Topaz's upcoming litter

Our second spring litter will be from Topaz, our dark apricot girl who is Amore's daughter from her final litter. Topaz is about 20 lbs and 15" at the shoulder, and she turns 2 in mid-April. She came into heat in early March and was bred to Canadian Doodles Donovan, a black phantom boy who carries parti.

Topaz

Both Donovan and Topaz carry parti, and Donovan also carries cream. This means we will have another lovely rainbow litter, full of little gold/caramel/apricot/red, chocolate and black babes, with about one quarter of them parti. Topaz doesn't carry phantom, however, so there won't be any phantom puppies in the litter but they all will be phantom carriers.

Donovan

We expect to keep back one or two females from this litter as potential future breeders. Our top choices will be chocolate parti, dark apricot and black parti - to help us towards our goal of specializing in black phantoms and dark apricots/reds down the road.

We are expecting Topaz's babies to arrive around May 9- about three weeks after her second birthday.Topaz's ultrasound will take place the second week of April to confirm pregnancy and get a preliminary puppy count.

If you are interested in one of these pups, please contact me by e-mail (roma@dragonramdoodles.com). Deposits will be accepted following the ultrasound.

Happy birthday, Galena & Teddy!

Galena and her brother, Teddy Malachite, turn 3 today!!

Teddy lives in North Vancouver, while our Mama Galena lives close by in Gatineau. The latest news from Teddy, a beautiful black boy, is that he loves to go to work with his mama and keep her and her office colleagues company. Couldn’t we all use a little bit of dog therapy on those rough days?!

As for Galena, she is the proud mama of 14 pups (in just two litters!). She loves to snuggle with her humans, play with her brother Carny-Frisou, and enjoy long walks and longer naps. She is looking forward to spring and being able to spend more time outdoors in her backyard.

We wish you both a very happy 3rd birthday! All the best for the year ahead!

Topaz in heat!

Our girl Topaz came into heat a bit over a week ago. A female generally becomes fertile around 6-20 days after bleeding begins. The way to pinpoint ovulation and the best time to breed is to monitor hormone levels, specifically progesterone, which rises as she enters estrus and stays elevated throughout pregnancy, and luteinizing hormone (LH), which surges to trigger the release of the ova.

Topaz's progesterone levels on Tuesday were still low but yesterday the LH surge occurred, which means she will ovulate Saturday and be ready for breeing Sunday-Tuesday. The eggs require a couple of days to mature prior to fertilization, so optimal breeding (for a natural mating) starts at the time of ovulation or shortly after and continues for about five days. Fresh sperm are viable for 5-7 days in the female, so they have plenty of time to find the ova and do their little job of creation.

Stay tuned for news of success and the next round in Guess How Many Puppies contest (the Topaz edition)!

Guardian Homes needed!

Now that Phoenix's puppies are soon to be  born, we can confirm that we are looking for several Guardian families to provide homes for breeding prospect puppies. We hope to keep one male and one female from this litter, and up to two females from Topaz's litter later this spring.

To qualify to be DragonRam guardian families, you need to live within a 10km radius of central Ottawa. You need to agree to provide a safe, secure, happy home for the dog, feed only high-quality, grain-free food, provide regular veterinary care, and overall provide a loving, caring home. We retain breeding rights to the dog for up to 4 litters, and require access to the dog for breeding-related health checks, breeding and whelping.

You need to agree to stay in touch so we can schedule breedings and so your dog remains familiar with us and our home. Males may be called upon multiple times a year to provide breeding services, which usually involves a couple hours every so often. Females need to stay with us for a few days when bred, and them come to our home about a week before puppies are due. The female whelps her puppies at our house and remains with us until the puppies are weaned by around 7 weeks of age.

In recognition of the ongoing relationship and our demands on you and your time (and dog), the price for a Guardian Puppy is substantially reduced.

If you think this might interest you, please refer to our website and/or contact us and we will be happy to provide more information. (roma@dragonramdoodles.com)

Happy 2nd birthday Phoenix!

Our little girl Phoenix turns 2 today!!

She's not such a little girl any more, either! At almost seven weeks' pregnant (equivalent to seven months' human gestation), she has a big swollen belly full of six or seven puppies!

Phoenix has always been a big pup. All last summer and fall she and Amore would love to play chase out in the field nearby. Whereas the previous summer it was always Phoenix chasing Mo, last summer it was Mo chasing Phoenix, as Mo was now a bit smaller and just a tad slower! (And wore out a bit faster, too.)

