litter grr and help please

Cahill

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i have a friend at work who always asks me about my dog and tells me about her sisters dog. this week she was rather excited to tell me that her sister is going breed the bitch for some `cute puppies` and `extra money` :(((( I was not enthusiastic to say the least and tried to tell her how the rescues are busting at the seems. the dog is a Heinz 57.

please can my hho friends send me a list of the expenses likely to be encountered so I can copy+paste it to my friend who may pass the info on to her sister.
I know it not my business but I am cross :(


thank you.
 

satinbaze

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Eye tests £40
Hip and elbow scores£200
Blood tests to get ight date or mating £73 x 3
Stud fee £800
Wormers £25
Pregnancy scan £80
Welping box £45
Vet bed £17 x 3
Puppy pen £100
Post natal vet check £175 ( one out of hours visit and one in hours)
One pup pts due to malformed bladder £75
Puppy food £200 (raw)
Puppy pack £100 per pup
Kennel club registration £15 per pup
Time off work £1000 (4 weeks)
Large piece of Lino for under pen £30
This is just the ones I can remember fro 7 years ago, not including things like toys for pups to play with.
 

Cahill

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idont think they will do all of that anyway but just the feeding and wormers may be enough to put them off,do not think they have thought it through at all :(.

was speaking to some1 else to day and they have a 7 mo retriever who is very naughty,had it since 8 weeks and think they may start training it soon !!!!! :((
 

Spring Feather

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I can't imagine she's going to be spending anything like the above. Most of those things she's probably not going to have done. What I will say is, if these are little crossbred puppies, it WILL cost her more to raise them than she will get once she sells them.
 

Arizahn

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Emergency caesarian section after the birth goes horribly wrong: £400 - £2000+
Aftercare for bitch and surviving pups in order to get them to the age to rehome: £250 (bitch); £85 (per pup, not including jabs and wormer etc)
New carpets and other furnishings to make house presentable for potential new owners: £500+ (depends how much damage the pups do, but new carpets are a given due to the whole lack of bowel and bladder control)
Ongoing health issues for bitch caused by pregnancy and birth: £??? - possible need to PTS
Cost of raising any unwanted and/or returned pups: £850 per year minimum, for life (I haven't allowed for possible legal costs if any of the pups turn out to have health issues or behavioral issues that cause their new owners to sue the breeder)
 

Alec Swan

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Eye tests £40
Hip and elbow scores£200
Blood tests to get ight date or mating £73 x 3
Stud fee £800
Wormers £25
Pregnancy scan £80
Welping box £45
Vet bed £17 x 3
Puppy pen £100
Post natal vet check £175 ( one out of hours visit and one in hours)
One pup pts due to malformed bladder £75
Puppy food £200 (raw)
Puppy pack £100 per pup
Kennel club registration £15 per pup
Time off work £1000 (4 weeks)
Large piece of Lino for under pen £30
This is just the ones I can remember fro 7 years ago, not including things like toys for pups to play with.

What? For a litter of mongrel pups? A free covering (or possibly a stolen one), and if the bitch is young and healthy, then it's just the cost of feeding the pups to about 8 weeks.

Emergency caesarian section after the birth goes horribly wrong: £400 - £2000+
Aftercare for bitch and surviving pups in order to get them to the age to rehome: £250 (bitch); £85 (per pup, not including jabs and wormer etc)
.......

If things go 'horribly wrong' then the bitch is put down, and the process starts all over again! Over the last 40 odd years, I've probably had 20 to 40 litters of pups, something like that, and have never had one delivered by cesarian, nor one yet put down during labour. The odd older bitch has needed a shot of Oxytocin, but that's been about it.

Alec.
 

Arizahn

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What? For a litter of mongrel pups? A free covering (or possibly a stolen one), and if the bitch is young and healthy, then it's just the cost of feeding the pups to about 8 weeks.



If things go 'horribly wrong' then the bitch is put down, and the process starts all over again! Over the last 40 odd years, I've probably had 20 to 40 litters of pups, something like that, and have never had one delivered by cesarian, nor one yet put down during labour. The odd older bitch has needed a shot of Oxytocin, but that's been about it.

Alec.

