The Phone Call Every Breeder Dreads

It was a Tuesday at 6 a.m. I was in the whelping room checking on a three-day-old litter when my phone lit up. The caller ID said "Hendricks, NH." I knew that name. I'd placed a puppy with the Hendricks family fourteen months earlier. Nobody calls a breeder at 6 a.m. with good news.

The voice on the other end was barely holding together. “Margaret, it’s David. Something’s wrong with Aspen. The vet says it looks like his hips.”

Fourteen months old. OFA-cleared parents. Two generations of Excellent scores behind him. And his hips were falling apart.

I sat down on the whelping room floor while the newborn puppies squeaked in their box, and I listened, and I felt the floor drop out from under everything I thought I knew.

The First Time It Happened

You’d think after twenty-six years, I’d have a script for this. Some practiced speech that makes it easier. I don’t. Every single time the phone rings with that particular kind of bad news, it feels like the first time.

The actual first time was in 2004. A puppy named Glacier’s Winter Promise, from my second litter out of Glacier. She was fourteen months old when her owner called to say the dog was limping after exercise. X-rays showed moderate hip dysplasia in both joints.

I’d done everything I knew to do at the time. Both parents had OFA Good hips. The COI was reasonable. I’d looked at the pedigree and seen nothing that worried me.

I spent the next six months drowning in guilt. I second-guessed every decision I’d made. I considered stopping breeding entirely. My grandmother, who’d bred Collies for forty years, talked me off the ledge. “Every breeder who’s been at this long enough gets that call,” she said. “What matters is what you do next.”

What I Do Now When the Call Comes

Over twenty-six years, I’ve gotten eleven of these calls. Eleven families who trusted me with a puppy and got a phone call to a specialist instead of a lifetime of uncomplicated joy. Each one gutted me. But I’ve developed a process, not because it makes the pain less, but because the families and their dogs deserve a structured response from someone who isn’t falling apart.

Step one: I listen. I don’t interrupt. I don’t defend myself. I don’t immediately start talking about contracts or guarantees. The family is scared and heartbroken and they need someone to hear them before anything else happens.

Step two: I get the veterinary records. I ask for the vet’s name and contact information, and I ask permission to speak with them directly. I want the clinical picture from a medical professional, not filtered through the understandable panic of a family watching their dog suffer.

Step three: I consult my own veterinary team. I have a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and a veterinary geneticist I’ve worked with for over fifteen years. I send them the records and get their assessment. Sometimes a local vet’s preliminary diagnosis turns out to be less severe than feared. Sometimes it’s worse.

Step four: I take responsibility. This is the part that separates ethical breeders from the rest. I produced that dog. Whatever genetic hand that dog was dealt, I’m the one who shuffled the deck.

What Responsibility Actually Looks Like

My contract includes a health guarantee. But I want to talk about what that means in practice, because the contract is just paper. What matters is the conversation.

Some breeders offer a replacement puppy. That’s in my contract too. But let me tell you something about replacement puppies: almost nobody wants one. The Hendricks family didn’t want a different dog. They wanted Aspen to be okay.

Here’s what I actually do:

I cover diagnostic costs. The advanced imaging, the specialist consultations, the second opinions. If I produced the dog, the family shouldn’t have to pay to figure out what went wrong.

I contribute to treatment. For the Hendricks family, that meant splitting the cost of Aspen’s bilateral FHO surgery. It wasn’t cheap. But it was my genetic lines that put them in that operating room.

I offer the replacement option but I don’t push it. Some families want a second dog from me. Most don’t, at least not right away. I leave that door open indefinitely.

And I adjust my breeding program. Every health issue in a placed puppy triggers a review of the entire litter and the breeding pair. Aspen’s diagnosis meant pulling his father from my active breeding roster until I’d investigated the lateral pedigree more thoroughly. In cases where I’d had co-ownership arrangements on placed dogs, these decisions became even more complicated, which is another reason I eventually moved away from that model.

The Calls That Haunt Me Most

Hips I can deal with. Hips have surgical options, management protocols, quality of life even with imperfect joints. The calls that destroy me are the ones about things you can’t fix.

In 2017, a family in Rhode Island called about their three-year-old, a beautiful male from one of my best breedings. He’d started dragging his rear feet. The neurologist diagnosed degenerative myelopathy.

I’d tested both parents. Both were carriers. On paper, the breeding was sound, carrier to carrier gives you a 25% chance of affected offspring, and most breeders consider that acceptable as long as both parents aren’t affected themselves.

But paper doesn’t comfort a family watching their young dog lose the ability to walk.

