Gatekeeping Within Our Breeds: A Conversation with the Patrons

Host Laura Reeves is joined by members of the Pure Dog Talk Patrons group in an extended deep dive on the question of gatekeeping within our breeds. Members of this private group share their opinions, thoughts and mitigations on placing dogs, using limited registration, educating puppy buyers and more.

Spinning off a podcast conversation several years ago with Amanda Kelly on the topic of are we protecting our breeds into extinction, Laura and the members of the group discuss the various perspectives on the topic.

“This is a group where we talk about a lot of things and very rarely do we share those things into the public realm,” Laura noted. “But we all thought this was a pretty important topic and that we all had things we wanted to say about it and we wanted to share that with the larger Pure Dog Talk community as a podcast.”

One side of the conversation is the position that we have a lot of problems with new people coming to dogs and you have a new person who’s excited to do it and the gatekeeping is preventing them from doing so.

On the other side of the discussion is the opinion shared by a long-time breeder in the group.

“I do not want my only okay, mediocre dogs in the conformation ring. That is not my goal. I don’t care how many champions I do or don’t finish as a kennel,” Karyn Cowdrey said. “What I care about is that what represents my kennel be of, in my opinion, sufficient quality. I would be proud to have kept it I would be proud to walk into the ring with it and honestly if I deem it show ring worthy to me then it’s breeding quality and I keep my name on that dog until at least a certain amount of criteria are met by that person if they’re a new person.”

Education of new and potential buyers was also frequently mentioned in the dialogue.

“I’m very big on education,” Sandy MacArthur said. “And I can give an example and I will not name the person nor the breed, but there’s a person who went in the dog world and was looking for a ‘breeding pair’ … this was 30 years ago in the 90s… emailing everybody ‘I’m looking for a breeding pair’… We all know that’s an instant red flag and this person got put on everybody’s do not sell list.

“Someone in the breed she was interested in decided to take this person out to lunch and have a conversation. By the end of the conversation at lunch, she sold that person a bitch on a co -owned contract. This person put all the work into it, all the research, drove everywhere every weekend, did everything right, and 30 years later is a well -known dog person. Let’s just say that. Somebody took their time to pull them aside ’cause they didn’t know. They thought that what you do is you get a breeding pair. They had no idea.”

If you would like to join these types of conversations, as well as support the work of the podcast in education and mentoring, please visit the website and sign up to join us! Go to https://puredogtalk.com/patron/ to learn more.