of dog breeders. When I say dog breeders, I mean serious dog breeders. I spoke last year at a Breeder Education Conference in Joplin, Missouri. There were more than 2,000 dog breeders registered at this conference.

This was the 7th annual conference held by this company. I was just an experiment. I was the only one on the two-day meeting’s agenda that was not trying to tell these folks how to do a better job raising their dogs.
Most all of the other speakers were veterinarians who were helping them with everything from nutrition and preventative medicine to you-name-it.

This company, owned mostly by one man, has been in the dog breeding business for 16 years, and he has been having these conferences for seven years to help people do a better job with their dogs.

He told the group that when he first started buying puppies from people years ago 50 percent of the puppies he saw he could not buy because they had something wrong with them. He said after seven years of these meetings 90 percent of the puppies will pass all the tests.

One of the things they had was a large group of puppies in glass-sided crates. Each puppy had something the matter with it. Now I am an old farm boy who had dogs around most of my life yet I couldn’t much see what was wrong with the puppies. Most of our farm dogs just showed up as strays and became pets. We kept them around until they died; most got run over by the milk truck.

Times have changed; so many people have dogs now. We never did have a dog that stayed in the house as I was growing up. We had one dog that we let in the house when it was going to storm or else she would tear the screen door.

We had dogs as a kid and when my kids where young, but later in my life I have not had one around. I plan to keep taking my medicine so I will not have to have a dog, but that is not the choice of lots of other people. I have seen it with my own eyes – they will even let you take your dog to the nursing home, if you’re really attached. That is not one problem they will have when they have to deal with me.

At this company where I spoke, dogs are big business. They buy from the dog breeders, and they sell through the pet stores, about 100,000 puppies a year.

They also manufacture kennel equipment and on their supply trucks they have all kinds of goodies for pet stores. They can pull up on your yard and unload a prefab kennel so you have room for 35 dogs.

This company’s headquarters is 20 miles south of Joplin in a small town, and if you wanted, you could ride a bus down and tour the place. I did, and I do believe that place was cleaner than some hospitals I have been in.

I was the only passenger on my bus that wasn’t Amish. They had brought 10 or 12 Amish families from Ohio down to the conference. They all raised dogs for the company. It has been a big help to the Amish because it is really getting hard to make a living farming today with horses.

I talked with an Amish man, and I asked him, “How much do you get for a puppy?”

He said, “Some of them bring $800 or $900, and we get at least two litters a year.”

I talked with a man who had been in the dairy business at one time, and he said he had 300 dogs from 10 different breeds and he said he had sold two French bulldog puppies for $12,000 to go into artificial breeding programs.

I could not tell these dog breeders some of my favorite jokes. It just would not have fit. My favorite is about these three clergy talking about when life begins. The Catholic priest said, “Life begins at conception.”

The Methodist preacher said, “No, life begins when a baby is born.” The third was a Rabbi of the Jewish faith, and he said, “Well, in my experience, life begins when the kids leave home and the family dog dies.” I could not tell that joke.

I spoke for 30 minutes both days during the conference. The first day I bragged on the company and told about how much comfort dogs are to people and then I said, “You know it is no coincidence that man’s best friend can’t talk.”

Today most people want a high-powered dog. Dog people are good salesmen. This lady came in to a pet store and asked the owner if he had any pedigreed dogs. He said, “Lady, my dogs are so high-powered that if they could talk they would not speak to either of us.”

I am now looking for some more dog jokes so I will be ready when I go back and speak to those wonderful dog folks again.

If you have any suggestions for me, give me a call. Keep smiling and laughing. PD