Those are great websites thanks for posting them. If everyone who was breeding dogs adheared to those principles it would be great, unfortunatly health testing gets expensive, and when you are not breeding "champions to champions" many people begin to call you a back yard breeder and accuse you of trying to ruin the breed, when infact you would like to see the breed restored to what it once was.
Lynn

jana lashmit <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It's a learning curve, like anything. In high school and college, I spent a lot of time volunteering in shelters and living in the world of shelters, and, later, rescue - spay anything that moves, breeders are evil, mutts are the only dogs worth having! Then, after my neutered adopted mutt bit three children (one so badly she needed 20 stitches) came my first dog from a show breeder, and all of a sudden shows weren't such a bad thing, and "breeder" ceased to be a four-letter word.
There is something to be said for socialization during the critical period - like I said, Valiant Collies was the first page that came up when I searched for "collie". The second one was Farm Collies: Back to the Future. Since then, I've been trying to find a bridge between the good old collies of "then" and the good new collies from "now" to determine how to make the great collies yet to be born.
If anyone wants a little light reading, here are two of my favorite websites (well, the first one is a sub-website, but this particular link goes to a really good section on breeder ethics):
http://www.dog-play.com/ethics.html#top
http://www.canine-genetics.com/ (some great articles on diversity)

Jana

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