I used to think that as well.

But I took the saying “adopt and shop responsibly” to heart and looked up what a responsible breeder has to do to be considered one.

Genetic tests determine if the dogs have known genes that cause diseases. If one of the parents has a recessive gene for a disease that won’t express in the pups because the other parent doesn’t have it, you can keep dogs that have desirable traits like excellent personality, lack of anxiety and general health in the gene pool—helping to maintain genetic diversity while not passing down a disease.

The kennel clubs (CKC) have started helping to reduce inbreeding by keeping track of the lineage of dogs and avoiding inbreeding by calculating the coefficient of inbreeding. The COI is a metric used in dog breeding to measure the level of inbreeding in a dog’s pedigree. It is an excellent tool for an institution that used to inadvertently encourage inbreeding because they created standards. Can more be done? Yes, is this a step in the right direction? Yes.

It’s worth noting that genetic tests don’t know everything, they might only test for a handful of the 20,000 or so genes and we don’t know what all genes do, and some genes are benign in some breeds and dangerous in others. This is why x-rays and elbow and hip assesments of the parents are still important. It’s also why meeting the parents of you puppy is important. If you don’t like them, you won’t like their pups.

On top of that epigenetics massively impacts the behaviour of pups. This is especially true if the grandmother of a puppy had a happy stress free life. Yes, we now know that improvements from nurture not just nature can be inherited. Dogs with happy lives produce happy dogs.

A responsible breeder will have done all of this, as well as done early socialisation and desensitization for the first eight weeks of the pups and many more considerations like limiting the amount of times they use a dam. These tests and assessments would have cost them around $10,000 for the dam and sire.

I wrote this insane response because if typing this on a meme educated one person who might get a dog, then the world is just a little bit of a better place.