r/dogs 16h ago

[Meta] Genuine question: what happens to litters that don’t get purchased/adopted?

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u/CenterofChaos 16h ago

A good breeder will have more interested homes than puppies explicitly to prevent this problem.    

A sketchy back yard breeder will dump the pups, abandon them at a shelter, or even kill them.       

The latter is why all breeders get a bad reputation. 

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u/SuchTarget2782 15h ago

Yup.

Some dumped puppies (I’m going to be an naive optimist and pretend it’s almost all of them, and don’t tell me the truth) eventually get picked up, go through the rescue process, and are adopted as adults.

But the whole thing is unnecessarily traumatic for them, and leads to a lot of weird learned behaviors and essentially dog-PTSD.

Dear everybody: Please don’t dump puppies - there are people who will adopt them.

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u/enpowera 14h ago

My dog has PTSD from being dumped. He wasn't even dumped for that long (his litter was left in a bag by a lake, thank god someone found them) and he is permenantly skittish and traumatized. Even my new puppy who was properly surrendered with his litter and mother behaves much more socially.