Episode 52 - Avoiding Getting Puppies Back, Part One: Ideas for Better Placements

8/26/2026

Puppy returns are an unpleasant reality of being a breeder. At the end of the day, no matter how well you screen, you're going to get puppies back if you breed dogs.

This week's episode is a response to a breeder who got a puppy back from a puppy owner who ignored the breeder’s explicit written instructions regarding training and veterinary care/medication, and disaster ensued. The puppy is going to be OK but the breeder is wondering, could she (the breeder) have done something differently? The people seemed so nice, how could the breeder have gotten this placement so wrong?

In this episode I address this question, talk about what is and is not within our control as breeders, and share some resources for stacking the deck in your favor when it comes to puppy placements.

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 52

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist., and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This week's question is about puppies being returned to the breeder. And here's the question.

Over the last couple of litters, I've had at least one puppy returned and one litter had two puppies returned. I rarely breed and spend an enormous amount of time working with my puppy families, both before and after the puppy goes home. I send home the guide, How to Advocate for Your Puppy. I have a lengthy application process and a strict contract.

Everything seems to go in one ear and out the other. Once the puppy goes home, I have heard it said that it's the breeders fault for picking the family. So I would like to find ways to improve. I hate to blame it on bad vets and bad trainers, but that seems to be the common theme here. For example, I almost had a third puppy surrendered from a litter until I laid down the law.

Either I buy him back from the buyer or she takes him to my trainer. Within a month of going to my trainer, he was like the puppy who left my home. I am almost at the point where I'm going to require only approved vets and approved trainers be used, or at least have the option of vetting them myself.

Okay, me again. So I had a couple follow up questions. First of all, what was the breed? And the breed is Labrador Retrievers. So, you know, important information because we're talking about a large size dog. And then I also wanted to know what were the reasons for return. And one puppy developed diarrhea after being given, you know, just an alarming assortment of medications which we'll talk more about that later.

Specifically, by the way, against the terms of the contract which outlined that none of these medications were to be given and the dog was given the medications. The dog was also taken. And I said, the dog, the tiny baby puppy was also taken to a shock collar trainer, a well known establishment that uses shock collars on puppies. Again, specifically against the contract.

Another one of her puppies that was returned was returned with a head tilt. The owner I don't know if the puppy has a tilted head the puppy has a neurological problem. Well, the breeder has run every diagnostic, can't find anything wrong with the puppy, but it's so happens that this puppy also went to a board and train with the Shock Collar franchise, and the puppy went into the board train with no head tilt and came back with a head tilt. So draw your own conclusions there.

So this post generated a tremendous amount of conversation, and I'm going to read a lot of them, but it's going to go long. So I'm going to start with my global comments, recommendations and the resources that we have available for breeders to help avoid this situation.

First of all, specifically, I do vet the vets and the trainers that my puppy owners use. This is part of our process, and it's in our contract that the puppy owner is going to be guided by us in their choice of veterinarian and dog trainer. I know a lot of puppy owners give pushback on this. They gave pushback on the thread. They say it's overreaching, but I'm just telling you, as someone of much experience., training and veterinary care, it's you can't describe them as one thing, okay? You can't describe veterinary care as one thing or training as one thing. It's that different depending where you go. And having a breeder who understands the good from the bad is priceless. To be fair, you know, this is kind of a big conversation because not every breeder also is so knowledgeable.

And you do have your kooks out there who are complete anti-vaxxers or don't think that you have to give any kind of worm medicine if you feed raw. But, you know, the majority of experienced breeders, we've just been around the block enough times. We've raised scores, if not hundreds of puppies. Some of us, and you know, we know what to look out for. So it's a resource.

And I have so much personal experience with puppy owners going to trainers and being given horrendous advice and yes, bad vets to vets who just give head scratching advice, recommend insane protocols and totally misdiagnose things. This is nothing against the veterinary profession, okay, but it's like anything else. Being a vet, they don't. They're not all equal and again, we breeders being a little more wily and having dealt with more veterinarians know how to flush out the good ones.

