13/09/2026
There is money in breeding dogs. We should probably talk about that.
I am going to say something that remains strangely uncomfortable in the pedigree dog world: I make money breeding dogs. Not every year to the same degree, and certainly not enough to give up my day job or justify my husband staying home, but over the past fifteen years my breeding program has regularly operated at a profit. I don't think that makes me an unethical breeder, and increasingly I think our reluctance to admit that there is an economy around dog breeding is creating problems of its own.
We have developed a peculiar culture where saying, “There is no money in breeding dogs,” or proudly explaining how much money we lose, is treated as evidence that we are doing it for the right reasons. Meanwhile, admitting that a litter made money can invite immediate suspicion. Somehow *hobby* has come to mean love and *business* has come to mean exploitation.
I don't think either assumption survives much scrutiny.
A breeder can make a substantial profit and breed exceptionally well. Another breeder can lose thousands every year and still make poor decisions for their dogs and their breed. Profit, by itself, tells me very little about someone's ethics.
What matters to me is how that profit was made. Profit should never come before the welfare of the dogs, the needs of the breed, or the long-term security of the breeding program. If money is being made by cutting health testing, compromising veterinary care, keeping too many breeding animals, moving dogs on as soon as they cease to be productive, or producing litters because the bank account needs one rather than because the mating has value, then I have an ethical problem with that.
The problem is not that money was made. The problem is what was sacrificed to make it.
There is also an uncomfortable flip side to this. Running a breeding program at a chronic loss is not necessarily evidence of good breeding. Our dogs need financial security. Caesareans happen. Specialist appointments happen. Dogs become seriously ill. Equipment breaks. Fencing needs replacing. Reproductive work can become unexpectedly expensive. Sometimes an entire breeding plan falls apart after a considerable amount of money has already been spent.
A breeder who has poured everything into the dogs but has no liquidity left to deal with an emergency has not necessarily created a more ethical situation than the breeder who deliberately maintains a healthy reserve.
Sometimes the most responsible thing sitting in a breeding program is simply money in the bank.
I also think we are remarkably good at pretending our own labour has no value. I spend somewhere between six and ten hours a week grooming dogs alone. That is before we count whelping, sleepless nights, cleaning, feeding, washing bedding, weighing puppies, socialisation, record keeping, photographs, enquiries, screening homes, paperwork and the years of support that follow a puppy out the door.
If I actually assigned a reasonable hourly rate to all of that labour, I could make an apparently profitable year look very different.
That does not mean I need to physically pay myself an hourly wage from the breeding account, and it certainly does not mean my own labour magically becomes a tax deduction. But economically, my time still has value. We readily accept that the vet, groomer, reproductive specialist, handler, web designer and kennel builder should be paid for skilled work. I am not sure why breeders have decided that our own skilled work is morally supposed to be free.
Perhaps that is part of why puppy pricing has become so distorted.
I would very much like to be making four or five thousand dollars per puppy. If someone worked out how to ethically sell Lowchen puppies for ten thousand dollars, my first thought would not be outrage. It would probably be, “How are you doing that?”
Market forces exist whether we approve of them or not. Pretending otherwise does not protect ethical breeding. In fact, I think the culture of insisting that reputable breeders should never appear to be motivated by money has sometimes left us competing on price with large-scale breeders who benefit from economies of scale that we simply do not have.
A larger operation can spread infrastructure, labour, advertising and other fixed costs across many more puppies. A small preservation breeder may be carrying expensive health testing, showing, reproductive work, stored or imported genetics, retained puppies and retired dogs across a comparatively tiny number of sales. Yet we can still feel uncomfortable charging a price that genuinely reflects what our program costs to sustain.
I don't think responsible breeders should deliberately underprice themselves simply to prove that they aren't “in it for the money”. If a breeding program can produce excellent dogs, compensate the breeder for some of their labour, maintain proper reserves, reinvest where necessary and still produce a genuine surplus, I see that as a success.
Reinvestment matters, but I don't think it means every dollar ever earned from dogs must be poured straight back into dogs. Reinvestment might be health testing, a large food order, a specialist veterinary visit, new fencing, whelping or grooming equipment, semen storage, a retained puppy or an import. It might be travelling to Crufts or Westminster, seeing dogs in person, meeting breeders and finding future stud dogs. It might be arranging collections that I hope to import years later.
Sometimes reinvestment is simply knowing that next year's predictable expenses are covered and that a significant emergency fund exists.
And once those obligations are met, I think breeders are entitled to profit.
If the dogs are secure, foreseeable costs are covered, I can deal with an emergency and there is no obvious investment being neglected, I do not believe every remaining dollar still morally belongs to the dogs. I might use it to pay the mortgage. I might take my family away. I might buy semen. I might leave it sitting in an account and enjoy being fifteen thousand dollars richer for a while.
None of those things retrospectively makes the puppies I bred less ethical.
