What if your breeder turns out to be a crook?

OK so I couldn't resist sticking a picture of the beloved Uggie into this post. Whenever I think of him in the Artist I laugh out loud. Of course the real story behind the Artist is Uggie's story. He once belonged to a family who was going to send him to the pound for biting a goat in their back yard. He was just 7 months old at the time. Hearing this, the current owner rescued him and the rest as they say, is history.

Now what does this have to do with breeders being crooks? Well, it's a long story. Let me begin.

Many weeks ago, we lost our beloved Jack Russell. After we regained some sense of life, both of us agreed that we needed another puppy to pour our love into. Now I know what you're saying; why not go to the pound and adopt a dog there? Wouldn't that be better? Believe me, many people have told us that too. Each week when our newspaper has it's pet pages, I fall in love with most of the dogs there and wish I could find places for all of them. But, there's something about Jack Russell terriers that we can't get away from. There's no other dog for us I'm afraid.

So, setting our guilt aside, we began to search high and low for Jack Russell puppies. We compiled a list of breeders both near and far. What did we ever do without the Internet? We learned that many breeders routinely ship puppies across country if you like. Some even travel with them in the cabin. Wow. Who knew? Well, despite finding that many out of state breeders had litters of the most beautiful dogs, we chose to narrow our search for breeders in a driving distance of our home in Southern California. We soon had a few good choices and after much web site perusals, we narrowed down our search to one that had pups and a great price too. The pictures of them on the web site were great and everything looked wonderful. My heart and soul were sold! What could go wrong? I thought everything looked great but in retrospect, I had ignored some pretty large things. My wife knew and was smarter. I was going my heart instead of my mind.

So what happened then? Stay tuned for more in the next post. Oh and one more thing about Uggie. Our new little guy, Gumbo is related to him. Seems his aunt was Uggies brother. Maybe we'll have a star on our hands!