So Mark, and my situation is perhaps a little different from most in that we tend to place all of our puppies locally. So we do have it in our contract for our locally placed puppies that if there's ever anything wrong with the puppy like that, there's a suspicion that there's really something wrong with this puppy. They have to go to doctor level.

They have to go to our veterinarian, and they're all happy to do that. And frankly, it's hard to get in with Doctor Lovell, so this is a huge benefit to these puppy owners because if they weren't our puppy owners, they'd probably have a hard time getting an appointment with him. So I think if you're a breeder and you have a relationship with a really good vet, you can spin this as a benefit to the puppy owners.

So that would be my first recommendation is, yes, if they're local, absolutely. Have them go to your vet and represent it as a benefit because it really is.

Now as far as the trainers, same thing goes. We help our puppy owners select a trainer if they're local. They either come here or they go to a local trainer of our choosing.

I mean, I say our choosing, we work with the puppy owner, okay? When it's a distant placement, it's trickier. But still, as a breeder and someone experienced in dogs, you usually are in a much better position to look at a website and know right away at least what the underlying methodology of this dog trainer is. It really honestly puppy owners, they just it blows right past them.

If there's people smiling on the front page, I mean they can have that dog with an enormous shock collar and a pinch collar on. And the puppy owners are like, well, but the people were so nice and they they were encouraging and they spoke nicely to my dog. I'm like, yeah, well, they're shocking it and choking it with a pinch collar.

So again, the breeder is going to be in a better position to read this situation than the puppy owner. And yes, I do think as a breeder you have to be upfront really, if it matters to you explicit about this and it's a condition in your contract. And by the way, it's not just the shock collar trainers that are concerning.

I have been horrified that even positive trainers and behaviorists display shocking lack of ability to read basic dog behavior. It's very troubling. And when we get into the comments, you know you're going to hear breeders having puppies, puppies returned to them that have been given Prozac. We had a puppy returned to us that had been given Prozac. You know, the shock collar trainers think they're going to shock the puppy out of the puppy, but the positive trainers often feel they're going to train the puppy out of the puppy.

So there is a basic lack of understanding of puppies here. So what that means to you as a dog breeder is that you have to be involved in this process. Okay? There's no like, philosophical orientation either. As a vet or as a as a trainer. I mean, it's not like the force free vet or the holistic vet is going to necessarily be a good diagnostician.

It's not like the positive dog trainer is going to understand dog behavior and, you know, not want to give your dog Prozac when it's just a puppy. As a breeder, you just you have to stay involved.

And this is where the breed really does matter, because we're talking about Labradors here, okay? It's a big, boisterous dog. It maybe isn't the terrier level of energy, but, you know, it's not a Yorkie or a Maltese. It's not a tiny teacup lap dog that people can just deal with it. I would say your probability of a puppy being returned goes up in direct proportion to the energy level and size of the dog, okay, and it's an algorithm like small tiny teacup Chihuahua, super high energy, maybe even a little aggressive towards people.

Not going to probably get returned because it's cute and they can carry it around in a purse. You know, a bull mastiff that is fairly laid back but pulls the owner on the leash. You know, you got a bigger chance of that dog being returned, even if it's the sweetest dog in the world. So I guess what I'm trying to say is some of this comes with the territory you're breeding bigger dogs.

People have very unrealistic expectations about what that little puppy is going to feel like in their life. When it matures.

So the question she has, she says she thinks it's her fault. So is it her fault that she got these puppies back? Could she have screened the homes better? In some ways, I really wish I could say this was her fault, because then there'd be a way to avoid it.

But unfortunately, I do think some of this comes with the territory. Even with our incredibly tight screening process, we still on two occasions were ghosted by puppy owners. One was a divorce where the wife got the dog and then ghosted us, and once was a puppy owner who want to spay her seven month old puppy, and we refused to give her permission.

On two other occasions, we've gotten puppies back. Both of those times, we were thankful there was nothing wrong with those puppies, and they both landed in fantastic forever homes. And I think that's the most you can ask in this game that the puppies come back to you and that you can rehome them. You know, sometimes there really is a problem with the puppy.

Sometimes there really is something mentally or physically wrong with the puppy, and that also comes with the territory you breed long enough, you're going to get puppies back, you're going to get ghosted by owners. You're going to have owners who don't listen to your advice and the results for the puppy are catastrophic. And it's really hard and demoralizing for breeders when this happens.

