How to tell a real breeder from a good website

Anyone can buy a domain, photograph eight puppies and write "health tested" across the top of the page. It costs about forty dollars and an afternoon. Clearing a pair of Labradors on hips, elbows, eyes and a DNA panel costs a great deal more than that, takes until both dogs are two years old, and sometimes ends with the answer that the pairing should not happen at all.

That gap — between what a website can claim and what a kennel can prove — is the whole problem facing anyone shopping for a puppy online. Here is how to close it in an afternoon, including the questions that are awkward to ask us.

Ask for registered names, not photographs of certificates

A photograph of a certificate proves nothing. It can belong to any dog, or to no dog, and it can be copied off another kennel's website in about four seconds.

What proves something is the registered name, because the body that grades the joints publishes its own records. Hip and elbow gradings come from the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, and the OFA database is public and free at ofa.org. Search a dog's registered name and you will see the grade, the date it was issued, and whether it is final. Eye examinations are listed there too, under CAER.

So the question is not "are the parents health tested?" — to which the answer is always yes. The question is "what are the sire and dam’s registered names?" A breeder who tests their dogs can answer that in one line, and then you can go and check it yourself, without taking anybody’s word for anything.

"Vet checked" is not health testing

Every puppy from a halfway-decent breeder has seen a vet. That visit covers a heartbeat, a temperature, worming and a first vaccination. It is necessary. It is not testing, and the two get blurred in advertising copy constantly.

Health testing happens to the parents, before the mating, and it looks for inherited disease that no examination of an eight-week-old puppy could ever find. For a Labrador that means four things: hips, elbows, eyes, and a DNA panel covering EIC, PRA-prcd, CNM, DM and HNPK. We set out what each test is, who performs it and what a pass actually looks like on the health testing page, in more detail than most people will want.

If the answer to "what were the parents cleared on?" is "they are both very healthy", you have your answer.

A preliminary score is not a clearance

The OFA will not issue a final hip grade before a dog is two years old, because a young joint can still look sound and then fail. Preliminary scores exist and they are genuinely useful to a breeder deciding what to do next — but a preliminary on a fourteen-month-old dog is not a clearance, and anyone presenting it as one is either confused or counting on you being.

Ask how old the dog was on the date printed on the certificate. The date is on there for a reason.

Ask to see the puppy, live, before any money moves

The most reliable scam detector in existence costs nothing: ask for a video call, at short notice, with the particular puppy you are interested in — and ask whoever is holding it to say your name out loud.

Stolen photographs cannot do that. Neither can a listing lifted from another breeder's site, which is where a great deal of puppy-advertisement imagery comes from. Pet-sale fraud has been one of the most reported categories of online purchase scam for years, and it runs to a pattern: urgency, a deposit for shipping or insurance, and a payment method that cannot be reversed.

Which brings up the part that is awkward for us.

Watch what happens around payment

We take transfers — Zelle, Cash App, Chime and Apple Pay — and we are not going to pretend that is a neutral fact. Those methods are irreversible, which makes them attractive to small breeders who would rather not lose a slice to card fees, and equally attractive to people who are not breeders at all.

So here is the rule we hold ourselves to, and the one you should apply to anybody. No account handle, tag or number appears anywhere on this website, in any automated email, or in any message you were not expecting. Payment details are given by a person, on a call you were told to expect, after you have seen the puppy. Details published on a page or sent by an automated email are details somebody else can substitute, and that is precisely how transfer-based sales get intercepted.

If a page claiming to be us ever asks you to type card details, or asks for a gift card or cryptocurrency, it is not us. Call the kennel on (202) 643-8872 and tell us.

Apply the same test anywhere else you shop. Where did the payment details come from, and who sent them? If they arrived in a text message attached to a deadline, stop.

Ask what happens if it goes wrong — and if you cannot keep the dog

Two questions. Both uncomfortable, both revealing.

The first is the health guarantee: what is covered, for how long, and what you have to do to claim on it. Ours is written out in full, including the parts most breeders summarise, on the guarantee page.

The second gets asked far less often and matters more. What happens if, in four years, your circumstances change and you cannot keep the dog? A breeder who treats that as your problem alone has told you something about how they think about the dogs they produce. Our answer is a return-to-breeder clause with no time limit: the dog comes back here, at any age, for any reason.

What this looks like from our side

Three litters a year is not many, and it is not meant to be. It is the number that can be raised properly in a house in Petworth, with the parents' clearances done in the right order and no corner cut on the ones nobody would think to check.

It does mean that when a litter is ready, it goes. What is on the puppies page is what there is — there is no second list held back for people who ask nicely. If you want to see the certificates before you commit to anything, ask us and we will send them; that question and nineteen others are answered on the FAQs page.

And if you put these six questions to us and to another kennel, and they answer them better than we do, go with them. We would rather lose a sale than place a dog with somebody who could not tell the difference.