So after buying a fourth from him, I still had three dogs. But a few months later, I bought a third female and took her to the vet. He said she was a beautiful dog. The whole time I had my dogs, she was always the better looking one of the bunch. In my opinion, I had three dogs with less desirable traits, and a really good looking dog. If you intend to breed, even if only for pet-quality dogs, some dogs can also be undesirable as pets. If they take a lot of vet visits and correction surgeries they sometimes aren't worth the hassle. There are common genetic defects in every breed, so look them up and be aware of them. I've even heard of St. Bernards having their eyelashes pointed inward making them have to get correction surgery. It's kinda simple and not the most costly, but if you don't have the money for it, the vet won't do it.
Now, when the first two litters were due, we had them one month apart. They were good litters, but each litter had one and two pups die, at first. This is common and a part of nature. But about three to four weeks after the pups were born, we had one pup seem to stop growing. By this time we didn't have the money to take any more animals to the vet. If I had been more experienced, I would have known what to do. This puppy ended up dieing as a result of just being pushed away from the mom by the other pups. Had I kept better eye, I may have been able to pull the fat and fed pups away from the mom and bring the skinny pup up to the mom.
Now I put two ads in the paper. Those cost me about fifty to fifty-five dollars each. Oh yeah and did I mention I had to register each litter for thirty-five dollars each plus an additional five dollars for each living puppy. Also, to talk about costs, during the last of the pregnancy and while the pups were feeding off the mom, she ate as much food as the other adults which is about two to three times what she would normally eat!
After the calls started flooding in about our ads, which were only in the papers for one week, we started selling pups. And when I say flooded in, they came in! Those pups all had deposits on them in a couple of days! Boy we had half the money up front and when everybody came for the pups, we had easily, five thousand dollars! That was the easiest money ever. I loved to count it!
A couple of hours after everybody picked up their pups, one of the customers called. She was ranting and raving! She told me that she had the dog to the vet and he had respiratory infection and he looked like he had worms. She screamed at me and told me that I was immoral and irresponsible for selling them a sick dog. I told her that the dog didn't seem to have any problems and seemed perfectly fine and that almost all puppies are born with worms. I also reminded her that when I sold her the pup that it was on the terms that they were not vet checked, didn't have their first shots, weren't de-wormed, and were only pet quality-not show quality.
Now, this is only my opinion, but I think she was just trying to get money back. This is why. When they came to put the deposit, they said they drove two hours just to get to our house. When they came to pick their pup up, they also mentioned the drive. So when they called me maybe two and a half hours after they picked up their dog, I doubt they had their dog to a vet. They could have, but seemed very unlikely.
Now time had passed but some things happened, that we had a couple of litters and they all died. This isn't likely, but I will talk about this to show that you don't always know what will happen. We had a fire at our house, this did not kill any dogs. However, we were put out of our house for six months which had an effect on our dogs. First off, the apartment we were put into didn't allow pets. Our lovely insurance company that is available throughout “all the states” wouldn't pay to have our pets and pregnant pets getting ready to have puppies in a kennel. So we had to keep them at a friend's house. They weren't prepared to take on four adults, one getting ready to have pups. They however did have a little shed built onto their house that the dogs could stay in and then we put a kennel around it. It seemed to work well. The first female had her pups, she had only two, and the first one died. About a month later, the other female had her pups and she had seven! Boy, was that sure to make up for only having one. Well the thing that happened there was that as soon as she had them, we went to a cook out. We came back immediately after to find a puppy out in the yard with all the flesh tore off. It was a gruesome sight, and there were only three of the seven pups there all were dead. The only pup alive was the one from the first litter. We had no idea what it really was, only to guess that it was a rat or skunk, maybe.