Good for you - I read the OP as a request for information on all the bad stuff that can happen and chose to presume the bitch in question might have enough sentimental value for her owners to choose a caesarian birth over PTS. Or that the vet might make the decision for them. Oxytocin does not always work, ime.

Still, Alec must be right! Presumably the owners will just put her to the nearest available dog, ignore the need for additional care during pregnancy, and then lock her in a shed for the duration of the birth and raising of the litter. That would cut out any costs vet wise. It would also be utterly wrong and reprehensible too. But hey, yet more allegedly cost effective mongrel puppies are what the world needs, right?

I am done with humans.
 

Dry Rot

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Believe me, it's not the rearing costs but what you do with unwanted pups when they pass the cute 8 week old stage. People see the prices established breeders get for a pup and expect the same. £2,000 to rear a litter doesn't seem unreasonable to me, plus a total disruption of your private life and home!

As they get older, the pups which were probably over priced in the first place get progressively less saleable and more destructive and costly to keep in the home. Eventually, the badly socialised pups, now no longer cute but at the gawky teenager stage, are advertised "free to good home" in an effort to get rid of them. Then the problems really begin.
 

Cinnamontoast

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Don't imagine she's doing it 'properly'. This is from a girl on another forum who did do it right for the one litter she's bred.


I thought I'd start this discussion, because it often comes up that people who breed, will make money. It's assumed, that at some point, over their *breeding career* there will be a profit.

I'd like to dispel that myth, at some points in time, you may end up cash rich, ie, you have a lot of cash in your hand, but that does not mean you are in profit.

So let's look at the costs, health testing for my two breeds is quite extensive, on average, I'd suggest it costs approx £700 each, including petrol costs driving to people who will take good quality plates. If anything isn't right, then that's at least £50 invested, which is the cost of the cheapest health test, for no return.

Equipment, I spent several hundred pounds on equipment for whelping, some of which can be used again, I need a new whelping box, I think mine cost about £70 from memory including delivery, and I went through various amounts of drugs which have a use by date so I will need them again. I'm guessing on average I've probably spent about £180 on things that I either made use of, or have gone past their sell by date, but bought in just in case I needed them.

Progesterone testing, at £60 a pop, driving it up to Idexx and paying for the vet to draw bloods, I reckon I spent at least £500 for five progesterone tests for Tau.

Stud dog fees and travel, Probably another £600 all told, so petrol and stud dog fees included.

Scans and ongoing treatment during pregnancy, probably about another £200 for a couple of trips, including a scan to confirm pregnancy.

Then you've got your increased bills, food etc, all of which soon hike up your utility bills by several hundred pounds over a short period. I know for a fact I was £1.5k in debt by the end of £2012, mostly down to the litter I had, I use very little otherwise.

And then for me, I may have come close to even, but Tau needed an emergency C-section, and then two pups died after trying to treat them, which in itself was close to £2.7k. I got £3k in payment for the five remaining pups. Work it out for yourself, those who think everyone is in it to make money, think again, and none of the money can ever make up for all of the hard work the heart ache of putting your bitch through a c-section (and spay) and losing pups that you've done your best to try and pull through.

So no, not everyone breeds for money, and if you think that's true of someone you're buying a pup from, then maybe you need to ask if you can find someone who breeds for something else.

Just to carry that on, and I've alluded to this in another thread, I'm probably going to be close to spending £3k on health testing and *campaigning* my two youngsters by the new year, and plan to travel to Europe to possibly see if I can find the right dog for Rhuna, pending on health test results, and how she pans out, although I can't see her temperament and ability being an issue. That's not a holiday, I don't have holidays, because my dogs come first, the dogs will stay at home in the care of one of the few people I trust with them, while I check out possible suitors.

Sorry for a bit of a rant, but it really is something that annoys me when people assume you are making vast sums of money from breeding, when it isn't always the case, I have lost lots of money so far from even breeding just the one litter. I did health tests on Tau's sister only to decide because her elbow plates weren't good, not to go ahead. I don't ever count on recouping that money, I don't want to, that's not what I'm involved with *breeding* for.
 

Cahill

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But hey, yet more allegedly cost effective mongrel puppies are what the world needs, right?

