Dogs for Sale
Browse puppies and dogs from breeders across the United States, with photos, prices and the seller's own details on every listing.
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Buying dogs: what to look at
Most of what tells you a puppy has been raised well is visible in the first thirty seconds of watching it move around a room, and almost none of it is the part shown in photographs. Everything below is what to look at before you pay a deposit.
Watch it move before you pick it up
Ask to see the puppy walk across the room and watch the back legs. A well-raised, well-fed puppy is springy and slightly ridiculous: it overshoots, it sits down abruptly. What it does not do is limp, hop, sway at the back end, or move stiffly after standing up. A puppy kept somewhere too small to run often moves as though it has not worked out how yet, and that is worth asking about rather than ignoring.
Ask when it came off the mother, as a date
Not an age. Ages get rounded up in conversation and dates do not. Anything under eight weeks deserves a conversation, and not because the puppy cannot eat: the fortnight either side of eight weeks is where most of the bite inhibition and social learning happens, and a puppy that left at five weeks usually shows it later in ways that have nothing to do with food.
Take some of the food home
Ask what it is eating and how many times a day, and leave with some of it. Changing food and changing house in the same week is the most reliable way to have a bad first weekend, and the loose stool that follows gets blamed on the breeder about as often as it gets blamed on the change.
Two questions worth asking out loud
“Has this one had anything wrong with it?” A breeder who raised the litter remembers, and the honest answer is usually small and specific: this one had a slow start, that one had a course of treatment at three weeks. That specificity is reassuring, not alarming. Then: “what happens if my vet finds something in the first week?” Every good breeder has an answer ready. What the answer is matters less than whether it exists.
More on choosing a seller and reading a listing on the PetListings blog.