American Border Collie Association, Inc.
82 Rogers Rd
Perkinston, MS 39573
(601)928-7551 Fax-(601)928-5148
email- abca@datasync.com
July 13, 2012
Docket No. APHIS-2011-0003
Regulatory Analysis and Development
PPD, APHIS
Station 3A-03.8
4700 River Road Unit 118
Riverdale, MD 20737-1238
I am writing on behalf of the American Border Collie Association, the principal Border Collie
registry in the United States, with approximately 9,000 members. Although we fully share
your concern about breeders who sell a large number of dogs over the Internet but escape
regulation because they sell only at retail, we must oppose this proposed rulemaking,
because we believe it would be uniquely damaging to the Border Collie breed.
The mission of the ABCA includes promoting and fostering the breeding, training and
distribution of reliable working Border Collies. We are committed to preserving in our breed
the high-level genetic working ability that has made the Border Collie such an effective
partner to farmers and ranchers here in the US as well as around the world.
To maintain the Border Collie as a useful stockdog, the complex of instincts and abilities
required must be bred for at every generation. This means that persons knowledgeable
about livestock and livestock-working dogs must train dogs to their full potential and assess
their strengths and weaknesses before deciding which dogs are worthy of breeding.
Our best breeders, on whom the future of the working Border Collie depends, generally
share the following characteristics:
(a) They have an extensive knowledge and experience of livestock and good
working stockdogs. They raise livestock, which is typically their main focus. They
train stockdogs and often compete with them in sheepdog and cattledog trials. The
breeding they do is secondary to those pursuits.
(b) They do not breed a lot of litters, but they own quite a few intact bitches at
any one time. That’s because most of those dogs will be undergoing training and
assessment as to whether they are good enough to be bred. Serious stockdog
training does not start until the dog is close to a year old, and typically takes two
years or so. Only at the end of that time, as a rule, can the best dogs be chosen for
breeding, and a decision made as to which dogs will complement them as breeding
partners to produce the best stockdogs in the next generation. So the dogs have to
remain intact until that decision can be made. Even the bitches who end up being
bred will not have nearly as many litters as would dogs who are only kept for
breeding. They will be used principally for herding livestock, and only secondarily for
breeding.
(c) They are respected trainers as well as breeders. Consequently, they will have in
their possession dogs they do not own, but are training for someone else, as
well as dogs they own solely for the purpose of training them and then selling
them to livestock producers. Those dogs will usually be intact, though they
may never end up being bred by their owners.
(d) They will occasionally sell dogs they did not breed. For example, many of
them travel to the UK, where border collies originated, and while over there will buy a
dog to sell to a student or a friend, who they know is in need of that type of dog or
that bloodline. Or they will buy a pup of a promising breeding, train it up, and then
sell it to a farmer or rancher who needs a trained dog. Or they may sell for a nominal
amount one of their trial dogs who has reached retirement age, to live out its
remaining years as a pet. Or they may sell for a small amount a rescued dog who
needs a home. This may happen no more than once a year, but it will be a rare
breeder who sells only dogs he’s bred himself.
(e) Although their purpose in breeding is to produce top quality dogs for
working livestock, they will sell some of their puppies as pets. The percentage
varies, but most working breeders are open to selling at least some puppies to a
good non-working pet home, where they are in demand for their intelligence,
athleticism and biddability. A dog who “flunks out” in its training and fails to become a
useful working dog will also likely be sold as a pet.
(f) While they welcome puppy buyers to their farm or ranch to pick out and/or
collect their puppies, they will sometimes deliver puppies to fellow competitors
at stockdog trials, or arrange for someone traveling to the area to deliver a pup
to its new home, or ship one to a remote location. These pups and dogs are
sorely needed in areas where there are no good breeders and trainers living close by.
Under the proposed regulations, these top quality breeders would lose their retail pet store
status under AWA, and would not qualify for any of the other exemptions. They only sell at
retail, but they sometimes sell to pet homes, they sometimes sell to people who are not
visiting their premises in connection with the sale, they often will own or be maintaining on
their premises five or more intact females of breeding age, and they sometimes sell dogs
they did not breed and raise themselves.
Breeding brings in little profit for these breeders, because they breed relatively rarely and
because they put so much time and effort into their breeding. They do it largely for love of
the breed – because they understand good dogs, and know their value in the management
of livestock, and are among a relatively few people qualified to shape and maintain this
unique and talented breed. These people are not the target of your proposal, but they would
be swept up in its net. Many of them will simply stop breeding rather than submit to
licensure, regulation and inspection, and the resulting loss to American agriculture will be
nothing short of tragic.
After years of thinking about how to regulate in a way that would reduce exploitative,
inhumane breeding while allowing beneficial, humane breeding to thrive, we have not come
up with a good answer. Probably the best approach would be to regulate only high-volume
breeders, somewhat as the PUPS bill pending in Congress would do, except permitting lowvolume breeders to sell a small percentage of dogs not of their own breeding without losing
their exemption (for the reasons we’ve explained above).
We understand your conclusion that you cannot take this approach because you don’t have
the authority to require retail pet stores to keep records of their sales. That being the case,
we urge you to leave it to Congress to legislate in this area, rather than trying to distort the
AWA as it currently exists to achieve a purpose that these proposed regulations simply will
not advance. Your reasoning that allowing up to four breeding females is going to have
roughly the same result as PUPS because it would “bring the average to 30 to 60 puppies a
year, which is [close to] 50 dogs sold per year provided in the PUPS Act” is fatally flawed,
because it assumes those four females are being bred to their fullest capacity. That may be
how commercial breeding operations do it, but that is not what our good breeders do, nor
what the vast majority of quality pet breeders do.
We cannot see any way in which the other alternatives you considered and rejected would
improve this proposal, and in particular, we would be strongly opposed to exemptions for
retailers based on oversight by breed and registry organizations whose welfare standards
APHIS deems acceptable. The government should not be in the business of giving
surrogate enforcement status to some private dog organizations, thereby empowering and
enhancing them to the detriment of other, disfavored organizations.
In conclusion, we urge you not to adopt these proposed regulations. They will encompass
many, many more breeders than you apparently realize. Many of the best of those breeders
will not be able to afford the costs of licensure and regulation, and many will be unwilling to
submit to federal inspection of their homes. Others will be driven to measures like breeding
more to cover the added costs imposed, or spaying dogs before their quality can be
assessed, or diminishing the number of dogs they will take in for training, to the detriment of
livestock producers who need good trained dogs. The collateral damage of this proposed
change will far exceed whatever benefits might result.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Eileen Stein
President
cc: Hon. Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture