Vimello.com

Fitting “Poem”

I love my little puppy; she makes my house a home.
She is my very sweetest little friend; I never feel alone.
She makes me smile; She makes me laugh; She fills my heart with  love . . .
Did some person breed her, or did she fall from above?

I’ve never been a breeder, never seen life through their eyes;
I hold my little puppy and just sit and criticize.
I’ve never known their anguish; I’ve never felt their pain,
the caring of their charges, through snow or wind or rain.

I’ve never waited the whole night through for babies to be born,
The stress and trepidation when they’re still not there by morn.
The weight of responsibility for this body in my hands,
This darling little baby, who weighs but 60 grams.

Should you do that instead of this . . . or maybe that was wrong?
Alone you fight and hope, one day, he’ll grow up proud and strong.
You pray he’ll live to bring great joy to someone else’s home.
You know it’s all just up to you; you’ll fight this fight alone.

Formula, bottles, heating pads, you’ve got to get this right,
two-hour feedings for this tiny guy, throughout the day and night.
Within your heart you dread that you will surely lose this fight,
To save this little baby, but God willing . . . you just MIGHT.

Day one; he’s in there fighting; you say a silent prayer.
Day two & three, he’s doing well, with lots of love and care.
Day four & five . . . he’s still alive; your hopes soar to the
heavens.
Day six he slips away again, dies in your hands, day seven.

You take this little angel, and bury him alone.
With aching heart and burning tears, and an exhausted groan,
You ask yourself, “Why do this? . . . Why suffer through this pain?”
Yet watch the joy your puppies bring, and everything’s explained.

So, when you think of breeders and label them with “Greed,”
Think of all that they endure to fill another’s need.
For when you buy your puppy, with your precious dollars part,
You only pay with money . . . while they pay with all their heart.

Author Unknown.

Today’s balance

10 kg of chicken neck without skin - R$ 18,30.

3 kg of boneless muscle meat - R$ 24,00.

Eggs, veggies, kelp, flax seed, organ meat and other fun stuff - R$ 18,30.

To see your vet FINALLY giving in that the diet is indeed, after all, recommended by one of her greatest veterinary influences, and recognizing they were mistaken - PRICELESS.

Not a breeder

I don’t think I’m a breeder.

Not while every fucking scumbag in this country who go to dogshows and stick their dogs into tiny kennels for over three months until the next dogshow and have litters to sell puppies (to anyone who can afford) call themselves breeders.

Then no, I am not a breeder. I’m just a dork who has a survey form and way too much time in their hands to actually bend over pedigrees and exams and standards and pictures and emails with people involved with the breed around the globe, not to mention to actually give love and attention to those who are not, by the way, fucking objects with no feelings. This is what I am, I am that dork.

Seriously, I’m glad I moved. The problems are still the same, sure, but the scum I had to put up with at the other town, whoa. If I never see them again, it will be too early. They are the very reason I scan prospect owners.

Survey and SEO

I am very pleased with my Puppy Inquiry Form on the Chantilly Exclusive website. The amount of unsuitable people that look for frenchies and email me have dropped considerably. Now I only have few selected emails a day and I can tend to them correctly by referring another ethic breeders or giving them predictions on when my next litter will be due. 2009 doesn’t look like it, probably, but there are people who are willing to wait. How cool is that?

Speaking of the website, I restructured it last June. It was a small website and I was not at all happy with it. I wanted to add a few pages on the breed and how I took on the whole deal of becoming a breeder and what came with this decision. I knew I had to rebuild a huge part of it and that it would drop on google results. Eventually, when google caught up with the changes, we left the fourth or fifth place we used to have when searching for “bulldog frances” on google Brazil and after about two months, we were back on the first page but as the last result. As this affected greatly on our pageviews and visitors, I didn’t really mind. I trusted my studies. Well, around September it was back to the top as number six result. And as I was looking at the statistics the other day, I was stunned at how many visitors I was getting. When I went to google, we were number two! I am so happy, especially because there are more things that I can think of to improve the SEO, I just have to get around to that.

Going back to the first topic, I am also stunned at the forms I’ve been receiving. Intelligent, well educated people looking for frenchies to add to their families. No one that intends to breed. They know that it’s a tough job. Most of them are willing to spay/neuter their dogs and no mentions of “it’s mah damn dog and I cans do what I wants with it, if I has moneh, you gon sell me da dog, you hear me woman?”. Instead, I am left satisfied with these people, knowing that when the time comes for me to have babies again, I will be able to find awesome families for them.