Phoenix loves to sit on our laps, but she never lies down - she always has to sit with her fore feet straight. We try to get her to lie down by pulling her front feet out, but moments later she's back in a sit. Makes it awkward when watching TV, as her head is always in the way!

Phoenix sleeps with my son on his top bunkbed, and she has become very adept at climbing the steep ladder with little or no help. I'm sure she'll miss her boy when she gives birth and has to stay with her pups, but she'll have their little warm wriggly bodies to keep her warm and provide company.

But she is still our baby, even now as a two-year-old mama-to-be!!

Happy birthday, big girl!

Best wishes for the coming year

and especially with your new pups-to-come!

Gayle Watkins' Transformational Dog Breeding

I had the pleasure this past weekend of attneding the Avidog Advanced Transformational Dog Breeding seminar hosted by the Ottawa Valley Golden Retriever Club at the Kemptville Campus of the University of Guelph.

This was a weekend packed with great info, lots of wonderful ideas, and super tips to help me (and all the attendees!) improve our breeding programs. Over the next while I plan to implement many of these ideas.

Most immediately important, and the main reason I wanted to attend, was the Advanced Puppy Evaluation Test (APET). This is a method Gayle developed to assess puppy temperament. To date the most common method is the Volhard method, which asseses a range of behaviours in response to various stimuli. The APET goes even further, assessing more traits (32 to be precise!) using a longer and different type of process.

APET divides the traits being assessed between stable traits and changeable traits. Stable traits are those that essentially do not change over the lifetime of the dog. These include energy level, environmental and people focus, pain threshold,  forgiveness, hand shyness, and 3-D awareness. These traits can be worked with with and influenced, but not changed. Changeable traits are those that can be changed with training. They include problem-solving and learning, patience, confience, and courage, among others.

The types of traits that are valued in a puppy will depend on what that puppy's job witll be (hunting, retrieving, herding, pet), the type of home to which that puppy will be going, and the amount of experience with dogs that the owners have. A puppy that will do well with a retired couple whose kids have grown up and who live quiet lives might well be totally misplaced in a young family with three noisy, active kids under the age of six. While that seems obvious, the APET provides a tool to specifically identify which temperament traits each puppy exhibits and to what degree, which is extremely useful in assessing which puppy will best suit which home situation.

It is our goal to implement the APET with our spring litters. We'll still be in learning mode with the first few litters, but this should help us to identify more precisely which puppy we recommend to you. This also means that we may be less willing to accept firm "criteria" from puppies in relation to colour and sex, as the oartucular cream female puppy we have might be best suited for the family that has indicated a preference for a chocolate male, for example. But in all cases we would tell you why we think a given puppy is right for you, and to give you a choice between at least two different pups that we think would suit your home situation.

My daughter attended the second day with me so she could also learn about APET and, I hope, help with puppy evaluation, as she has a good eye and feel for puppy behaviour.

The seminar also provided an introduction into the fascintating world of epigenetics - how the environment can change the way a gene works without changing the gene itself - and population genetics - how breeding choices can influence the overall gene pool of a given dog breed. But more of that in a future post, I hope!

Topaz in heat!

Well, it seems Topaz has just gone into heat as of a couple days ago. We will begin monitoring her hormone levels to determine her ovulation date, and within the next week o two expect to report a successful breeding!

The male of choice is Donovan. (My website still says Roary, but I've changed my mind! Will update the website soon.) Donovan is Roary's full brother from the same litter, but where Roary is apricot-red, Donovan is a gorgeous black-and-tan phantom. This means that all the puppies will carry phantom, but there won't be any actual phantoms because (here's the lesson in genetics!), while Topaz carries the actual phantom colour genes, she also carries two "blocker" genes that prevent the phantom colouring from being expressed. The pups will get one blocket gene from her and one "unblocked" gene from Donovan. If one of these pups is then bred to a phantom, about half of the resulting pups would show the phantom colouring.

So what colours and patterns can we expect? There should be about 25% caramel with brown noses, 25% in shades of gold-apricot-red with black noses, 25% cafe-chocolate, and 25% black. About three quarters of them should be solid and about one quarter parti (white with coloured spots), as both mama and papa are parti carriers. Unless, (Of course, it could end up like Galena's fall litter where we had 3/4 parti and 1/4 solid when it ought to have been the other way around!)

Depending on the actual date of breeding, we are looking at puppies being born in early May, and ready to go to new homes right at the beginning of summer. What a great time to get a puppy - all you teachers out there!!

Stay tuned for news of a successful breeding!