Why We Don't Kennel Our Dogs: The Guardian Home Model Explained
By Emily Scott, Rocky Road Doodles
When I first started breeding I realized that I did not want to do things the way that I had seen them done, in the industry. I wanted family raised dogs that were given the best life, from day one, and parent dogs that could live with their own family, and NOT have to be re-homed at retirement. I did not want a kennel facility where dogs were in conditions that weren’t conducive to being their healthiest, happiest selves. Healthy, happy moms raise healthy, well adjusted pups. So I started creating a program that placed every mom and dad into their own forever home. We call these, while they are part of our mom and dad program; “Guardian Homes”. This allows us to have a large, professional team, with experience and expertise, while also balancing the well being of each mom and dad, and each puppy that is born into those homes.
Our breeding dogs don’t live in kennels. They live in homes. Real homes, with families who love them, kids who play with them, couches they probably aren’t supposed to be on but absolutely are. They sleep in beds. They go on road trips. They greet visitors at the front door. They are, in every meaningful sense of the word, family pets. This is the guardian home model, and it is the foundation of everything we do. We can also be objective in our breeding decisions because we know that each dog is already home if we decide that they should be retired. They simply get spayed or neutered.
What the Guardian Home Model Actually Is
The concept is simple, even though the execution is anything but. Instead of housing our breeding dogs in a kennel facility, we place them in carefully selected guardian homes. These are families who apply to our program, go through a thorough vetting process, and agree to provide a loving, permanent home for one of our breeding dogs. The dog lives with them full-time as their family pet. When it’s time for breeding or whelping, the dog either stays and raises their pups in their own home or (if the family is not able to raise a litter there) comes back to one of our experienced “Puppy Raising Families”, and then returns home once the process is complete and pups are heading off to their new homes.
The guardian family provides the home, the daily love, the socialization. I provide the veterinary care, the health testing, the breeding expertise, and the ongoing support. When the dog retires from breeding, it stays with its guardian family permanently. No transition. No upheaval. The dog just continues living the life it has always known, spayed or neutered.
How It Works, Day to Day
Placement. Before a puppy even goes to a guardian home, I’ve spent time evaluating the family. I’m looking at their lifestyle, their experience with dogs, their home environment, and their willingness to communicate consistently. Not every wonderful family is the right fit for a guardian dog. Matching takes intention.
Daily life. Once placed, the dog lives as a normal family pet. The guardian family feeds, trains, and integrates the dog into their household. They send me updates and communicate about behavioral or health observations. There is an ongoing relationship between me and every guardian family, and that relationship requires openness on both sides.
Why This Is Better for the Dogs
I’ll be direct: a kennel is not a home, no matter how clean it is or how well the dogs are cared for. A kennel is an institutional environment. It may be sanitary and well-managed, but it is not the same as being part of a family.
Dogs in guardian homes get individual attention. They get unstructured time — the kind where you’re sitting on the couch watching a movie and the dog is curled up at your feet. They encounter other dogs, children, cyclists, delivery trucks, and all the unpredictable stimuli of real life. This is socialization in its truest form. Not a structured protocol performed for thirty minutes in a kennel, but the organic, continuous process of living as a member of a human family.
The stress difference is real. Dogs in kennel environments carry a baseline level of cortisol that dogs in home environments simply don’t. Chronic stress suppresses immune function and affects behavior. And for a breeding female, chronic stress during pregnancy directly affects the developing puppies. Research on prenatal stress in dogs shows that puppies born to stressed mothers are more likely to be fearful, reactive, and difficult to socialize later. A calm, happy, well-adjusted mother produces calm, well-adjusted puppies. It’s that simple.
Why This Is Better for the Puppies
This is the part that matters most to the families on our waitlist, and rightfully so.
Temperament is both genetic and environmental. A breeding dog’s genes determine the raw material, but the environment shapes how those genes express themselves. A genetically confident dog in a stressful kennel may become anxious, and that anxiety can be passed to puppies through epigenetic changes and through prenatal stress hormones. A genetically confident dog in a low-stress home expresses that confidence fully — and her puppies benefit from every bit of it.
Well-socialized parents also model behavior. During the early period when puppies are with their mother, they absorb information about the world from her. A mother who is relaxed around people and calm in new situations teaches her puppies, without a single training session, that the world is a safe place. That early imprint is extraordinarily powerful.
And guardian home dogs give me better breeding data. I know which dogs are patient with toddlers and which prefer a quieter household. I know which handle alone time without stress and which need more companionship. I know which are confident with strangers and which are more reserved. You simply cannot get this information from a dog that lives in a kennel, because a kennel doesn’t replicate any of the situations a pet dog actually encounters.