After that call, I changed my protocol. I no longer breed carrier to carrier for DM. Period. The genetic testing conversation in this breed is evolving, and I need to evolve with it. A 25% chance of producing an affected dog might be statistically acceptable to a geneticist, but it’s not acceptable to me anymore. Not after hearing that family’s voice on the phone.

The Transparency Problem

Here’s something that makes other breeders furious when I say it: we don’t talk about our health failures enough.

Go to any breed club meeting. You’ll hear about champions and titles and beautiful litters. You will almost never hear a breeder stand up and say, “I produced a dog with severe hip dysplasia last year, and here’s what I learned from it.”

We’re afraid of each other. We’re afraid that admitting a health issue will destroy our reputation, that other breeders will use it against us, that puppy buyers will run to someone else. So we stay quiet, and the same mistakes get made over and over because nobody’s sharing data.

I publish my health results. All of them. The good and the bad. Every dog I’ve produced that developed a significant health issue is documented and available to anyone who asks. Not because I enjoy airing my failures, but because other breeders working with related lines deserve to know.

When You Can’t Find the Cause

Some calls don’t come with answers, and those are the worst ones.

In 2021, I placed a puppy who developed severe autoimmune disease at two years old. Immune-mediated hemolytic anemia. No genetic test for it. No family history. Both parents and all known relatives were healthy. It just… happened.

The family was devastated. I was devastated. And I had nothing to point to, no test I should have run, no pedigree red flag I’d missed. Sometimes genetics is a loaded gun and environment pulls the trigger and you never find out which one was which.

I paid for the dog’s treatment. I tracked down every puppy from that litter and every puppy from both parents’ subsequent breedings and asked their owners to watch for symptoms. None of the others were ever affected. It appeared to be a one-off.

But “appeared to be” isn’t the same as “definitely was,” and that uncertainty is the thing that keeps me awake. I retired both parents from breeding. Some breeders told me I was overreacting. Maybe I was. But I’d rather lose two excellent breeding dogs from my program than risk producing another dog who bleeds internally because their immune system decides to attack their own red blood cells.

What I Tell the Family

The hardest part of the phone call isn’t the diagnosis. It’s what comes after. The family wants to know if this is their fault. Did they exercise the puppy too much? Feed the wrong food? Miss a sign they should have caught?

Almost always, the answer is no. Most of the health issues that show up in well-bred dogs are genetic in origin or have a strong genetic component. The family didn’t cause it. I need them to hear that clearly and believe it, because the guilt of thinking you hurt your dog is unbearable, and it’s a guilt they shouldn’t be carrying.

Then they want to know what I’m going to do about it. Not just for their dog, but for future dogs. They want to know that their dog’s suffering means something, that it will prevent another family from going through the same thing.

That’s a promise I can make honestly. Every health issue I learn about changes how I breed. Every phone call about a placed puppy feeds back into my program. The dogs who struggle are the ones who teach me the most, and I owe it to them to learn the lesson.

The Health Clearance Illusion

I need to say something uncomfortable. Health clearances are necessary but not sufficient. They’re a floor, not a ceiling.

I’ve watched breeders wave OFA certificates like holy relics. “All health testing done!” they announce, as if checking boxes on a form means they’ve eliminated risk.

They haven’t. Nobody can.

OFA hip evaluations miss early degenerative changes. PennHIP is better but still not perfect. DNA panels test for known mutations in known genes, but there are thousands of genetic variants we haven’t identified yet. Cardiac evaluations capture a moment in time, not a lifetime trajectory.

Health testing reduces risk. It doesn’t eliminate it. And the moment you start believing your testing protocol makes your dogs bulletproof is the moment you stop being careful enough. It’s the same reason I moved away from the show ring, because titles and certificates create a false sense of security that has nothing to do with how a dog actually lives.

Aspen’s Update

David Hendricks sent me a video last month. Aspen is three years old now, two years post-surgery. He’s running in the snow with their kids, a little stiff when he gets up in the morning, but otherwise living a full, happy life.

The Hendricks family still trusts me. They’re on my list for a puppy from a spring breeding I’m planning, different lines entirely, a pairing I’ve spent two years researching specifically because of what Aspen taught me.

That’s the part nobody tells you about the dreaded phone call. It doesn’t end your relationship with the family if you handle it with honesty and accountability. Most of the families who’ve had health issues with my dogs are still in my circle. They still send photos. They still refer friends to me.

Because they know that when things went wrong, I didn’t hide. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t point to the fine print in a contract. I showed up, took responsibility, and made changes to my program so that the next litter would be better than the last.

That’s all any of us can do. Breed honestly. Test relentlessly. And when the phone rings at 6 a.m. with the worst news imaginable, pick it up.

The dogs we produce deserve at least that much.