I respectfully disagree. I think my web page is a way to fight bad breeders. Here is why.
Put yourself in the place of a person interested for the first time in a Norwich terrier. If you are very lucky, you have a friend to make a recommendation. But most likely, you do not know anyone with a Norwich terrier. So you put "Norwich breeder" in your favorite search engine. When you do this with Google, you get several breeder web sites, the NTCA breed referrel page, and puppyfind.com on the very first page.
The NTCA breed referral page lists some breeders, their phone numbers, and email address. (Perhaps you spend some time looking around the NTCA web site.) But you are not interested just yet in contacting a particular breeder. So you go back to looking at the web sites of the breeders given to you by Google. Perhaps you are lucky and look at the web site of a good breeder. Perhaps you are unlucky and you look at the web site of a bad breeder. It can be hard to tell the difference. (Too bad there is not an authoritative source that rates breeders.)
Perhaps a particular web site catches your interest - for any number of reasons: location of the breeder probably being the most common.
So you next google the kennel - not to find the web site of the kennel, but to find out what others are saying about the kennel. (If we breeders do it when researching potential puppy buyers, then you had better believe that puppy buyers are doing the same thing about us. This is sometimes call "Google stalking".)
Here is where I believe a policy of ignoring bad breeders is misguided. There are no negative reviews of bad breeders for our hypothetical puppy buyer to find.
So I have put up a web page listing the web sites of all known (to me) Norwich breeders. My hope is that when Google stalking a particular breeder, a potential puppy buyer will find my site. And that the information provided on my web site and the list of other potential breeders will help that buyer make a better decision.
I am not making any value judgements on the breeders I list (other than separating - for those in the US - those who are NTCA members from those who are not). If anyone wants to suggest objective verifiable information that indicates that a breeder is good or bad, please do so and I will consider adding it to the page.
If all a puppy buyer wants is a cheap Norwich terrier, then they are going to go to puppyfind.com and (and as I write this) purchase a $750 Norwich puppy - shipping included! (Of course, the puppy is not AKC-registered, and is possibly a mix.) I sincerely doubt that my website is driving people to puppy mills. My web page currently is usually buried several pages down in the google rankings.
So am I advertising bad breeders or fighting bad breeders?
I respectively suggest that the best way to fight the puppy mills is by quality and cost - good quality and low cost. (And by quality, I believe that what pet buyers want most is a healthy dog with a good temperament.) Additionally, fight the bad breeders by documenting why they are bad and making that information available to the public.
Blair Kelly
20140321