You know, it's a weird space we live in because legally we're selling goods. We're transferring ownership of chattel to a third party. But emotionally, we could not be more invested in these puppies. And that's really hard on breeders. I get it, I get where this woman is coming from. She's emotionally wrought and 100% hands down. I'm going to tell you any forward thinking, ethical breeder, the hardest part of dog breeding is placing puppies, period. The puppies themselves are a breeze. It's it's a delight to raise a litter, placing them, letting them go. Not so much.

But I do have some resources. Many of them free, that can help you breeders. And if you're a puppy owner listening, absolutely. These are for you to. I do have a podcast on helping puppy owners navigate the world of corporate vet care and help them find a good veterinarian, and I'm going to put that up on the show page. If you go to madcapradio.com on the show page, you will see these links. So I have that link to that podcast there.

Now breeders, I do have a podcast on contracts as well, and I talk about what I consider negotiable and non negotiable things and the true utility of a contract. Okay. Because it's really not like you're going to sue these puppy owners.

It's more of, I would say a dual screening process and meeting of the minds because yeah, I mean puppy owners, they really don't understand what you're talking about. But if you put it out clearly in writing and you go over it with them, it does at least eliminate an entire level of misunderstanding. Again, that link to that podcast is going to be on the show page at madcapradio.com.

We do also require all of our puppy owners to take our puppy course. If you don't already know about our Puppy course, you can find it at puppyculture.com. It's called With Open Arms and a Level Head: How to Welcome a puppy into Your life. We take the puppy owner from setting up their house, setting up their puppy enclosure through.

How do you carry your puppy home in the car? What do you do the first nights your puppy is home? How do you train your puppy and then all the way through to complete house and crate training? I'm just going to say here I'm not stumping for my puppy course necessarily, but literally this course was made for our puppy owners as a breeder.

These are the things that I know that puppy owners need to know, which is not necessarily the same thing that most dog trainers think the puppy owners need to know. I know what the questions are. Let me drop it here. If you have a trusted online puppy course that you use, I'm not telling you not to use that.

I'm just saying I have this one. But whatever your puppy course is that you want your puppy owners to take, they got to take it before they get that puppy home, and the puppy course has to cover not just training basic behaviors, but things like how do you schedule your day with your puppy? What do you do with your puppy when you can't watch your puppy?

What does your actual day look like and what are your priorities with the puppy? How do you handle things like puppy biting? What is reasonable to expect at each developmental stage for the puppy? You know, I think training, while it's very important and it is a necessary tool, it's ancillary to the real issue, which is how do you teach your dog to be a good pet?

How do you live with the dog? How do you learn dog mentorship? And that's what you have to make sure your puppy owner is getting in. Whatever puppy course they take. Okay, so you found a great puppy course for your puppy owner. You are sure your puppy owner is taking the course, but just taking the puppy course is not enough.

We also touch base with them in the weeks leading up to their getting their puppy, to ensure that they're on board with the recommendations in the course, and they seem to be in good faith about following our advice. We do it in a Facebook group. I mean, I do reach out individually to each puppy owner, but we also have a Facebook group for each litter.

If Facebook is something that you know, some younger puppy owners don't want to join, you can do a Google meeting or whatever however you want to do it. You can do Zoom calls. Some people do that, but it's good to have a place where the puppy owners can kind of support each other if possible. No substitution for you getting in there individually and making phone calls and have or texts or communications of some kind with each puppy owner to ensure that they are in fact taking in this information, assimilating it, and acting on it.

Because our puppy course starts from way before they get the puppy home. Okay, it starts with how do they set up their area P for their puppy? What are their expectations? They should have watched to the end of the course, including the entire house and crate training system so they understand where they're going with all this.

We do offer a bulk discount for breeders on the Puppy Course, and as a breeder you do get a dashboard where you can see if in fact the puppy owner has accessed the course or not. What a lot of breeders will do is, at the time of deposit, they'll they'll take the money also for the puppy course from the puppy owner.

