End of Life is usually at their homes – not in a nursing home or hospice – however, not to say in some cases they might use such a facility.

Unlike some “English” think – the Amish do use doctors and medical facilities when needed. But they live a “healthy lifestyle” and are perhaps healthy overall than the general population.

Unfortunately, they also suffer from certain conditions and diseases related only to their heritage (mainly European).

may also be of interest to people reading this post.

Go the Amish

First of all, if anyone is interested in learning more about the Amish, I recommend reading Plain Secrets by Joe Mackall, which is a great book that neither idolizes or condemns Amish life, just tells it how it is.

Amish sects vary wildly, even within individual counties. I live in a very conservative Amish area in Ohio…the buggies with windshields that you see on TV? Not here. You won’t even see the orange slow vehicle signs on their buggies. Don’t be quick to lump all the Amish together, because they are very different.

I have never, ever heard of an Amish puppy mill. In my experience, the Amish don’t baby their animals…it is a farm community after all, and the animals work for their keep…but at least in my area you don’t hear about Amish animal cruelty cases either. Animals are used for work or for food, but it doesn’t benefit anyone to be cruel to them.

As far as money…the Amish tend to be loaded because they keep their expenses down and they work their fingers to the bone. I did have to deny a home equity loan to an Amishman because the property did not meet our bank’s collateral standards for equity loans. (He had wanted to build a greenhouse). Since his property did not have running water or electricity, underwriting wouldn’t approve the loan. So while the Amish save on property taxes by essentially living on “undeveloped” property, they sometimes have trouble getting financing if they need it. Don’t get me started about opening bank accounts for people without tax ID numbers or any photo ID! Thankfully, most of the younger Amish folks are starting to realize that ID and social security numbers are a necessity.

Regarding self insurance…a good Amish friend of mine was in a bad car accident last year. He works construction, and his crew hired a driver to take them to the job site and back home. Their van was hit by a kid running a stop sign, and of course, the kid did not have insurance. As a result of the car accident, my friend’s son had a broken back, meaning he couldn’t do construction or farm work for well over a year. My friend paid most of his son’s medical bills out of pocket, to the tune of $25,000. If he couldn’t have paid the medical bills, the Amish church would have.

I think the important thing to remember about the Amish is that there are good folks and bad folks, just like in our community. There are some I am happy to be friends with and others I don’t like at all. You can’t judge a community as a whole…you must decide on an individual basis.

That is neat to hear that you are seeing some similarities there. It is an interesting model.

#41 @ Amanda

Hi Amanda, thanks for letting me know about your article! It’s funny but it sounded familiar and when I found it I realized I had come across it already, a few months ago. Great article, you really did a nice job.

Your comment on Amish taxi drivers was interesting too–Amish seem to often develop close relationships with their drivers, as you’d expect when spending enough time in the car.

One thing I noticed though: they all tend to drive fast (at least faster than me!) Giving a friend’s son a ride home from the PA Dutch market recently, we were passed by 3 or 4 vans loaded with Amish within about 5 minutes of leaving. Or maybe I just drive too slow?

Definitely, that is a good point. I am far from an expert on the dog breeding issue in general but have read reports on how many dogs are killed, and one thing that surprised me was that some dogs meet their end in shelters as well. But I think that’s a separate, much larger issue outside of the question of the Amish involvement in the industry.

Another issue would be the ethics of breeding designer dogs or those breeds which have developed inherent health problems by selective breeding over time. I’m personally not a big fan of that but I understand there is a huge consumer demand that drives it.

#34 @Erik
Huge numbers of completely wonderful companion animals are killed every year simply because there are not enough homes for them. There is a massive pet overpopulation problem. Any animal breeding is unethical breeding these days.

This is easily the most idiotic comment that I’ve seen in almost three years of reading GRS.

I’m very familiar with the PA Amish as I live very close and have dealt with and been around them my whole life. And the most profitable business enterprises of the Amish would be tobacco and furniture (although the furniture part is dwindling to things like selling carved trinkets on eBay and moving into things like construction), not puppy mills.

Just because a few Amish have chosen to run unethical operations that are despicable does not mean that you should paint the other 99% into that same corner of unethical sleaze.

