The Not-So-Guaranteed-Health of a Great Dane puppy
You did your due diligence.
You checked all your boxes and found the perfect breeder.
You picked your perfect puppy.
It’s all just rainbows, sunshine, and unicorns. Right?
No, not always.
As a responsible breeder, we do what we can to make sure puppies are healthy, happy, socialized, vet checked, shotted, dewormed, all of it. But once that puppy leaves our care and goes to now your care, that puppy is now your responsibility. This blog may sound harsh and I will apologize ahead of time because I may offend some people here but I want to lay this all out.
So many times, actually, too many times, people pick up their puppy and go against everything the breeder told you. They take them to the park or to a friends house to show off their beautiful new Great Dane. I get it, I love to show my Danes off. But, this is NOT a safe practice! If you got your puppy from me, you went through a gauntlet for a reason. I created a whole page on what to expect when you visit because, these little babies are not safe until 3 weeks after their last parvo shot!
And let me tell you how this goes, every single time. You just showed off your puppy and now your puppy is sick. You rush them to Vet and call your breeder. You blame your breeder for selling you a sick dog.
-WRONG-
Once that puppy left our care, it is now yours. What you do with your puppy is your business but, if your puppy gets sick after it leaves our care, that is your responsibility. Am I suggesting sick dogs never get sold, oh heck no, that happens too. But, if you purchased from a reputable breeder, then it is more plausible that you got a healthy pup and once you took it, that baby got exposed to something. That is not the breeder’s fault. And just let me add something here. When a puppy falls ill, it absolutely crushes us. We still consider every single pup we placed part of our family. Don’t think for a second that many-a-tear were not shed in this house because we had a stillborn. We love our dogs, we love our unborn puppies, our newborns, and our homed puppies all equally. We take what we do very seriously.
This has never happened to me, thankfully, but I read horror stories on Great Dane boards and I felt I needed to address it.
It is standard practice never to cover Vet bills or refund the money for a puppy unless it is something congenitial and even then, breeder’s standard procedure vary from refund (rarely), you either get a puppy of equal value on the next litter from that breeder, or you look for a new puppy elsewhere at your expense. People often times get into a frenzy about getting the world’s most perfect dog (a Great Dane of course). I don’t blame you. I have been, and still am, the same way. In that frenzy they sometimes drone out what the breeder is telling you and exposure their pups to something. It is sad and it happens all the time but, please understand, just as most other things that you buy, once you take them into your possession, they are yours, good, bad and ugly, sick, healthy, all of it.
