I have two stories to tell...yes two...I had two children, so we decided to buy them each a puppy. We wanted two close to the same age, so that the puppies could play together. We bought Layla first. Once we decided on getting boxers, we started looking everywhere for them. Let me tell you , it wasn't easy...they are not exactly easy to find in Illinois. We looked and looked and finally found a listing in the classifieds of a Chicago newspaper. They only wanted $450 for the pups, and I thought "wow, what a cheap price for a boxer". So off we went...little did we know, we would be ending up at a BYB. We didn't know any better at the time, and when we got there, he seemed nice enough. He had the puppies in a cage on his front porch, and instead of knowing that they should have a sire and dam on site, I thought that it was normal to have them in a pen by themselves, that meant that they had been weaned. He kept bragging on this one female boxer that he had, so we asked to see her. He went into a barn to get her, and brought her out to us. He wouldn't let us into the barn where he kept her. That should have told us something, as now looking back, I believe he had several litters of pups in there that he did not want us to see. Anyway, Layla looked so sad in her cage, and she was really small, I couldn't bear to leave her there, so we took her home. Before we left, he let us know that he fed the litter plenty of pork to fatten them up, so she should be full for the ride home. PORK, to a six week old puppy (yes, I know, much too young). We brought her home,and for five months everything was hunky dory. At five months old, she started looking skinny and her coat was dull, so I took her to the vet. The first vet I saw told me that boxers often go through a growth spurt at that age, and that was probably her problem. Well, after a week of her starting to look skinnier, and her coat looking extremely dull, I took her to see a different vet, who ran a urinalysis and blood sample on her. What came back horrified us and our vet. The puppy was in kidney failure, and there was nothing we could do. Her kidneys weren't formed right from the time she was born, so once she got so big, they just couldn't keep up and quit working. We were given three weeks at the most for her, and were told to make her as comfortable as possible. Two weeks later, we had her put down, as she had deteriorated to the point where she wouldn't eat or play, and she started to smell from the toxins in her blood, as her kidney's weren't functioning. I took a look at her papers later that night, and to my horror....the dam's first litter was registered in the AKC Stud book in 11/03. She would have had to have had a litter a couple of months before that for that litter to be registered in the stud book in 11/03. Layla was born in 04/04. This meant that the dam had a litter, and when she went back in to heat the next time, they bred her again, and she had Layla's litter. Which is probably the reason her kidneys did not form correctly, as they bred her in back to back heats. Which even I know you should never do, and I don't even breed. A definate lack of common sense on that BYB's part.
Story number 2: I was looking online and found an ad advertising "rare black boxers". (Yes, I know...no such thing...but I didn't know any better). I thought I found a steal for $750. I put the deposit down on him when he was three weeks old. Through the next four weeks, we proceeded to get pictures of him at least once or twice a week. He was a gift for my six year old son, so my son was taking these pictures to school to show his friends, he was so excited. We went and got him at seven weeks old (again, too young), he looked nothing like the bouncy puppy in the pictures, he was all skin and bones. I mean you could literally count his ribs. He was still nursing off of his mom. I again, felt sorry for him, and brought him home anyway, as we had Layla at this time, and we had fattened her up just fine, so I would do it for this puppy too. When we got him home, we couldn't get him to eat, or even drink water, and I resorted to giving him water through a baby syringe straight into his mouth. The next morning, my BF woke me up and told me I needed to come and look at the puppy. He was laying on his side, and his breathing was very labored. I called the vet, and took him right in (on a Sunday, mind you this is not inexpensive). The vet told me that the pup was too far gone, and that I needed to call her and get my money back, that by law she had to give me my money back as long as it was within 72 hrs. of the purchase. I went home and called the BYB. She was a vet tech for a local zoo, so she asks me if I had a needle and syringe, and suggests that I try to inject fluid straight into his veins to try and hydrate him. She was very snotty at first, but changed once I told her he had already been to the vet, and was told that she had to give my money back (which she did, that same week). I told her if she wanted, I could bring him back to her, which she said no, and that she was going to take the other puppy that was still there to the vet, as he was acting the same way Rocky did (which led me to believe that she knew he was sick, she just hoped to unload him onto us so that she didn't have to pay that vet bill. ) Come to find out, the pups had coccidia. The other pup got on antibiotics, while my six year old son got to bury his dog. The puppy survived until late in the afternoon, and when he passed, my BF dug the hole, and my son insisted on burying him himself, since "he was my dog, Daddy, I'll do it". I will never forget that sight as long as I live. That night, we went online and found Champ, and our wonderful breeder who has also given us Haylee and Twix. The moral to the story is...do your research. If something doesn't seem right, it's probably not.
