In 1998, the year before I bred my first litter, I drove eleven hours to Wisconsin to spend a weekend with a woman named Dorothy Kessler. She'd been breeding White Swiss Shepherds since the breed barely had a name in North America. She was seventy-two years old, blunt as a hammer, and she told me within the first hour that I had no business breeding dogs.
She was right. I had a Cornell degree and a beautiful imported bitch and I thought that was enough. Dorothy looked at me over her reading glasses and said, “A degree tells me you can read. It doesn’t tell me you can breed.”
That weekend changed the trajectory of my entire program. Not because Dorothy taught me everything I needed to know. She didn’t. But because she taught me the most important thing: I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
The Mentorship That Shaped Me
My grandmother, who bred working Collies for forty years, was my first mentor. She taught me to love dogs and respect what they can do. But she worked with a different breed in a different era, and when I started with White Swiss Shepherds, I needed someone who understood the specific challenges of this breed’s genetics, temperament, and tiny gene pool.
Dorothy had been at it for three decades when I found her. She’d imported dogs from Switzerland and Germany when most Americans had never heard of the breed. She’d navigated the politics of breed recognition, fought for health testing standards, and made every mistake I was about to make.
She was also brutally honest about those mistakes. The first time I visited her kennel, she walked me through her dogs and told me what was wrong with each one. Not just the health issues, but the breeding decisions that produced them. This male had too much angulation because she’d chased a show fad in the early ’90s. That female had a soft temperament because she’d prioritized coat quality over nerve strength. A retired stud had thrown puppies with entropion because she hadn’t researched the lateral pedigree thoroughly enough.
The Lesson in Honesty
I'd never heard a breeder talk like that. Every breeder I'd met at shows presented their dogs as perfect specimens of the breed. Dorothy stood in her kennel and catalogued her failures like a scientist reviewing data. No defensiveness. No excuses. Just clear-eyed assessment of what went wrong and why.
"If you can't look at your own dogs honestly," she told me, "you'll never improve your program. You'll just keep making the same mistakes and calling them successes."
What a Good Mentor Actually Does
Over the next seven years, until Dorothy passed in 2005, she mentored me through my first four litters. She didn’t tell me what to do. She asked questions that forced me to think.
When I showed her the pedigree for my planned first breeding, she didn’t say it was a bad match. She asked, “What’s the coefficient of inbreeding?” I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me. She said, “Figure it out, then call me.” That sent me down a rabbit hole that fundamentally changed how I approach genetic planning for every breeding.
When my first litter went wrong, with two puppies dead and structural issues in three others, she didn’t coddle me. She said, “Now you know what a bad breeding looks like. Learn from it or quit.” Then she spent four hours on the phone with me analyzing what went wrong, where the pedigree had warned me if I’d known how to read it, and how to avoid the same catastrophe with my next litter.
When I was ecstatic about a beautiful puppy from my second litter, she asked, “What’s his temperament like under pressure?” I didn’t know because I hadn’t tested it. She told me to test it before I decided he was worth breeding from. He wasn’t. His nerves were soft, and I would have missed it completely without Dorothy’s question.
A good mentor does three things:
They prevent mistakes you don’t know you’re about to make. Not by hovering over your shoulder, but by asking the right questions at the right time. Dorothy had an almost uncanny ability to identify the blind spots in my thinking before they became problems.
They share their failures honestly. This is rare and invaluable. Most breeders will tell you about their champions. Few will tell you about the litter that went wrong, the breeding decision they regret, or the dog they should never have used. Dorothy told me all of it. Every failure she shared saved me from making the same one.
They push you to be better than comfortable. Dorothy never let me settle. When I was satisfied with a litter, she’d ask what could have been better. When I thought I’d learned enough about genetics, she’d send me a research paper that proved I hadn’t. She held me to a standard I wouldn’t have set for myself.
The Mentorship Crisis in Breeding
Dorothy died in 2005. Her kennel was dispersed. Her knowledge, decades of it, died with her. I had seven years of her guidance, but there was so much more she could have taught me.
This is happening everywhere in the breeding world. The experienced breeders, the ones who’ve been at it for thirty, forty, fifty years, are aging out. Some are retiring. Some are dying. And they’re not being replaced at anywhere near the same rate.
The reasons are complicated. Breeding is expensive, emotionally grueling, and increasingly under attack from animal rights organizations and well-meaning but uninformed public sentiment. Fewer young people are willing to take it on. And the ones who do often can’t find mentors because the experienced breeders are either too busy, too distrustful of newcomers, or too burned out to invest in the next generation.
The result is a generation of new breeders who are learning from the internet instead of from experienced hands. They’re reading Facebook groups instead of spending weekends in kennels. They’re watching YouTube videos instead of helping whelp litters at 3 a.m. with someone who’s done it a hundred times.
What Gets Lost
You can't learn to read a dog's movement from a video. You can't learn to evaluate a newborn puppy's viability from a blog post. You can't learn how to handle the emotional devastation of losing a puppy from an online forum. These things require hands-on experience under the guidance of someone who's been there. And we're losing the people who've been there faster than we're developing replacements.
My Other Mentors
Dorothy was the most important, but she wasn’t the only one. Over twenty-six years, I’ve had several people who shaped specific aspects of my program.