Wolf in sheep’s clothing

As I have mentioned many times before, there is a puppy mill guy around, and he is starting to sell his adult dogs now (cheaper than puppies, after all, who wants grown dogs, right?). He got three of his dogs from this small breeder, a brother and his two sisters. The girls have litters in every heat cycle.

After all of his scandals, his dogs’ breeder told me they were truly sorry they let them have their dogs, that they really did not agree with anything and that they’d be more careful next time. I myself have made mistakes in the past, and I think it’s pretty rare to find someone who hasn’t. But I did try to do everything in my power to try and fix those. And I do think, honestly, that I have made and will make so much more to the breed around here…

So you’ll probably understand my frustration towards them when I tell him the guy is selling their dog to anyone who can pay a couple of thousand bucks, and they do nothing. Who cares, right?

In this case, I am seriously wondering who is worse. Is it the puppy mil guy who will tell anyone he’s a puppy mill? Is it the correct and ethic breeder who “made a mistake once” and now doesn’t even care about getting those dogs as far away from that puppy mill as possible? Who knows? What I do know is that people keep buying those frenchies, and then scandals pop up but where do these dogs end up? Do they care at all?

Best of the Best

Whooshie! I was just informed that we have some TOP people around us. So, let’s all pretend this is true, instead of some little imaginative tale of mine. One of the top ranked dogs in the country at the moment comes from an ill line, lives in a pigstall, in five months had had ten litters and has probably had more than twenty up till now. Not to mention that at least one third of his offspring is dead because the “breeder” doesn’t know how to take care of babies. I mean, who can find the time to spend more than ten minutes a day looking over those brats?

But, this is nothing but a little dream of mine. So, let’s all carry on as though we’ve seen nothing. That’s what we all do, right?

This is one of those days where I headdesk for at least an hour and ask myself why, oh, why did I have to go and become a breeder?

Pureness Certificate in Brazil

I’m not sure how to translate its name. In Portuguese, Pureness Certificate or Beginner Registry. Basically it works like this: You have a dog without their Pedigree, for any reason whatsoever: Maybe the breeder didn’t want you to breed that dog, maybe you lost the document, maybe its parents weren’t registered, maybe it isn’t purebred. You take this dog to a dog show and at the end, one of the judges (or more than one, I’m not really sure) will evaluate your dog and if they think it looks and behaves like a french bulldog, it will give out a Pureness Certificate. In theory, this is a blank Pedigree in which you get to choose the name of the dog with any kennel name preceding it, or not, as you wish.

That’s the end of the explanation of how it works. Now, here goes my two cents. What is it good for? Some breeders have talked about it in nearly extinguished breeds, but in other breeds I really cannot see how this could add up to anything. So you take this dog, give him a “blank pedigree”. What for? So you can have litters of a “question mark”? So you can breed him to his full sibiling and never know? So you can breed his line which has severe heart problems to the other line which also has severe heart problems?

This is only a sample of what is wrong with our kennel systems. And, amazingly enough, I know of at least two separate cases around. Today a person came up to me to ask how he could get the Pureness Certificate for their french bulldog and listened to a little rant of mine. But there’s also one puppy mill that has done that and fooled many people because in addition to getting this pureness certificate, they registered it with a famous kennel’s name.

My best friend is not into the dog breeding world at all, she loves dogs but she simply cannot understand me and my reasons. She probably thinks I’m a puppy mill. We decided not to mention the subject again, or else we would get into one of those huge fights. Anyway, she thinks I cannot guarantee my puppies’ future. It’s true, no one can really guarantee one hundred percent forever. But we can make sure we try our best to pick a good match, to talk to them frequently, to help, to be always available to them, and to have a written contract as well. In her view, she thinks it’s unreal to survey the prospect owners, and even more so for them to interview me, it’s nosy or whatever. Maybe this is what’s wrong with everybody. They don’t care where they get their dogs from, and most of the times when they feel they’ve been fooled, they want to get their money back, and the only way out they see is to fool more people in turn.

So, yea, I woke up a little bit pessimist today, but I actually feel great. I am planning something very big for 2009 and I really want this to work, so I’ll keep all to myself for now.