I'm with everyone else. Breeding chins from a pet store is not the way to start out. You never know what genetic history those chins might have, even though they very well may be "from a breeder." I've met the person who is the wholesaler for local pet stores in the area. He is a breeder, and has some quality chins. That said, he is not the most scrupulous breeder and adds whole corn to his chin's feed because it's "too expensive to feed them otherwise." Anyway, point is.. he wholesales to just about every pet store in the region. So, all those chins have a good chance of being related. With related chins, it's even more likely that some genetic condition may pop up because you're more likely to have two carriers with related chins.
And... despite the fact that he's a breeder and I've seen him at MCBA events so he apparently isn't too big of an idiot... I've had several people come adopt chins from me after getting a chin at the local pet store and saying it ended up dying from malo several years later. He probably is not aware of that, as he is just wholesaling... but some of his breeder chins must be carriers.
I'm not saying actual well-bred chins can never get malo - we've seen it and so have other people. But taking two pet store chins, that you basically know nothing about other than their color and general age, is just asking for problems.
If you're looking to breed, go to a show, see what quality chins look like. When I first started out, I thought my chins were great! I thought man these look pretty. Let me tell you, I still have my first two chins, both of which were pet store chins. I love them to death - but they look NOTHING like my breeder chins. They're smaller, wedgy, shorter fur, you blow in the fur it doesn't go back... I could go on. They're nowhere near breeding quality, and so they're my pets. The breeding gets left to the pedigreed chins I've gotten at shows and from quality breeders. And that's how it should be. You want to breed the best you can find, not whatever you can find.
