22 FIONA BAIRD
ONE REPUTABLE BREEDERS MISSION NO ONE SHOULD BUY FROM PUPPY FARMS. RESPECTED GOLDEN RETRIEVER BREEDER, FIONA BAIRD TELLS US WHY, WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR, AND HOW TO ACT ON IT. Fiona Baird grew up in Sussex and has been a professional dog breeder and trainer all her life. Her family have had the same line of working Golden Retrievers for generations. Her grandfather started the line over eighty years ago, which her mother continued prior to Fiona. She grew up with dogs, started working them, then went on to train gun dogs.
is the clincher. Imagine turning up at a reasonably nice house in suburbia to view the potential new member of your family. The dog of your dreams; the dog your child has cried for over the past three weeks, only to find that they came from a puppy farm. You’d be devastated. That’s what happened to Fiona’s dear friends.
Fiona began residential training of other peoples’ dogs and now breeds dogs that become Medical Detection Dogs (MDD). Fiona supplies pups which are placed with their first foster family. Family members bring the dog up, integrating and associating it into family life. Members of those foster families take the dogs to MDD, a business owned by Dr. Claire Guest OBE. The dogs undergo training after which, they move on to their ‘forever home.’
Owners of a Dalmatian dog already, Fiona’s friends visited a house where they bought their gorgeous dogs. Her friends were the least likely people in the world to fall for the trap, yet what they hadn’t considered was if the bitch was the mother of the pups. Did they look at the bitch’s undercarriage? Did she look like she’d been feeding puppies for the last eight weeks? Both her friends realised after the event, they had been conned and their dogs had come from puppy farms.
Fiona Baird is a leading voice in the training and breeding field and gained so much experience, she wrote ‘Training Your Puppy,’ published by Merlin Unwin, ISBN-13: 978-1906122829 which retails at £9.99 and is available from Amazon. DECEPTION AND A HEARTBREAKING DISCOVERY IN SUBURBIA
Fiona told Vanity Fur Magazine, “Having bought the puppies, which all seemed terribly above board, it was only when they got the puppies home, both were found to have numerous health issues. They thought, hang on a minute, when we picked up our ‘last puppy,’ almost certainly the next ‘last puppy’ was probably shipped in. This happened quite a while ago.”
The classic advert with a headline stating that there is only one puppy left
It would be easy to think to ourselves, ‘avoid buying puppies online’ but
