AKC Breeder Who Think The HSUS Is Against Him

I recently sent a letter to some breeders who write columns for their magazine, the AKC Gazette. I invited them to come on DOG TALK®, to talk about their breed and also to show how dedicated and responsible proper breeders are about their breeding dogs and the puppies. I got many RSVPs wanting to come on the show (and I have now initiated a new mid-show segment of DOG TALK® called “Meet the Breeders”). But then I received this response:

Hi Tracie –

Thanks for your request for me to be a guest on your show. I would be willing to discuss doing the interview with you but first want to know why you are using an endorsement of your book by Wayne Pacelle as President of HSUS. That organization has been anything but friendly to dog owners in general and has been especially unfriendly to purebred dog breeders and fanciers. I am quite surprised that you would accept an endorsement from an organization that is against the ownership of dogs.

I look forward to your reply and would be happy to discuss this with you.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey

So I replied as follows:

Dear Jeffrey,

Thanks for your prompt reply to my letter and your interest in coming on DOG TALK® so listeners can learn what a really good hobby breeder is all about.

However, I need to set the record straight about the serious and entirely untrue assertions you made about the HSUS. Your comments about HSUS are ones that have absolutely zero basis in fact, but are declarations that I have seen in the AKC Gazette and in some associated sites. It is such a terrible shame to have such a fine organization as HSUS be the target of lies and distortion of the actual agenda and programs of HSUS. What’s so amazing is that anyone is free to go to the HSUS website or even to call them in order to discover that these allegations of HSUS being “anti-dog” “anti-dog ownership” or “anti-dog breeder” have no basis in fact. Why don’t you take a minute and do just that? As an experiment, my husband just spent 15 minutes on their website and could not find one shred of evidence to support these fairly absurd and ridiculous assertions about anything at all “anti-dog” there.

There are millions upon millions of HSUS supporters who both own purebred dogs and breed them – and feel that HSUS is an important part of making this a better world for all sorts of animals, not just the pets we love. You are welcome to download and listen to Wayne Pacelle on earlier broadcasts of DOG TALK® discussing and dispelling these allegations with me – because these lies are spread day after day by people with other agendas, and then spread by people like yourself, who seem to have blindly believed what they were told.

As far as my book goes, I doubt you have actually looked at it, either, since there are multiple chapters about how to go to dog shows to investigate breeds, how to find proper breeders, charts and lists of questions to ask a prospective breeder, lists of questions a serious breeder should ask a buyer, how to pick a purebred puppy and have a continuing relationship with that breeder. If HSUS were against any of this, certainly Mr. Pacelle would have no respect for the book – nor would I have any for HSUS.

The irony from my perspective is that so many listeners to my radio shows have written since the Lisa Peterson interview and called in to ask what I could possibly want to do with “a terrible organization like AKC!” Life is funny, the way ignorance and misinformation flow in all directions. My primary interest in interviewing Lisa Peterson was to help create a bridge between members of these two organizations – I know I have an uphill battle ahead of me, but I am depending on individuals like yourself to just put a stop to all this finger-pointing and concentrate on the positive ways we can all come together to make this a safer, kinder world for dogs.

I will tell you that I was sorely disappointed to discover that many of the criticisms of AKC from my listeners turned out to have validity. I had always written and declared that AKC members have a code of ethics not to place their progeny in pet stores, and I also believed there was no AKC endorsement (i.e. AKC registration papers issued) for puppy mill puppies, which are the only ones sold in pet stores. I have since discovered that pet stores are full of AKC-registered puppies from high volume production-line breeders, via industrial-style puppy distribution centers like the Hunte Corp. I would think that dedicated hobby breeders like yourself would be as distressed by this as I am – since it goes against everything you have all worked so hard for so long to create and maintain in each of your breeds.

In any case, my goal in these interviews with breeders is to introduce people to real actual breeders who breed dogs with love and passion for excellence. I want people to see that individual members of AKC care deeply about how parent dogs should be bred and their puppies raised and shown or placed in homes. I have taken all this time to spell this out because it matters a great deal to me that who I am and what I say is very clear. And if I can open some eyes and dispel misinformation wherever I encounter it, then it has been a good day for me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

And his reply back was:

Dear Tracie,

Thanks for your response. I really cannot agree with some of the statements you made regarding HSUS and AKC and therefore think it would be best if we skip the interview. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey

So how do any of you feel about this??  Comments please!

UPDATE

So Jeffrey Pepper agreed to come on the show August 30th. In anticipation of that, I asked him to give me a bit of information about himself, since all I knew was that he was a very involved Golden breeder but I wanted to know the rest of his canine involvements for my introduction. He replied:

Briefly, I am an AKC judge presently approved for all Sporting and most of the Hound breeds as well as Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. I have been judging since 1984. I have judged all over  the US, in Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Holland, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia and Australia. I have written 4 books on dogs and am presently completing a new (and second) book on Golden Retrievers. I am president of the Dog Judges Association of America and Treasurer of Take The Lead, a non-profit foundation providing support to people in the dog fancy who have a life threatening or terminal illness. I write regularly for Dog World magazine and the AKC Gazette.

I should add that I am not presently breeding Goldens or any other breed and I currently live with 3 geriatric Petits Bassets Griffons Vendens (PBGVs) and 3 Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. I lost my last Golden in September, 2001.  Lucy was the last of many generations of Goldens I bred under the “Pepperhill” prefix. I have bred more than 60 Golden champions and more than 50 PBGV champions, including best in show winners.

Jeff Pepper

Wowie! I felt like I hit the jackpot in Vegas. I had crossed swords with a man who it turns out is completely steeped in dog breeding across three breeds and who is such an important judge that he is president of the Dog Judges Association! I feel he will be a worthy person with whom to have this debate. While we had divergent views on puppy mills and the AKC involvement in them, that your firm but level-headed point of view would make for a really good intelligent debate on puppy mills and where the AKC is part of the problem or the solution.

Tracie