The dog seller dilemma - the best compromise

As a veterinary doctor people believe you should have the best source of puppies to sell where others expect you to have a lot of clients waiting to buy puppies and dogs. I was somehow pushed to give in and become a puppy seller by sourcing from the best sources I could get. As I grew in the business of selling dogs I encountered many challenges associated with this business. Some of these challenges made me hate the business but majority of the outcome was very rewarding in terms of the “good name” and additional cash which is largely passive.

One of the challenges vexed me so much that I sat down to use my computer programming skills to build this site called fairvet.com. This site was born because a client of mine had dogs that where not pure Caucasian breeds and when they had puppies. The puppies where very difficult to sell and on top the man kept the price so high at one hundred and twenty thousand naira (#120,000) for a puppy I will not even pay twenty thousand naira for. They were seven of them. I tried not to lose this client by contacting people to buy. I also will not hesitate to tell you that they were not pure Caucasian puppies.

The client ended up giving out five of the puppies and kept two. The bad thing is that he kept reminding me about it. The thought of that experience disturbed me for two weeks because it was my first bad experience. The extended thought led me to write this website and the first thing I included in it is dog/puppy sale. I started to refer my clients to the website when they have puppies to advertise and sell them themselves.

The second one is that one of my clients asked me to source for a pure bullmastiff puppy for him and paid into our company account a sum of one hundred thousand naira (#100,000). We sourced the puppy and got the puppy. The papers with the dog showed that the dog had been vaccinated with the first shot of Distemper vaccine (DHLPP).  The client was in Bayelsa and asked that we board the puppy until he comes back to Abuja. We were waiting for the puppy to be due for his next vaccination, one week later the dog became sick and refused to eat and eventually we discovered the puppy was down with Parvo-enteritis which should not be if he was correctly vaccinated. The puppy died eventually but I had shown the client the puppy physically before we lost it while managing the condition. The client insisted we must pay his money complete.

There are a lot of stories with selling dogs which I’m sure you might be familiar with. The question is: who bears the cost associated with dog sale? Who bears the risk of death of a puppy sourced? Who pays for the phone calls during sourcing of a puppy? Who bears the cost of transport for a puppy sourced and maybe the client doesn’t like the puppy?

In my experience, people go to our website and call me to ask for a puppy and I source the puppy waiting for the buyer and the buyer is never coming with his or her phone switched off. You end up keeping the owner of the puppy stranded and in most cases you pay for the puppy’s transport back. This is spending without even seeing a buyer. Sometimes you decide to buy puppies and keep hoping to sell them and these puppies will stay longer than expected and someone will want to buy the puppy below the cost price.

On the other side many breeders get into problems when they receive excessive demand for a puppy litter which they have few of. These guys end up buying from other litters with less quality than the ones they had just to make sales. The wrong thing is that they still sell it at same price as the high quality.

The most annoying one is when someone contacts you to send a puppy from Abuja to Lagos and if he likes the puppy he will then pay via bank transfer. Who will bear the cost of the transport? Who will take the puppy to his house in Lagos? In most cases they ignore that aspect and concentrate on the initial price of the puppy.

I have seen and been told so many stories about the dynamics of puppy sales in Nigeria and I have come to understand the real problem with the market. And that basic problem is ORGANIZATION. There is no regulation of the market. In Nigeria, someone can sell dogs to you on the road and simply disappear and never to be seen. You will not be able to contact the seller again. Many puppies are sold with papers from people who are not vets. Most of these papers are not branded to enable the buyer contact the vet for further information. 

Many sellers sell puppies and don’t even realize that they did not even make profit even when they sold the dog double the price they bought it. Many sellers tend to engage in various unethical practices like vaccinating the puppies themselves without consulting a veterinary surgeon. Many also lie to buyers about the pedigree of the puppies just to sell. Some sellers even sell sick puppies and pretend they were fine.

I have to conclude by saying that it is important for the seller to always inform the buyer that the puppy is a living thing and requires special care during shipping or transportation and therefore requires financial commitment from the buyer no matter how small. If the market was organized I would recommend that a form be filled by the buyer stating the kind of breed he desires and other information with some financial commitment to enable the seller source the breed without fear of spending money without commitment. And the puppy should be given to the client right away with an advice to see a veterinary doctor immediately. I guess there should be an association for puppy sellers were the sellers will fashion out modality or processes for selling, just like real estate agents. I heard that Jos dog breeders have an association and that is a welcome development.