Housing.. Vereinsboxen and Dog Carrier Kennels (Portable) - Page 2

That is not telling me your occupation again I am not asking company just what you did.

DDR,
as much as I try to stay out of your post's, I just had to comment on this.
You are totally wrong with your assumption that "many members keep their dogs at the trainingplace, with the dogs living in the "Vereinsboxen" as their primary living space. Where did you you get such a balony from, or is it  just annother way to justify your wrongdoings of the past ??
No, dogtrainingplace would allow such thing, as it is clearly against animal protection law, and would lead in no time to the closure of that facility. The "Vereinsboxen" are just & only to confine the dogs during the trainingperiod - some members use them, some put their dogs in the car or trailer.  There are only a few trainingplaces that I know of, that have seperated kennels, that they offer for rent to their members. But these are most certainly monitored by the club, meaning simply, if the dogs are not kept properly, the member looses the right to use them. The reason why I know about this, one club I am a member of does this.
Holy Moly, I dont even know why I am getting upset.
Ulli

Thanks Uli we know why you are getting upset.

Now Jan come on you have told us so much what is the big deal about your occupation, unless you are the one that gave the shot on death row.

I climbed phone poles, OK? I fixed wires, basically. Did both technical stuff and not-so-technical stuff. It doesn't matter, really. It's over and done with. The only reason I bring it up at all, is to point out that dog breeders are not all about being "greedy" and "exploiting animals". This is a myth, promoted by animal rights activists.. a characterization of dog breeders as snaggle-toothed, uneducated folk living in trailers out in Oklahoma or Nebraska? But, God bless THOSE people, anyway.. Like, I'm sure they don't have a lot of choices in their career path, OK?

What the hell do you do? I'm picturing some kid working in an activist boiler room, jamming weblogs and lists where dog people hang out, in exchange for a cot on the floor and a couple of bowls of instant noodles a day. These people do exist. I know.. In the past, snooping around on the internet, I found a weblog where a handler was advising some of these kids on what to say in debating on various kinds of lists online. It was very interesting, to say the least. I know that some of the people who picket Burger King and the like are paid activists. They show up to carry pickets and raise hell, where ever they're paid to go. Some move from city to city and even back and forth to Europe, like if there is a big high level economic convention they want to demonstrate at.  It's a job, right? For some, it's a career. I heard of one guy who was up on a Burger King counter one day, and a couple of weeks later, he was leading a demonstration at at big WTO meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

You keep harping about animal rights people, I can tell you in no uncertain terms I am not one of them people so please spare me with that crap. I have never donated to them and I never will. I dont support them and I never will.

Jan don't you see this is all an excuse please try to admit what you have done and see the wrong in it. Only once you accept it will you be able to move on and put this sad chapter of your life to bed. I just want to hear out of your mouth some form of remorse and not excuses.

Well, there may be more laws there, now.. Same as here. Some say the whole Schutzhund training thing is in jeopardy, for that matter. But, I know it was done in the past and that there are kennels which do this. Real estate is expensive. How can anyone provide a huge space for the dog to run and live in all day long, unless maybe they live far out in the country, where land is cheap? Even then, the cost to fence and maintain land is costly, and the effort to do clean up increases as kennels get larger.

So, you live way out in the country, and land is cheap, but there are no services, no shopping and supplies, maybe no utilities and no customers, either.

If the dog is let out to exercise and do what it needs to do, then there is no harm to the dog. This I know.

The problem is that the laws are being made by people who scream and bitch the loudest, and usually these are the people who have nothing to do with the industry. It is completely different if you have a business and aim to make a living at something, than if you have a pet or two.

Fact.. This type of a containment will keep a dog (and the public) much safer than any other. Dogs in homes LOOK nice.. Everyone shows pictures of their dogs, lying on their couch. That's nice! It's also nice to see a picture of a puppy, running through a pretty green field. But, a kennel cannot do this. Unless they have one wealthy customer who spares no expense and is always out of town, how can they ever hope to pay the bills? It's impossible. You take what you have and you do the best you can with it. If you are long on demands and short on resources, you do the best you can.

Kennels have been disappearing, all over.. at least, the affordable ones. Land, labor and insurance cost too much. The only kennels remaining now are completely self contained buildings and the dogs get litte cubicles which LOOK like a room, but are basically still a kennel. The cost is exhorbitant, $35 a day and up from there. I think the sky is the limit. A Russian woman not far from me invested a million dollars in her kennel, and it was state-of-the-art, you might say.. but she had very few customers and was barely making ends meet. I used to send her customers when I stopped taking boarders. I stopped taking boarders because there just were not enough to make it worthwhile, and they would do stupid stuff like show up at 4 AM (when I told them not to), and get all the dogs barking and disturbing the neighbors. It wasn't worth it. Now, I think that all the business must go to the self contained kennels in tilt up buildings, but they can't get any return on their investment.