And at that point, usually the puppy owner is pretty excited and very willing to take the course, sending it home with the puppy owner really not so effective. Okay, the as a breeder, the time when you have access to that puppy owners mind and attention is before they get the puppy home. That's when you're in a position of bargaining power.

Once the puppy goes home, it's like a bomb goes off in their life and they're just they're playing catch up and they're not going to win at that game. You know, requiring them to work with you on finding a vet and a trainer and requiring them to take the puppy course are really good screening tools. Okay, because if they're not even going to do that before they get a puppy, if they think they know better before they get a puppy. I mean, you really have to seriously rethink that placement.

I should mention here also that Mark and I do have a puppy application that is fairly extensive. I know the AKC, for instance, really limits you when you know they apply through marketplace, they really limit you on how many questions you can ask because they, in their words, you'll discourage people from applying for your puppies.

And I'm not saying that you should have a terrible, discouraging application, but I think the application should be very realistic about who you are and who you're looking for, as a puppy owner. We make it clear in our puppy application that there is a lot of things that other breeders might not have a problem with, but we do have a problem with it.

For instance, we will not place a dog in a home that does not have a true fenced in enclosure. We will place a dog in a city environment where they're going to be leash walked. But we will not place a dog in a situation where there's no fenced in backyard, and the owner thinks they're going to train them to stay in the backyard.

And we absolutely will not place a dog in a, shock collar, electric fence enclosure. But we say in the application, if any of these things are not agreeable to you, just let us know and we will refer you to another breeder who's reputable and won't have a problem with your lifestyle. You know, I think this gets more honesty from people because if you villainize them or don't give them an option, they're going to tend to lie to you, okay?

They'll say what they need to say to get the puppy, but if you tell them, like, listen, it's okay who you are, it's just not who we are. But we can help you find a puppy. You know, you got a better chance there. You're increasing your odds of them being honest with you. And yes, we actually do have friends that are breeders that do not have strict requirements in the same way that we do.

I mean, that's how they run their breeding program. They test their stock, they breed good temperaments. They just they feel differently about it than we do. Another thing that Mark and I do is we require two in-person visits from our puppy owners. The first one is just for us to meet, okay, and see if we think we can work together, see if we, Mark and I, think that this is a person that we want to place a puppy with, and for the puppy owners to decide if they want to deal with us or not, because we're not for everybody, I admit it. This is the time when we sit the puppy owners on the couch and we let in our most obnoxious young dog, and we just look at their reaction.

You know, if they're laughing and enjoying it and just bathing in the exuberance of this young dog, you know, that's a good sign. We probably have a winner if they're standing up and freaking out and clutching pearls. I mean, you know, you just saved yourself a lot of heartache right there. And I do understand breeders are in different positions, okay.

Particularly if you're breeding a smaller, easier dog or if you're doing a higher volume of breeding where you are sending puppies across the country to people that you haven't met before, this is not going to be an option for you. But I'm just saying for this breeder who breeds, as she says, rarely and she breeds Labradors, I mean, I would think that having the people come out and meet her, that that's a good first step for her in narrowing down her gene pool when it comes to puppy buyers.

And by the way, even if a puppy owner lives across the country, it's the same thing. They have to come out and meet us before we make any kind of commitment about whether they're going to get a puppy or not. It would be incredibly rare. In fact, I can't think of a case where I've ever placed a puppy across the country with someone that I don't know.

I have placed puppies across the country, but they're people that I've known for decades. But, you know, you'd be surprised if people are really motivated. Yeah, they'll come out, and then we require personal pickup. The people have to come pick up the puppy. I'm not saying, obviously, that this makes this an error less process, but yeah, I mean, it does really help.

And meeting the people in person, you can just read and see a lot that I don't care how many zooms you do with the people or how much you talk to them, otherwise you just seeing them in person, interacting with dogs, especially young, exuberant dogs. That's going to tell you volumes right there and save you again, a world of hurt in many cases.

The other tools that we have for you and your puppy owners are our booklets. We have the exercise booklet, we have the Be Your Puppies advocate booklet, and we also have the spay neuter booklet. Now you don't have to buy the booklets, okay. We have the exercise article and the Be Your Puppies Advocate article for free on our website, and I'll put the links up to those on the show page again at madcapradio.com.

