This campaign started, like most of them do, in a defensive crouch. It turns out the crouch may not be necessary.
In 2015 the Center for Animal Welfare Science at Purdue University surveyed 1,523 US adults about dog breeding, publishing the results in June 2016. 90% said dogs can be bred responsibly. 87% said it can be done ethically. Those are not the numbers of a public that has decided breeders are villains.
What the same survey found next is the interesting part. Acceptability collapsed with scale. Operations with one to five breeding females were most often rated “completely acceptable.” Operations with more than 300 breeding females were called “completely unacceptable” by 71% of respondents. And across three different question wordings, 65–74% said that all breeders should be regulated — not some, all.
Read those three findings together and a clear position emerges, one that almost nobody states out loud. The American public is not anti-breeder. It is anti-scale and pro-accountability. It objects to volume operations and it wants oversight that applies to everybody.
Which means the health-testing, contract-placing, take-back-for-life, two-litters-a-year preservation breeder is not arguing against public opinion. They are describing, almost line for line, what most Americans already say they want dog breeding to look like. The gap is not disagreement. It is that most people have never been shown that this kind of breeder exists.
That changes what this campaign is for. We are not here to win an argument with the public. We are here to make an introduction. It is the same conclusion we reached in Adopt — or Shop Responsibly. Both Can Be True.
One honest caveat: this survey closed in October 2015. A search in September 2026 found no comparable national survey since — so treat these as the best available figures, a decade old, rather than as today’s.
Sources
- Purdue University Center for Animal Welfare Science — national survey of 1,523 US adults, fielded October 2015, published June 2016. Figures re-verified against the Purdue white paper, 7 September 2026.