We have outdoor kennels (wood, not concrete) for the dogs that don't come inside, but all get to spend some time inside at some point in their lives, particularly on retirement (our house is the dog retirement home!). We generally have between 6-10 dogs inside with us at any one time (not including the 5 cats, and assorted guinea pigs, turtles, fish, gerbils).
We are not a puppy mill cranking out pups by the dozen all year and selling pups to all comers indiscriminately like a retail pet store! We rarely have more that 3 litters a year. We whelp ALL our litters inside, either in the kitchen or the adjoining room, and the pups do not get outside until their shots (after 6 weeks). We are extremely careful of letting outside visitors in during the time the pups are most vulnerable to disease (we mostly prohibit it). And we are very careful on selecting individual pups for individual owners, through careful screening of the prospective clients, and by living with and closely observing the pups through the first 8-9 weeks of their lives.
We do not need anyone looking over our shoulder telling us how to raise and care for our dogs, when they don't have anywhere near the experience that we do. They haven't a clue on what they are trying to regulate! (I doubt any of them even have pets... and even if they did, caring for pets is quite different from caring for breeding animals.)
These proposed regulations would prohibit all this! Talk about hypocrisy...
>We are not a puppy mill cranking out pups by the dozen all year and selling pups to all comers indiscriminately like a retail pet store!<
But, for USDA’s purposes, we in the hobby side of dog breeding have been shielded for generations because of this wording. USDA’s definition of “retail” is NOT a bad thing. You want to be considered to be under this umbrella.
“Retail” means, for these purposes, that you sell to the “end user”, aka the dog’s forever home. You do not sell to pet stores, who are also retail in that they sell to the dog’s final (one would hope) home.
Everything you say to me sounds like you are EXACTLY how we are. I am completely legal in my own state, Pennsylvania, because I stay under the limit. If you have 26 or more dogs and pups on your property, you need a license. Like the author of that piece I posted argued, they probably wouldn’t try to come after you or me, but the fact that they have it worded so they COULD means they don’t just care about large scale breeders, nor do they care about the animals. They just want power.