The spay neuter booklet is not up there, but I will tell you that we don't really have a position on spay neuter except to expose the true risks and benefits of spay neuter, particularly early spay neuter. Our position for our puppies, which you may, you know, may or may not be your position, is that we require the puppy owners to wait until the puppies are 18 months old before doing, any spay or neuter.

And we highly recommend they wait until they're three years old. For males, we recommend if there is not some other behavioral problem, that they do not neuter their males. However, there's no health benefit to it and there are a lot of serious health detriments to it. Again, spay neuter booklet. We've laid out all the studies for bitches for us, there is a high risk of Pyometra, meaning to say uterine infection, once they get past six years old.

That varies a lot by breed, with some breeds never really getting Pyometra and some almost for sure getting Pyometra by the time they're ten years old. So that's something that's going to vary. But for us, we do require our, puppy owners to spay their bitches by six years old.

So somewhere between three years and six years, I would say, is the sweet spot for us with the spay neuter. The sweet spot is never. But if they do choose to do it, not before 18 months old. And I'm only giving you that much detail because I don't have it all, you know, up in an article that you can read for yourself beforehand.

But the other two are in an article that having been said, we sell hundreds of thousands of copies of these. They're very helpful for your puppy owners. And, you know, having it in writing to refer to at any time somehow gives it an immediacy and legitimacy that an online resource just doesn't have for your puppy owners, even though it is the exact same content.

So to sum up my advice. Yes, have it in your contract and in fact help them find a trainer. Help them find a vet, require that they take the puppy course and you need to follow up with them in a structured manner, not just to make sure that they're taking the course, but to make sure that they're understanding it and are truly prepared for what's to come with this puppy.

And then you've got to be pretty ruthless about changing your mind right up to the last minute about placements. If something's giving you a bad feeling, if the puppy owner comes and they make a comment that puts you not at ease, I mean, it's never too late to pull chocks. I mean, literally, you're at the altar and the priest says, do you?

And you can say, no, I don't. I will say one of the two placements where I got a puppy back was, in fact, a situation like that. I was very attached to this puppy, and he was attached to me, and the family came to pick him up. And by the way, this was a family that had two dogs from me and had gotten a dog from one of my friends before that, and his parents had gotten a dog from one of my friends before that.

So multi-generational, very tried and true family, but they showed up to pick up this puppy and it was not a match. There was nothing wrong with this family. They are good friends of mine. There is nothing wrong with the puppy, but I knew that day it wasn't a good match and I didn't stop it. I didn't say, you know what, I'm not getting good feeling about this.

I mean, very fortunate situation. The puppy came back within a couple weeks and he went to a home, which he's an absolute celebrity. Could not be happier. And I wound up placing a different puppy with that family that returned the puppy. And that puppy is doing great in that home. That was a good match. All I'm saying is even I sometimes, you know, don't listen to that voice on the inside that's telling me, no, stop. Don't do this. So listen to that voice.

This one went long, and it's going to go a lot longer, because I haven't even gotten to all the comments. And there are a lot of them and they're very good. So we're going to split this into next podcast. I'm going to be reading all of these comments and discussing them because there are some really, for me, novel ideas that came out of them that I thought were great, or at least great food for thought.

Before I sign off, though, I do want to say, listen, I don't want you to be discouraged and think, oh, it's a disaster. Or, you know, all my puppies are going to come back and even Jane gets puppies back. I'm just being really honest with you. Most of my puppy placements, they're not just puppy placements, they're family.

I mean, the Madcap family is a real thing. The puppy owners love each other. The litter groups tend to stay together. I've made lifelong friends. I mean really deep relationships through dogs. I met my husband through dogs. I placed a puppy with him so I cannot overstate how meaningful this vocation of being a dog breeder is. You're changing lives, your own and other people's for the better.

But I'm being honest with you. Yes, there are times when it's not all wine and roses. There are times you get puppies back, but that's part of the process.

If you like this podcast, you'll love our bundles. We have bundles for breeders, bundles for puppy owners. We have show Puppy bundles, we have Pet Puppy bundles all available at puppyculture.com.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.