If you would actually talk to real Amish people, you find that while their views on animals are not the same that most Englishmen have, they are mostly disgusted with the stigma that the puppy mill “industry” has spread on their culture as a whole.

They are no different than any society anywhere. You have 99% of the people doing what they are supposed to and the 1% who sully and stain the other 99%.

There is no exploiting of anything except your obvious ignorance and hatred towards these people.

I come from Lancaster County, PA, and grew up on a dairy farm. No…I am not Amish (everyone always asks me that), but my family has close ties to them. In fact, my father is employed as a driver for the amish when they have to go to doctor’s appointments, or take trips to Montana, or visit family members in Indiana–he loves his job.

Also, I wrote a Best of Money Carnival-winning post called Amish Finances you might wish to check out (on my website, under “Best of Frugal Confessions”). It was featured here on Get Rich Slowly.

Thanks for sharing!

DH/we are looking at buying a franchise, and the failure rates of the best-run franchisors run less than 10% as well — the mentoring and buying back failures sounds like a similar business model to what you describe for the Amish. The franchisors we’re talking to are very supportive and very fiscally conservative.

It’s fun to find how successful patterns propagate, even among different cultures.

I have been reading some doomsday people lately fretting over what would happen if we got a neutron shower, or terrorists took out a major electrical supply, etc. I don’t worry about being ‘too dependent on my laptop’. But while I think some of their fears are far fetched,I do worry about what I would do for water if our electricity went out for an extended period of time since I’m on a well. From this perspective I think we have taken a huge risk as society being dependent on people we don’t know working in a system we don’t understand to provide basic necessities like food, water, sewage, heat, etc.

Stephen @38

I would also say they are less likely to have the higher levels of risk that many people take on to START the business in the first place. I think the 90% success rate isn’t as much about brains, community, working hard, or anything else as much as a culture that is much more risk adverse than most of society.

Preferred Financial Services

I found the following NY Times article interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/business/smallbusiness/08sbiz.html?pagewanted=2. Especially the following:

Professor Kraybill said … that he knew of no business that had closed in the last six months. “I doubt if many will,” he said, because “the church usually comes in and takes over failing businesses before they fail.”

Not so different from what the secular world has been doing with “too big to fail” companies, eh?

1.Like most people, I love dogs, and unethical breeders are a bad thing.
2.The vast majority of Amish are not dog breeders. I’m also not certain where you are getting the information that this is the “most profitable business enterprise”. I’m fairly certain that would be furniture.
3.Amish I’ve spoken with condemn the unethical breeders who run operations where dogs suffer. As you might imagine, conditions vary between breeders.
4.The majority of dog breeders in America are non-Amish. Amish tend to be an easier target, however. One reason is because they are a clustered, easily-identifiable group and tend to avoid media, court, and other outlets where they might defend themselves.
5.I also wonder, what exactly is a ‘puppy mill’. Is it any pet breeder, or just one that houses dogs in horrible conditions, or…I think this is a valid question in order to know what we are talking about because I’ve seen some broad brush strokes on this issue before.
6.Dogs as animals are afforded a higher place on the animal ‘totem pole’ in our society. They are our companions and for some, best friends. They also tend to evoke a very strong emotional reaction for this reason. Amish tend to see an animal as an animal and a human as a human. I’m not saying this is the ‘right’ way by many people’s standards to look at it, but there is an inherent cultural difference.
7.For that reason, it’s probably a good idea that many Amish breeders are getting out of the breeding business, even though they may be running completely legitimate operations. Amish I’ve spoken with tend to agree.
8.Painting Amish as a group as evil based on some highly-publicized though deplorable cases, is maybe not the best approach.

I know I shouldn’t respond, but your comment pushed my buttons. Life is complex. People and issues are complex. It’s not as simple as Amish == Puppy Mills. Nothing is that simple.

If you want to base your worldview on these sorts of black-and-white mono-issue judgments, then go ahead. But don’t expect everyone else to, and don’t expect this blog to. I believe the world is filled with nuance and subtlety. I’m not a fan of puppy mills, but there’s far far more to the Amish than that.