There is another part of this conversation that pedigree breeders need to become more comfortable with, and that is the word 'business' itself.
Dogs Victoria has already warned breeders that being a Recreational Breeder under Victorian dog legislation does not automatically mean that the ATO considers your activity a hobby. Taxation is asking a different question. The ATO looks at the overall character of what you are doing: things such as repetition and regularity, profit intention and prospect, commercial sales, organisation, record keeping and whether the activity is being conducted in a business-like way.
There is no magical number of litters where someone suddenly crosses from hobby to business. But equally, we do not get to decide something is a hobby for taxation purposes simply because that word feels more comfortable.
There is some irony in this for registered breeders, because Dogs Australia and Dogs Victoria quite rightly expect us to behave professionally. We are expected to educate ourselves, keep detailed records, document breeding and health information, register dogs and litters, comply with advertising requirements, maintain traceability and deal responsibly with puppy buyers.
Those are good things. They are also some of the same characteristics that make an activity look increasingly business-like once regular commercial sales and a reasonable prospect of profit are added.
That does not mean every registered breeder needs an ABN, or that every person who breeds an occasional litter is running a business. It does mean that “but this is my hobby” is not, by itself, a tax argument.
The ATO is making an economic and taxation classification. It is not making a moral judgement about whether you are a good breeder.
I think separating those ideas matters. Professionalism is about how competently and responsibly I conduct myself. Business status is about the economic character of what I am doing. Breeding ethics are about the decisions I make for my dogs and my breed. They interact, but they are not interchangeable.
We also have a surprisingly large non-cash economy within pedigree dogs, which makes it easy to underestimate how much value moves around. Stud services have value. Frozen semen has value. Puppy swaps and reciprocal breeding arrangements have value. A puppy I retain rather than sell may not put money into my bank account, but that does not make that puppy economically worthless.
None of this means every favour between breeder friends needs to be mentally converted into an invoice. It simply means that no cash changing hands does not necessarily mean nothing of value changed hands.
The same is true of turnover. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars of puppy sales is not twenty or thirty thousand dollars of profit. Of course it isn't. Breeding has substantial expenses.
But if that amount of money has passed through our accounts, I also think we need to be candid enough to acknowledge that there is money in breeding dogs.
Pretending otherwise does not make us more ethical. It just makes it harder to have an honest conversation about where that money goes.
For me, some degree of that answer should be visible. I do not think breeders owe the public their tax returns or a forensic breakdown of every expense, but a healthy breeding program should leave evidence of investment. Health testing should be happening. Veterinary care should extend beyond the bare minimum needed to send a puppy home. Supplies are bought in bulk. Facilities require maintenance and improvement. Equipment gets replaced. Dogs are retained. Dogs retire. Genetics are preserved and sometimes new genetics are acquired.
There will be good years and there will be spectacular money pits.
Scale is where I think the ethical conversation begins to change again. I have no philosophical objection to a breeder running a moderately larger program, and in small breeds I think we sometimes need to challenge the idea that breeding as little as possible is inherently virtuous.
Purebred dogs cannot be preserved without producing the next generation. We need enough dogs to make meaningful selections, maintain genetic options and continue lines into the future.
But there is a point where scale changes the nature of the enterprise. I don't think occasionally paying someone to help clean, groom or care for dogs is morally significant in itself. Full-time staffing is different. Once an operation becomes so large that paid staff are structurally necessary simply to provide routine daily care, I think we have moved into a different set of ethical questions.
That does not automatically make the operation bad, but it does make me ask whether the economic structure has begun dictating the number of dogs and litters rather than the needs of the breeding program doing so.
And perhaps that is ultimately where I land on all of this.
I don't particularly care whether an ethical breeder made ten thousand dollars this year or fifty thousand. There is no profit figure at which I suddenly think somebody has become morally suspect. I care about the decisions that produced it. I care about whether the dogs are secure, whether the breed is better for the work being done, whether the breeder can meet their obligations when things go wrong, and whether the program can continue without constantly placing the breeder's household under financial strain.
I actually want good breeders to make money.
I want the thoughtful breeder with decades of accumulated knowledge to still be breeding ten or twenty years from now. I want the person doing excellent health testing and making careful breeding decisions to be able to afford the next generation. I want promising younger breeders to look at this world and see something they might be able to sustain, rather than an expectation that they should lose thousands of dollars every year to prove that their motives are pure.
I want preservation breeding to be possible for people who are good at it, not merely for people wealthy enough to endlessly subsidise it.
There will always be people who put money ahead of dogs. Calling those operations businesses does not offend me nearly as much as the decisions they make in pursuit of that money. But I don't think the answer is to make financial martyrdom a defining feature of ethical breeding.
I make money breeding dogs. I hope to keep making money breeding dogs. I would quite happily make more.
What I will not do is make that money at the expense of my dogs, my breed, or the future of my breeding program.
To me, that is the ethical distinction that matters.
