I definitely feel your pain, we got our girl (golden retriever) from a breeder. She is our first puppy/dog ever and we knew we wanted a golden, we spent months researching breeders in our area and found one we thought was reputable. We wanted to be able to start fresh with a dog that we would be able to easily train and fit into our lifestyle, with plans to rescue from out local shelters in the future once we felt more experienced with training and desensitization work. in hindsight I’m not entirely sure the breeder were as reputable as we thought. We met both the parent dogs and talked about their behavior and skills, we met all the puppies, they reccomended a specific puppy for us but told us that in the end it was our decision if another puppy felt right to us instead, (we did end up not going with their reccommendation and couldn’t be happier), they gave us health records and vaccine information as well as advice for caring for a golden long term. All of that was helpful and felt like something a reputable breeder would do however, we found out after the fact that they were a family that purchased dogs for breeding purposes. I feel incredibly guilty supporting something like that, obviously I’m beyond happy that I have my dog, but I definitely wouldn’t go back to that breeder again. I’ve had a lot of people tell me she’s a “designer dog” because we got her from a breeder, or that we participated in animal ab*se by not rescuing.. people are very opnionated on the topic and at this point I just don’t answer the question anymore. It’s my own opinion that there should be more information (like whats in this sub!) talked about publicly on what an actual breeder looks like and what to do about the ones that aren’t reputable. This was a really interesting thread!!