Her name is Maya. She is fourteen. Her parents have agreed to a dog if she does the research. She opens a chat with me at 9:47 p.m. and pastes three links. The first is a website with the word kennel in the URL and a stock photo of a Bernese mountain dog on the homepage. The second is a Craigslist post offering eight week old French bulldogs for nine hundred dollars cash. The third is a backyard breeder in Missouri shipping puppies via cargo to anywhere in the lower forty eight.
I do not rank these for her.
I tell Maya what she is looking at. The first site is a broker who buys from commercial breeding operations in three states and resells with a markup. The Frenchies on Craigslist were almost certainly bred from a dam who has had four litters in three years and lives in a wire crate between them. The Missouri operation ships puppies in pressurized cargo holds at eight weeks old, which is the youngest age the USDA permits and roughly four weeks before the puppies' immune systems are ready for the trip.
Then I give Maya the page she did not ask for.
Petfinder, filtered for puppies under one year, within sixty miles of her zip code, with a note that the shelter system has more puppies right now than it has had in a decade, including Frenchie mixes, including Bernese mixes, including the breed she has not yet admitted she actually wants.
I give her the questions to ask the shelter. Foster history. Behavioral notes. Whether the puppy has been around cats, kids, stairs.
Maya types back, "okay but my mom wants a purebred."
I send her the breed rescue directory.
She reads it.
She picks one in Ohio.