Philosophy for Choosing an Ethical Breeder

I was a moral philosophy major at University, so nearly everything I think goes through a lens of leading an ethical life using rationally derived premises which support my conclusions. Another thing a philosophy degree does is to make you a bit wordy. . . 

The difference between ethics and morality is the difference between climate and weather. Moral choices are made every day, ethics is a history of moral choice outcomes. If you strive to make good moral choices, the accumulation of these will eventually become the premises for concluding that you are a good ethical person. Since this article is about deciding whether a Breeder is ethical or not, a bit of moral philosophy is needed to make sure our decisions are fairly made.

There are a lot of moral systems the world uses to determine whether a person is a good person or not. Some are more valid than others. Some have holes in them. Let me give you a visually derived metaphor to help you understand how one might see their own ethics:

Picture you have one bucket and two bags of marbles. One bag is filled with dark colored balls, one with light colored balls. The color of these balls really doesn't matter except that one would assign to one color the value of good, the other to bad. If you were to decide (for yourself) which colored ball to throw into the bucket every time you made a moral choice, the eventual accumulated blended tone of the balls in the bucket would help you determine the ethical outcome of all the moral choices of your life and it might go something like this:

If you said that the dark balls are bad moral choices and the bucket appeared somewhat more dark than light, and you wanted to be thought of as an ethical person, then it might appear you have some work to do. And vis-e-versa. The general color of the contents of your ethical bucket can, of course, change over the span of your life since you make more choices and older choices are covered up over time. So for the ethically challenged, there is hope for change in either direction.

Enough about buckets full of marbles, we are interested in making judgements about breeders; how does one decide whether a breeder is aiming at an ethical outcome, or just looking at making money by exploiting a life which might otherwise have its own interests. First, let's decide whether breeding can ever be a good moral choice. This is not so clear cut and the answer may surprise you. 

• From a purely human point of view any moral choice which leads to pursuit of personal interests, without interfering in any other human's interests, might be thought of as a good choice, or at least not  bad one. 
• If a society of human beings believes that, on balance, having more animals is a good thing then this would re-enforce the point of view that breeding, so long as it doesn't impede a majority outcome, is good. 
• One might decide the issue from the law, but this is merely legislating the  point of view that the more people who think it is good, or bad, can make a legal system which decides whether it is good or bad. 
• If you have no society telling you good or bad only your own interests matter. This is a perfectly good point of view providing you have no society interfering in your choice.  
• You may choose on your own, but whether you are an ethical person more often than not is decided by the values that society gives you. 

There is one other important point of view, other than the human point of view, to consider. There are the animals themselves who are subjected to this. Dogs have no ethics, no morality per se. Dogs lead a natural life. As one prominent philosopher might be paraphrased to say: Life (for a dog) is nasty, brutish, and short. 

We cannot know for certain how a dog feels about being subjected to the business of selling its offspring. We can assume Nature's directive of requiring the provision of a next generation is what passes for a good moral choice in the natural world. But we cannot say this for dogs where humans interfere with the natural world. Dogs, in philosophical terms, are not moral agents (capable of making their own moral choices). Dogs are moral patients. Each breeding choice made by a dog is somehow made by the human, whether the offspring are considered accidental or not. There are many types of moral patients, beings subjected to the moral choices of some human moral agent (the person putting a ball in a bucket). Let's not go down that road any further, we will stop at the first type of moral patient the most akin to the dogs in my kennel: slaves.

A slave is an individual: which is bought and sold; which does fairly much what the Master commands; who might be punished, starved, given love, given food, or neglected; who has no true recourse or means of gaining a redress of some grievance. 

Dogs fit this description perfectly so if a dog is a moral patient (wild or not) and subject to human moral decision making and, if the treatment of the dog is entirely out of its own control but also entirely within the control of the human Master, then the dog is a slave. If slavery is morally wrong (and it is), then dog breeding cannot be a good moral choice and breeding is immoral every time it is engaged in.  

But not all who engage in breeding are unethical since ethics is a balance of good and bad decisions made over time. (A bucket of mixed balls.) I have bred Basset Hounds for many years and consider myself an ethical person. But because of this I must apologize to my females for putting them through the rigors of whelping, the endurance tests of raising pups, and the panic and loss of selling the pups. In order to stem the bad that I am doing in the world by breeding I must, as a matter of ethics, in every moral choice, rigorously decide the moral implications of every step of the process of breeding puppies as a business. 

• I must decide how much breeding does the least harm to my moral patient (female). 
• This is a moral choice.
• I must decide how to treat my female, how much love to give, what environment is suitable, and who the pups eventually go to. 
• These are all moral choices.

I must therefore, treat my female dog as I would my own child. (Except that selling a human (a moral agent) is absolutely prohibited by all morality. 

Thus, having a grounding in making moral choices and knowing that breeding is a bad moral choice, but that the ethics might not be all bad, we can make moral choices for ourselves about which breeders we might wish to engage with, and who to walk away from. I cannot presume to decide this for you. The breeding trade is, in fact, morally wrong, but not always the worst outcome for the female engaged in the business without her true consent. Selling animals as slaves is wrong, but not always the worst outcome for the puppies given over to good homes and loved for their entire lives. The best we can do is check with others before making a buying decision. 

This is how you might decide whether a breeder is an ethical breeder, or not. Look at the choice you are making in deciding to purchase a puppy from any breeder and ask yourself: Am I making a good moral choice? What colored balls am I putting into my own bucket? 

Check references, visit the kennel, decide for yourself if the person you are considering ought to be in this morally challenged business. If you see something that makes you wonder if you are doing the right thing, do not encourage the "breeder" to continue in the business by buying a puppy. If you see abuse, report it because it is the right choice for you to make. If you see a person breeding dogs for money alone, disregarding the interests (health and happiness) of the animals or the customers, walk out on the opportunity to encouraging this unethical person. But if you see love, a person who puts the female's interests ahead of the profit motive, no matter the circumstances (within reason), you might encourage it and be involved despite the moral challenge. 

• An ethical breeder will have a good place to bring pups into the world.
• Reasonably clean
• Somewhat secure
• Safe
• This only needs to be as good as a natural den the female might choose for herself.
• An ethical breeder will have a female which is treated as family except for the treatment of the breeding business.
• Treated as a child of the family, scaled to fit the owner's idea of what good treatment looks like. 
• An ethical breeder will have a good veterinarian and uses them as needed despite the costs.
• Cost to benefit analysis is valid and lifetime ownership is not always the best outcome for the dog's life.
• Whether a life is no longer worth living (putting a dog down) is also the basis for a good decision so long as this does not become a cost to benefit decision.
• An ethical breeder has a means of determining whether a person interested in taking a puppy will take care of it.
• Most people will treasure and respect an investment made at significant cost.
• Those most likely to treat a dog well are those whose lives are full of care for others.
• An ethical breeder will require certain behaviors and treatments regarding their raising of the puppy into adulthood.
• An ethical breeder ought to have a Contract that is openly available to all prior to any decisions being made. Both parties are taking on a responsibility.
• An ethical breeder will control, where possible, the insertion of the puppy into a "puppy mill" environment.
• We look carefully at the environment our pups will be entering. A puppy mill is never a good outcome for a female. These are often breeders who use cages, and have more than one breed present in the kennel. 

I, you, or anyone else, cannot say whether you, I, or anyone else, is a good person ethically. 

We can only look closely at what we are doing, make a guess at the outcome, and make good or bad choices for ourselves and our moral patients. This takes judgment and the desire to be a good ethical person, one who encourages others to follow suit, one who will be a good parent for their own family members and pets.