As a new breeder in business, you have advertised, inquiries are being made and you are ready to set up visiting appointments. The manner in which the puppies are presented to strangers in your home will have a vast influence on your placements. Cottage or castle, how your home is kept is important, indicative to prospective clients of the pride you have. If junk is found lying about the yard, prospective buyers could assume this sloppiness extends to the care of your matron and puppies. There is a difference between the normal household clutter of a family and slovenliness. A neat appearance is important, indicative of caring.

Making sound puppy placements is time-consuming hard work. There is far more to making good placements than merely allowing prospective clients to view puppies randomly running around the yard. You may find that for many people this will be their first experience with a purebred registered dog. These people may not understand what "papers" are, or their value, but they do know that they want their dog to have them.

Prepare an orderly presentation of items to cover with your visitors. You need to devote adequate time to each visiting family, planning their visits at least two hours apart. Photographs of the mother and father, including win pictures taken at shows, should be among your items.

Have a list of necessary articles that a family needs to welcome a puppy into its home. This list should include complete feeding instructions, an inoculation record of shots already given, those due and when and a copy of the puppies' pedigree for each client to keep. It is important for visitors to have a copy of the litter's pedigree, illustrating illustrious ancestors for no less than three generations. Pedigree forms are available through pet suppliers and feed stores for a very nominal sum.

Pedigrees can also be obtained through the American Kennel Club and through professional pedigree services. These services may be found advertised in the back portion of any national dog publication. Services need the registered names and numbers of the sire and dam, and the numbers in parentheses following their names, on their individual registration forms in order to make up a pedigree.

The numbers in parentheses following the sire's and dam's names are the dates on which these dogs first appear in the stud books. These records, while kept by the AKC, are also for sale through their offices. Every registered dog that has sired or whelped a litter is automatically entered in this historical record, providing the litter has been registered with the American Kennel Club. Pedigree services, subscribing to the periodically published stud books, are able to trace accurate pedigrees through the numbers in parentheses.