Should You Offer a Mobile Stud Service? The Pros and Cons

This comes up a lot among handlers, so here is the honest version from someone who does it. Going mobile has done more for my reach than anything else I have tried. It has also had me sitting in London traffic at rush hour twice in the same day.

First, is your stud actually up to it?

Before anything else, be straight with yourself about your dog.

Will he perform, reliably, with a receptive girl? If he is hit and miss, do not offer mobile. You will waste your own day, and more importantly you will waste the customer's, and she may be at the only point in her season where it was going to work.

If he is reliable, the rest of this is worth reading. If he is not, that is the thing to sort out first.

The reach is the obvious benefit

You stop competing only with the handlers in your own area. That is the whole of it, really, and it changes the kind of bookings you get.

The one most handlers miss: everyone local is related to you

This is the argument I would not have appreciated until it happened to me.

If your dog does well locally, he will eventually be behind a good share of the dogs around you. Reggie, my red toy poodle, was a brilliant stud at his peak. Great litters, passed on his temperament, and very popular. I kept Roger, Charlie and Ralphie back from litters he sired to my girl Lara.

Which means all three of them are related to Reggie, and so are a lot of the girls locally. People check how closely related they are, quite rightly, and find they cannot use any of mine. I got away with it because I also have Waffle, who is unrelated, but it could easily have been a real problem.

Turn that round and you have the case for going mobile. A stud who does well in one area ends up saturating it. The demand that creates is for blood from somewhere else, and the only way to serve it is to travel, or to have people travel to you.

I have had a handler book me for a five and a half hour drive each way, an eleven hour round trip, for exactly this reason. They wanted a line in their area that was not already there.

And some dogs simply do not travel

Car sickness is more common than people think, and a girl who has thrown up for an hour and a half is not in the best frame of mind to meet a strange dog. Owners will often tell you this is why they booked a mobile handler, and there is nothing worse than cleaning sick out of your car either.

How I price it

Charge for your time and your fuel, properly. This is what I do, and it has held up well:

• My standard stud fee covers anywhere up to 30 minutes from my address.
• Every additional 30 minutes of travel adds £50.
• That runs up to about three hours.
• Past three hours I quote for the job, because it is a full day.

That last point is the one handlers forget. A full day away is not just fuel. If you stand more than one dog, every one of them is off the board while you are out, and you cannot take another booking that day. Price it as the day it actually is.

Now the cons, and they are real

If you do not like driving, this is not for you. An eleven hour round trip is not even the longest day I have had.

One day went like this. Home to London, three and a half hours. London up to Middlesbrough. Back down to London again. Then home. Plus stops along the way, because the dogs need them whatever the diary says.

If you know the map you will have spotted the problem: I drove past my own house twice. And I hit London at both rush hours, which was the part that really hurt. Sitting still with dogs in the back, watching the clock, on a day that still had hundreds of miles left in it.

That is the day to picture when you are deciding whether this is for you, not the eleven hour one. The eleven hour one is fine. It is the days where the bookings land in an order that makes no geographical sense at all, and you take them anyway, because the girls are ready and they are not going to wait while you plan a tidier route.

You have to be genuinely flexible. Plenty of breeders are fertility testing, which means the clinic gives them the go at short notice and you need to be able to move. That is fine in principle. It is less fine when the go comes through and it is a four hour round trip starting now.

Traffic. I spend a lot of time sitting in it, and you cannot price for it reliably because you never know which days will be bad.

And the mileage. It goes on your vehicle at a rate that will surprise you, and that is a real cost even if it does not arrive as a bill.

So is it worth it?

For me, yes, and a lot of that is simply that I like to drive. If you do not, be honest with yourself about it, because no amount of extra bookings makes up for dreading every one of them.

The short test is three questions. Is your dog reliable? Can you drop everything at short notice? Do you mind being in the car for hours at a time? Three yeses and mobile will widen your reach more than anything else you do. One no, and it will wear you down.

A note about Reggie

It is a sad day when you retire one of your boys.

Reggie is eleven now and his working days are behind him, but he still comes with me on matings for the company. He is a very active boy still, no health problems to speak of beyond poor teeth, which is common enough in toy poodles.

He did more for this business than any dog I have had, and he is the reason I needed to start travelling in the first place.