1. You need to be patient. You should have really good nerves. You need patience the most when bitch is whelping, with some of the fellow breeders, puppy owners. Without a patience you can´t build up a sussecful long lasting breeding program. Sometimes you need to build things for generations and lack of patience would be bad news.
2. You need to be strong enough. You must believe about what you are doing. You must stand often for yourself and for your dogs. You must strongly believe about what your are doing if you want to breed good dogs in a long run. If you want to create a line and do something out of ordinary you will not give up easily. You need also strenght with your dogs as you must be the leader of the pack in all occasions.
3. You must be humble. In dog breeding you deal all the time with living and feeling things. There will be conctant dissapointments and tears. You must be humble to deal with all of that. You must learn there are things you can´t control. You must learn to live with it and to learn from that. Without a humble attitude it is not really possible to be great breeder and learn.
4. You need lot of respect. Breeding dogs is about learning the tradition of your breed and about breeding. There have been talented and intelligent people before you doing this. You need to respect that history. You need the respect to learn form the pioneers and people before you. You need also respect the mother nature and dogs themselves.
5. You need a good sence of humour. The road you have chosen will be full of surprises, challengies and disapointments. The best way to cope with all that is humoúr. There will be days nothing went as you planned. There will be moments your best furnitures or shoes has been eaten. Only way you can deal with all of this is to be able to laugh. This quality will also help you to attract right people near you. Positive state of mind is very helpful in life in general but specially so in dog breeding.
6. You must be able to share things. If you do not know how to share you will end up as a lonely breeder. Lonely breeder can only do limited things. As you share you will do co-operation. Other breeders and your best puppy buyers will take you to the next level. Dog breeding is about give and take. You will not get anything special back if you do not share something special yourself.
7. You must be ready to learn and you should love to learn. Dog breeding is about learning. You must develop your personal know how all the times. In dog breeding you will never be ready. You must learn and more your learn – more changes you have.
8. Be always yourself and about what you really are. Dogs have always straight forward attitude and they are honest. Dogs and people hate pretenders. You can get best out of your dogs only if being just yourself. This way you will gain the respect. This is best way to gain respect also from the people around you. In dog breeding you will need this.
9. As a breeder you must know how to relax. Being a dog breeder means you will meet lot of stress. Dog breeding include sleepless nights. Dog breeding means working for long hours and there will be plenty of stressful moments. You really can´t cope with that all in a long run if you do not know how to let go every now and then.
10. Dog breeder need to know how to see and keep things in right perspective. After the passionate and often very sensitive begin you need to grow up slowly and surely. Soon you must see things in right light. You need to grow up as a breeder and find the right balance between the rational thinking and feelings. Great breeder will have the right perspective toward dogs, breeding, breeders, judges and puppy bueyrs. Most of all breeder need also perspective how to deal with life, work, family, home and dogs. So that there will be a right balance.
11. A true breeder has creativity. You must be inspirational and you must have a good imagination. You need to iamgine lot of things in your mind. How will the future puppies look like. How to create vitality and how to find it. Any of that is not possible without imagination and creativity.
Being a dog breeder is not only about dogs. To be a breeder means the breeder should have sudden mental qualities to be able to manage. The World of dog breeding is very challenging indeed and it takes a lot of capasity to do it in a long run.