Tips for buying an English bulldog

Diana Engeszer is an English bulldog breeder with nearly 30 years of experience, and she recently shared some tips to keep in mind when buying an English bulldog.

ST. LOUIS - Thursday night on NewsChannel 5 at 10 p.m. Farrah Fazal introduced you to a military family scammed by someone trying to sell them a bargain bulldog online.

We looked into the situation further and found some tips for buying an English bulldog.

Diana Engeszer is an English bulldog breeder with nearly 30 years of experience. She runs the St. Louis English Bulldog Rescue and is president of the Board of Directors, on the Bulldog Club of America Rescue Network.

HEALTH'You want a member of your family and you want a healthy member of your family -- the best way to do that is to do some real research. Go to the Bull Dog Club of America website, which is BullDogClubofAmerica.org, go to the rescue websites which is rescuebulldogs.org and talk to more than one person.'

FINDING A BREEDER'A reputable breeder will generally not ship a puppy, you come to the breeder. I have dogs in Alaska, Washington state and every one of them came to me and then took the puppy back with them. It's very risky to ship bulldogs. The other thing you want to do is see where these bulldogs are being raised. How many bulldogs do they have? If they have a kennel full of 20 bulldogs you have a commercial breeder and the drive on a commercial breeder is money. Most of your best dogs are going to come from hobby breeders. I breed a litter a year maybe, sometimes two, I have a waiting list for my dogs.'

ADOPTION'To adopt one of my dogs is like adopting a child. I'm going to do a background check on you, going to do a home check on you, I'm going to check with your vet. I care about where these guys go and if it's all about the money then we don't care. This isn't Amazon, you can't just go. We've become very used to, we go online and we buy things. We point and we click and it's shipped to us. This is going to be a family member for hopefully at least 10 to 12 years, you really want to know who that breeder is and is that breeder going to be a resource to you -- for the life of your dog.'

GOOD BREEDERS DON'T ALWAYS HAVE PUPS'What's the breeding on those puppies, what's vet care they've received? Has a vet looked at them, what kind of congenital issues do these puppies have, those are all big issues. Your good breeders don't have puppies all the time. If you go to a website and there's a whole website of puppies for sale, run away, run away. That is someone who is commercially breeding these dogs, or brokering or importing them.'

Engeszer also says there are no bargains with bull dogs.