Recently I discussed how I finally accepted decided that the Pembroke Welsh corgi was the breed for me. You can read about that here. Once that was done, it was time to find my puppy.
So I don’t know if this was clear in my other post, because my brain separates these things out when they’re really overlapped. I started looking at dog breeds during the time that I was fostering Eleanor, and I knew I wasn’t a good fit to be her forever home, but events in my life had developed in such a way that I knew I wanted a dog. At the time I finally landed on a corgi, she was still with me.
Then she got adopted for the first time. I had a gut feeling that it wasn’t going to be the right home for her, and that made it extremely hard to say goodbye. But I told the rescue she could always, always come back to me if it didn’t work out. And I said goodbye to her.
And then I went home and started looking for corgi breeders. I know now that it was a bit of a grief response, but it didn’t end up being a bad thing.
I’m still planning to tell Eleanor’s full story one day, but as I tell the rest of these events, know that I was picking her up exactly one week after her adoption because it hadn’t worked out. Then after another month or so, she got adopted by that wonderful family, and I knew it was going to be permanent. Anyway, I probably won’t mention this again, so just know these timelines were all overlapped. 2020 was a weird and chaotic year.
Contacting Breeders
I could probably go back and piece together what order I contacted all of these breeders in, but instead I’m just going to talk about them from not-a-good-fit to exactly-what-I-was-looking-for.
Growing up, when my parents brought home a purebred puppy, they always went through exceptionally good breeders, and it showed in the behavioural and physical health of our dogs. So I knew that getting a good puppy started with finding a good breeder.
But at first I did something I would now never recommend, which was googling “[insert breed] breeders in [my state].”
Yeah, you could get some really good breeders, but the search results will be diluted with less good breeders and even outright scams. People who are approaching it as a business are slightly more likely to be good at SEO and all that.
Trust Your Gut!
I found a breeder in my state. Her website was overwhelming without being very informative at all, and looking back, I was in the peak of grieving over Eleanor and some other personal matters, and so I missed all the red flags that would make me cringe now. I just really wanted a puppy. So I reached out to her through email.
Her response to me was a long, copy-pasted email. Which is fine, I understand that particularly during that point in the pandemic, breeders were receiving floods of inquiries, and having a standard response is smart. But the contents felt very sales-y to me. The very first paragraph was about coat colour preferences and what each of her females could produce. Then she detailed the puppy-buying process. Just to be on the waitlist required a $100 non-refundable deposit. Before she even had a puppy for you. It could be transferred to future litters, but never refunded. On her website and in the email, there was very little information about her (quite numerous) parent dogs.
Something I didn’t catch at the time was that some of her breeding stock were merle. I didn’t even see that, because as I said, I didn’t care about coat colour. I knew that Pembroke Welsh corgis do not come in merle. What I didn’t know is that people are selling “merle” Pembrokes by mixing other breeds in, usually Aussies or Cardigans.
If you’re going to mix breeds to get a fancy colour and you’re not completely transparent that this is what you’re doing—and she wasn’t, no where on the website or the email did it mention that those particular dogs were not Pembroke Welsh corgis—that’s not exactly honest. But as I said, even though I knew Pembrokes didn’t come in merle, I wasn’t thinking to be on the lookout for merle corgis sold as Pembrokes, because I didn’t know anyone was doing that.
I left that email in my inbox. Because I didn’t see the red flags, I didn’t write this breeder off completely, but the transactional nature of the whole thing did not have me excited to get a puppy from her, and I just didn’t like the vibe I got.
Not Just a Good Breeder—the Right Breeder for Your Needs
Next I’ll talk about a breeder who I do believe is a good breeder, but wasn’t the right fit for me. This one came through word of mouth. She breeds beautiful corgis that are successful in conformation showing, and her kennel name appears in a lot of pedigrees. I reached out to her through email, and she asked me to call her.
On the phone, she asked me why I wanted a corgi. I was excited for that question. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t just calling her because I thought corgis were cute. I had given this a lot of thought, and knew I would be able to give one of her puppies an amazing, adventure-filled life.
I told her a very condensed version of the story I gave you. When I mentioned that I enjoyed being able to walk with my foster off-leash (only in areas I knew would be safe, of course) she told me that if I ever let one of her corgis off leash, I would never see it again! The second the leash was unclipped, they’d take off running and never look back. She said her dogs were well-trained, and it wasn’t a training issue. It would just never happen. I told her if that was the case, off-leash walking isn’t a requirement for me.
But in the back of my mind, that just seemed so strange. She knew her breed and her dogs better than I did, obviously. However, we weren’t talking about a hound or a terrier. It seemed to me like it would be such a liability around livestock to have a dog that you had zero control over. And if you were on a cattle drive and your dog just took off into the great blue yonder never to be seen again… Well, that would put you in the soup! So why would the Welsh breed these dogs for centuries if they couldn’t be relied upon off leash?
She asked if I had questions for her, and I asked her if her corgis had high herding instinct. I did want that bossiness, intelligence, obsession over detail, and all the other traits that come with herding breeds (because I’m crazy, clearly.) But since I wouldn’t be really working my dog, I didn’t want too high of instinct either. She answered me honestly, bless her, that the instinct had been all but bred out of the lines she used. She said that occasionally she would get a puppy who might be able to do some herding, but no one is coming to her to get a working ranch dog. “What I can promise you is an absolutely beautiful corgi.”
She invited me to come out and see her dogs, and I told her I wasn’t quite ready but I would get back to her. Even though I’m confident she’s a wonderful breeder, the more I thought about it, the more it just wasn’t what I was looking for. I had seen pictures of the early dogs in the breed, and I loved how rugged and work-ready they looked. They were so different from corgis today. I also love the type that you see in the show ring now, but if that had been achieved at the expense of any kind of herding instinct, it saddened me a bit. Corgi or curgi is closely related to the word “cur.” They are at their heart a working dog. That ability should be part of what makes a corgi a corgi, right?
Okay, I intended to make this all one post, but we’re over 7k words and I still haven’t gotten to choosing my breeder and being matched with the right puppy. So… Part two coming soon!
Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a lovely day!