I am done with humans.[/QUOTE]


same here Arizahn
 

Alec Swan

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......

please can my hho friends send me a list of the expenses likely to be encountered so I can copy+paste it to my friend who may pass the info on to her sister.
....... :(


thank you.


....... - I read the OP as a request for information on all the bad stuff that can happen and chose to presume the bitch in question might have enough sentimental value for her owners to choose a caesarian birth over PTS. .......

Still, Alec must be right! ........

Cahill asked for a list of the expenses "LIKELY" to be encountered. The list that you offered, in the main was highly unlikely, in my experience.

Why be insulting?

Alec.
 

Alec Swan

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so very quickly...how much to feed and worm say-4 pups for 8 weeks?

thank you.

For 100ml of Drontal Plus at about £18, and administered at the rate of 1ml per 1kg puppy weight, that would need to be worked out. It would depend upon the breed/size but at say 6 pups in a litter, and wormed at say 3-5 and then 8 weeks, I suppose you would have some left over at the time of weaning if you'd bought 200 ml so that would be £36.

Food? Again difficult really, and again, if there were say 6 pups, of say Spaniel size, then the bitch would be feeding them up to about 3 weeks, and the amount of solids would probably be very little, perhaps 6ozs a day for the first week, then perhaps 24 or 36 ounces for the next week. Then by the time that they're say 6 weeks you'd probably have gone through an £18 bag of puppy feed, but from 5 weeks onwards, you'd probably get through that bag, every week.

When I say an £18 (cost) bag of puppy feed, that's what I was paying for the last lot of Autarky puppy feed, and I suppose that up to the age of 6 weeks, and I had 6 pups, I think that I bought 3 bags, though I'm going from memory. I ran on 3 of the puppies, and by the time that they'd got up about 20 weeks, they were on adult feed, and they seem to be doing very well.

I suspect that the 6 puppies cost somewhere in the region of £90 to include wormer and feed and that was to the age of about 8 weeks. Added to that figure would probably be another £20-30 for milk powder (the lamb's variety!), so now we're at about £120. The feed and wormer costs would seem to run out at about £20 each.

The last litter of puppies were Cockers, so there were also the tail dockings, dew claw removals and the chipping costs, but you only asked about food and wormer!

Short of the legal requirements for tail docking etc., there were no other Vet's bills.

The litter before last I had my vet blood test to see when the optimum time for covering was and when the bitch was likely to ovulate. She's a very well bred bitch and the dog was the Championship winner, and so as I was planning to travel across the country to Shropshire to visit the dog, I thought it best to get things right. That was (from memory) about £40 per test, and I think that there were 2 tests done.

The Cocker Championship winner of 2012-13 was FtCh Moelfamau Griffon, and his stud fee was £400. Most Field Trial Champions of most breeds, are about the same figure.

Alec.

ETS, An interesting point which I forgot to mention, when I weaned my last litter of puppies on to adult food, I mixed Autarky Puppy Feed, with Dr. John's Gold. They wolfed down the D_J and left the Autarky, which considering that they'd been reared on the Autarky, surprised me. a.
 
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Naryafluffy

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And of course the extra tax that will have to be paid to the tax man for the 'extra income' she's generating.
Joe Public also needs to be educated about buying puppies, if there was no market for these types (i.e. no KC registration, no 5 generation health tests, lines that haven't done well in showing, agility, obedience trials, working field) then people would have to think twice about breeding?
 

EAST KENT

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I think honestly the less experienced a breeder is the bigger the costs. Very very easy to get sucked in to "you must/should do this" .As for a proper mongrel litter, well free mating of course, she won`t need blood tests, just mate when she feels right, she won`t need special beds/caeserians and all the other stuff.She will perform naturally as dogs always have done;it is just our hot house plant type dogs who may need all the fuss to protect the investment.If a decent true mongrel litter is being bred and good homes can be found ,well excellent. Or maybe like my first dog, a mongrel, only two were reared because the owners kept one and we booked the other, no one even knew the bitch was pregnant until about a week before.
 

Clodagh

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I hate to say but it will probably be a nice little money earner! If the bitch or the dog are black or chocolate though pups will probably be black so not so sellable. She wants fluffy golden ones for the biggest bucks.
 

Cahill

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I don't think they have thought any further than ikkle-fluffy-babies then getting a few hundred £. :(
 
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