Sock puppet.. In criminal law there is supposed to be something involving intent or knowledge. I had no way of knowing that the kennel business was so lousy. The first two weeks that I bought this kennel, everything seemed to be lining up so well.. I got the phone in, and the advertising. The timing was perfect. I had a presence. I had my vacation time and took two weeks off to open up the business and wait for customers. I waited by the phone.. It didn't ring. This was in the middle of summer, the supposed best time of the year, aside from brief holiday seasons. I know it takes a few years to build up a clientelle, but the phone didn't even ring. I just thought,,

   "OH, MY GOD!!! WHAT HAVE I DONE!!???" 

And, that's pretty much how it went, trending downhill. I did get a few wierd customers.. All seemed to be people with some kind of issues. Eccentrics, people going through nasty divorces.. etc.  One lady brought a cat and a dog. The cat actually got a room all to itself. Luxury! Only, the cat didn't think so.. It lept onto a small shelf and bumped the louver curtain on the window until it could just make it through to the window, which was open for ventilation. Now, I had a loose cat. Luckily, the little dog that came with it was very friendly with the cat, so we went out together looking and actually found the cat. That was a save! .. Then there was a dog .. a GSD that chewed a little hole into a big hole in the kennel gate and almost made an escape. I stopped that in time, but the gate was ruined.

Mind you, I worked noon to eight and my husband worked eight to four and we both lived close by our work (until the last year, due to circumstances beyond our control), so there was always someone close by if there was an emergency, and the dogs were only alone on average four or five hours in a 24 hour period. I tried to get an employee, but all I was getting was the dregs.. looked like drug problems to me.. One guy was mildly retarded, and God bless him, but he couldn't be left alone with that responsibility. He needed supervision. So, that was no help. That last year was really hell for me. I lost even my husband as a helper and the workload had increased exponentially. Things just went from bad to worse..

Well, the way it works in business, you cannot have a "play" business and call it a business.. Not according to tax laws. You have a certain amount of time to get things going.. somewhat flexible, but generally you are expected to make a profit (even a dollar?) two years out of the first five. Otherwise, you can lose your deductions, retroactively. There are very specific rules regarding depreciation and so many other things. If you make a capital investment in equipment (usually any durable item which costs $500 or more), like kennels, you cannot write off the expense all in one year. You have to depreciate it, over time. That rule actually helped me to begin with, because I had so little income.

What I am trying to say is that I HAD to try to make this thing work, somehow. Boarding didn't work out, so I tried breeding. But, we were not getting much in the way of internet sales back then, and prices were very low on average, even for a good puppy. Pretty much you had to go with the local market and sell pets. That was an average of about $350 to $500 per puppy.. IF you could get it. With no regulation in the marketplace, no licensing required to breed and sell dogs, you had to compete with people who would breed one litter a year, and if they pocketed $3,000, they went to Las Vegas with the wife, grinning all the way! But, that's not the worst part of it.. Every time you had a litter, you got stuck with the extra two or three puppies that just didn't connect with a buyer. What's the common wisdom about buying puppies? Everyone says to pick the most outgoing, the one that picks you, right? That's nice.. So, what do we do with the leftovers. Nobody wants to buy that last puppy!

Think about it! This is a problem!!!! Then, you have the older ones, who have earned their place (and no one wants to adopt an older kennel dog) and it's rare to get one back, but it can happen, and you have the ones that no one picked (more with every litter) and you have the main breeding dogs (may be only 20 - 25% of the kennel population, on average), and you have then finally the young hopefuls.. which you have to keep for two years before you even know if you have anything (waiting on OFA's). A breeding kennel has not ONE population, but as many as four or five of them, overlapping!!!! No one thinks of this, but this is the way it is. I had five and six year old dogs that I had NEVER bred. There just was no market for the puppies, and the only reason I had these dogs was either for the bloodlines (genetic diversity, rare lines) or because there was no other option for the dog. Yes, I could have "cleaned house" and taken many of the dogs to the vet to be PTS, but this is hard to do, if you have feelings for dogs. Some people can do that sort of thing as a business decision, but then this is not the business I wanted to be in. I just held out, hoping for a solution.

OMG I'm going to vomit. Another try at excusses? I'm with Ulli, he'd know, as he lives in Germany currently. When I lived there, I NEVER saw this happening. Dogs housed in crates OVERNIGHT, in the house, yes, the same as is done here in the states. I had no yard to speak of when I lived in Germany and my young dog "slept" in a crate in my dinning room, when I slept. Loose in the house when I was awake to keep him out of trouble, walked to the nearest field for potty breaks.

I'm going back to bed, I hope I don't have a nightmare.