Why This Is Better for the Breeding Program
Here’s a truth that breeders don’t discuss often enough: you cannot accurately assess a dog’s temperament in a kennel. A kennel is an artificial environment. A dog that seems calm may be shut down. A dog that seems energetic may simply be under-stimulated. A dog that seems friendly has only been evaluated in the narrow context of handler visits and feeding time. None of that tells you how the dog will behave with a baby crawling on the floor, or when the doorbell rings for the third time in an hour, or at the vet after a twenty-minute car ride.
My guardian families are, in a real sense, my field researchers. They see each dog in every context I need to evaluate. They report back honestly, and that information feeds directly into my breeding decisions. When I choose which dogs to pair, I’m working from years of detailed, real-world behavioral data — not kennel observations alone. That is a radically different foundation for a breeding program.
What Guardian Families Get Out of It
The guardian home model isn’t a one-sided arrangement. Guardian families get a beautiful, health-tested dog from proven lines. They get breeding-related veterinary care covered by us. They get ongoing support from someone who has spent over a decade working with these breeds. And they get a dog selected not just for health and structure, but for temperament — chosen specifically because it has the qualities that make an exceptional family companion.
The dog is theirs. Not temporarily. Not on loan. The guardian agreement is built around the understanding that the dog is a member of their family first and a member of our breeding program second. When the dog retires, there’s no goodbye. There’s just a dog that has been loved every day of its life, continuing to be loved for the rest of it.
Why Most Breeders Don’t Do This
I want to address this honestly, because transparency matters.
The guardian home model is harder. It is more expensive, more time-consuming, and requires more trust, communication, and coordination than kennel breeding. When your dogs live in a kennel, you control every variable. Feeding, exercise, breeding timing — everything is centralized and efficient. You don’t coordinate with ten families to schedule health tests. You don’t build deep, ongoing relationships with guardian homes. You don’t worry about a guardian family’s travel schedule conflicting with your breeding timeline.
Kennel breeding is a logistics problem with a straightforward solution: keep all the dogs in one place. Guardian home breeding is a relationship problem that never has a simple solution, because relationships are inherently complex.
I also won’t pretend the vetting process for guardian families is trivial. I turn down more applicants than I accept. Placing a dog in the wrong guardian home affects the dog, the puppies, the program, and the families waiting for those puppies. The stakes are too high to cut corners.
So why do breeders kennel? Because it’s simpler, it scales more easily, and it costs less per dog in terms of time and coordination. I don’t think that makes every kennel breeder a bad person. But I do think it makes their dogs’ lives fundamentally different from ours, and I think that difference matters.
What This Means When You Buy a Puppy from Us
When you bring home a Rocky Road Doodles puppy, you’re getting a puppy whose mother lived as a family dog. A puppy whose father is someone’s best friend, whose favorite spot is probably the left side of the couch, who gets unreasonably excited about car rides and has opinions about which neighborhood walking route is best.
You’re getting a puppy carried by a mother who was calm, loved, and unstressed during pregnancy. A puppy whose parents were selected for breeding based on how they actually behave in a home, not how they present in a kennel run.
That is the difference. And I believe, after more than a decade of doing this, that it is the most important difference there is.
Interested in Becoming a Guardian Family?
If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking that being a guardian family sounds like something you’d love, I want to hear from you.
The ideal guardian family is committed to a loving, stable home environment. They understand that the dog will return to us periodically for breeding. They communicate openly. And they see this not as a transaction, but as a partnership — one that benefits the dog, the puppies, the families who will raise those puppies, and the future of the program.
The application process is thorough. I ask a lot of questions. I want to make sure the match is right for you and for the dog, because when it’s right, it’s an extraordinary arrangement for everyone involved.
If you’re interested, please text Gabi on 801-842-2683 and reach out. We’d love to talk.
A Final Thought
I started Rocky Road Doodles because I believe dogs deserve better than the way the breeding industry has traditionally treated them. They are not production animals. They are not breeding machines. They are living beings with emotional needs, social needs, and a capacity for love that humbles me every single day.
The guardian home model is harder than kenneling. There are days when the logistics make me want to pull my hair out, when coordinating schedules feels like solving a puzzle with moving pieces, when the easier path is genuinely tempting. But then I get a photo from a guardian family. Their dog — our dog — is asleep on the couch between two kids, or splashing through a creek on a family hike, or greeting a visitor at the door with a toy in her mouth and her whole body wagging.
And I remember why we do it this way. Because that dog is not just producing puppies. She is living a life. A full, rich, loved life. And the puppies she produces carry that life within them — in their genetics, in their temperament, in the calm confidence that comes from being born to a mother who was happy.
That is the standard I hold this program to. It’s harder. It’s worth it. And I wouldn’t do it any other way.
Emily Scott is the founder of Rocky Road Doodles, a multigenerational Bernedoodle breeding program built on the guardian home model. Learn more at rockyroaddoodles.com.