Dr. Sarah Chen, a veterinary geneticist at Cornell, became my genetics mentor after Dorothy’s death. She’s the one who taught me to think about breeding in terms of population genetics rather than individual pairings. “You’re not just breeding two dogs,” she told me. “You’re affecting the breed’s gene pool. Every decision you make ripples outward.” That perspective shaped my decision to prioritize outcrossing over line breeding and to retire popular sires before they dominated the regional gene pool.
Robert Halloran, a retired police K-9 handler who transitioned to civilian dog training, became my temperament mentor. He’s the one who taught me that evaluating temperament requires structured testing, not just casual observation. He designed the modified Volhard protocol I still use, and he evaluates every litter I produce. His outside perspective keeps me honest in a way that evaluating my own dogs never could.
And there was Mary Blackwood, a Labrador breeder from New Hampshire who mentored me on the business side of breeding. Contracts, buyer communication, return policies, the logistics of running a program that’s sustainable long-term. She taught me that turning away a family with cash in hand isn’t just an emotional decision; it’s a business decision that protects your reputation, your dogs, and your own mental health.
Each of these people gave me something I couldn’t have gotten from a book or a website. And each of them invested years in me, not because they had to, but because they believed the breed was worth protecting through the next generation of breeders.
How to Find a Mentor
New breeders ask me constantly how to find a mentor. It’s the right question, but most people go about it the wrong way.
Don’t start by asking for a puppy. The fastest way to alienate an experienced breeder is to approach them as a buyer who also wants guidance. They’ll see you as a customer, not a student. Instead, offer to help. Show up at their events. Volunteer to clean kennels, stack firewood, drive to a vet appointment. Demonstrate that you’re willing to invest time before you ask them to invest theirs.
Look for honesty, not fame. The breeder with the most champions isn’t necessarily the best mentor. Some of the best breeders I know have never finished a champion, especially since many of us have stepped away from the show ring as our priorities evolved. Look for someone who talks openly about their mistakes, who can articulate why they made specific breeding decisions, and who treats their dogs as more than inventory.
Be prepared to hear things you don’t want to hear. Dorothy told me my first breeding plan was going to produce a disaster. I did it anyway, and she was right. A good mentor will challenge your ideas, question your assumptions, and sometimes flat-out tell you you’re wrong. If you can’t handle that, you’re not ready for mentorship, and you’re not ready for breeding.
Commit for the long term. Mentorship isn’t a weekend seminar. Dorothy invested seven years in me. Robert Halloran has been evaluating my litters for fifteen years. These relationships take time to develop and time to bear fruit. If you’re looking for quick answers, the internet has plenty. If you’re looking for wisdom, find a mentor and be patient.
The Mentorship Exchange
Good mentorship isn't one-directional. Dorothy learned things from me too, mostly about the newer genetic tests and digital tools that were emerging in the early 2000s. I helped her set up a database for tracking health outcomes across her litters. She taught me to read a pedigree. I taught her to use a spreadsheet. The best mentoring relationships are partnerships, not hierarchies.
What I Owe Forward
Dorothy mentored me. I owe it to her, and to the breed, to mentor others.
I currently work with three aspiring breeders at various stages. One has been with me for four years and is preparing for her first litter next spring. Another is two years in and still deciding whether breeding is something she wants to commit to. The third is brand new, still learning to read pedigrees and understand health clearances.
I don’t charge for mentorship. I never will. What I ask for is honesty, commitment, and a willingness to put the dogs first even when it’s expensive and heartbreaking.
I also ask them to watch me fail. I invite them to my whelping room when things go well and when they don’t. They’ve seen healthy litters born without complications, and they’ve seen me lose a puppy at four days old and sit on the floor crying. They’ve been there when the phone rings with bad news about a placed dog, and they’ve watched me navigate the conversation that follows.
Because that’s what Dorothy did for me. She didn’t show me a highlight reel. She showed me the whole picture: the beauty and the brutality, the wins and the losses, the dogs who made her proud and the dogs who kept her up at night. That honesty is what prepared me for the reality of breeding, and it’s what I owe the breeders who come after me.
For Experienced Breeders
If you've been breeding for twenty years or more, you have knowledge that will die with you if you don't share it. Find a young breeder. Take them under your wing. Yes, it's time-consuming. Yes, some of them won't follow through. But the ones who do will carry your influence forward into dogs who haven't been born yet. That's a legacy worth more than any championship title.
The Breed’s Future Depends on This
I worry about the future of ethical breeding. Not because of legislation or public opinion, though those pressures are real. I worry because the knowledge pipeline is breaking down.
Dorothy knew things about White Swiss Shepherd bloodlines that no database can capture. Which dogs from the 1980s imports produced calm temperaments three generations later. Which Swiss kennels had hidden health issues that never made it into official records. Which pedigree combinations looked good on paper but consistently produced soft nerves. That kind of institutional knowledge, built over decades of personal observation, is irreplaceable.
When Dorothy died, most of that knowledge went with her. I got seven years’ worth. The breed needed seventy.
This is why I’m writing this article. Not because I think I have all the answers, I’m still learning every single day. But because someone needs to say out loud what most breeders only whisper: we are losing our elders faster than we are training their replacements, and the dogs are the ones who will pay for it.
Find a mentor. Be a mentor. The breed depends on both.
My grandmother’s last piece of advice to me, given a month before she passed, was this: “Everything I know about dogs, I learned from someone who came before me. And everything they knew, they learned from someone before them. Don’t break the chain, Margaret.”
I haven’t. And I don’t intend to.