All About Dog Shows

I had the opportunity to tape an NPR (National Public Radio) segment on bull terriers and dog showing...the first minute is a bit provocative, but give it a chance and I think you will enjoy it. The host, Faith Middleton, is a two-time Peabody Award winner and loves bull terriers! Have a listen:

CLICK HERE for the Podcast

and here are some of the pics, now more grown up. We do have a black brindle male to place in a pet home, so feel free to contact me.

Week 4: First Day Outside! Time to Explore

Here are Bianca and Vi...no fear here! At this point Bianca is the largest in the litter.Letting the pups be pups and explore and get nice and dirty! Somehow even after playing they remained clean and pristine

Here is Vi again...I know, Im biasedHere they are exploring their "cave"
Below is a pile of puppies. Bianca is on top. The other white puppy is a singleton from another litter. The boy, The Captain, is on his back in the centerFor those of you who know Freeman...here is his twin Forrester! I know, they dont look Anything alike! Here Forrester is getting his puppy fix. The brindle girl with more white on her face just took to him immediately and they spent quite a while communing.

End of Week 3

Well, somehow the girls dominated! Most of the pics of the black brindle boy didnt come out, so all I have is one of him sleeping! Here is The Captain

In general they are all walking around, eyes bright and shiny and they are attempting to escape their whelping box area. If they get out, Hope gets upset and makes lots of noise until we help get them back into their box. She is still nursing, but in general she wants to be away from them.

Here is the brindle girl with the most white on her face. We are so happy with their short backs!

Here she is from the front with her nose pigment coming in.Look at the size of her feet! There is a lot of bone in this litter.

I know human moms arent supposed to have favorites, but I am in love with the little black brindle girl. She looks like a little plush toy! There is this feminine, sweet quality to her. I cant keep my eyes off of her! She reminds me of Beckett when he was a baby.

I mean, look at this face! Im thinking of naming her Legacy Vivacious of Winsor and calling her Vi (long "i") for short.

Here is the other brindle girl with the mustache. I have to get more pics of her too! She has a similar body type to her brindle sister. All of their mouths are Way over. Dont think we will have to worry about reverse scissor issues, but will keep an eye on the canines.

And here is the white girl and her nice short back. We cant find a speck of color on her...yet. Im still looking. She is Freeman's favorite, but then again her Mom was his first show dog that he trained from 8 weeks onward.

Here is Freeman being silly and playing with the babies. Yes, I gave this one a raspberry on her belly right after the pic was taken.

The white girl in the pic below looks like a manatee! To me anyway...

But I dont know if manatees can smile like this:)

And here is a bonus pic of a baby Shih Tzu! There was a litter of 3 nearby and I was snapping pics for them.

Weeks 1 & 2

In the interest of time, I'm just gonna post a bunch of pics with very little editorial and you can fill in with the ooh and aahs.

Here is the litter:

The conga line:

Here are the babies sleeping:

Here they are nursing. left to right: the male Cappy, one brindle girl hidden, black brindle girl on top of her, Saffron, of course, and the last brindle girl....I promise to get better pics next week!

Our Recent Wins

Just back from a 10 hour drive to Canfield Ohio for a Bull Terrier specialty put on by the Buckeye Bull Terrier Club. It is a great weekend on a sprawling fairgrounds and weather usually plays into the picture. In years past we have had faint worthy heat. This year we had rain with flooding on Friday. I was wearing knee high muckboots and the rain came Over my ankle. Everyone with ankle muckboots was soaked! This pic is UNDER our tent After it had Subsided LOL! You cant really tell but the water was flowing. You could have had rubber duck races.

This is my local friend Patti. She came out in the pouring rain; it stopped long enough for our pic but she had to throw her shoes out when she got home! We had been on-line friends for 2 years but had never met and this was also her first dog show! We had a great time and she took all the wet and muck in stride.

Friday I was showing my puppies Rose and Huey under breeder judge Claudia Sharp. I usually "enhance" my show dogs with the appropriate "makeup" (did I just say that in a public forum?). I did powder my white Huey a bit but I decided to let Rose go in "naked". She is quite pristine and yet I have Never NOT touched her up to some degree. I have never sent a dog in the ring au naturale. But I took a long hard look at her and decided to go for it and let her stand on her own in all her glory. She is a very correct lovely girl and even though we were competing in a puppy class, I believed she could do well. And she did! She took Winners Bitch and went on to Best of Winners for a 5 point major and 2 ROM points! Her first AKC points - a nice way to start a show career. Here is a pic of her about 2 weeks before the show. She also has a perfect bite all the way around and moves freely like a dream. She has a pink show lead:) She is alllll girl.

Saturday was a BIG show - the largest bull terrier entry of the year. Mary Remer was judging and as she is slated to judge Silverwood in Oct. (our most prestigious breed event), so many people turned out to see what she thought of their dogs. Huey was in the first class of the day and he did nicely for me (he barely had 4 feet on the floor at once for Claudia the day before). He went on to Reserve Winners Dog, which was a Very nice placement for him out of the 9-12 month class. Here he is asking Mary for the win.

And here he is sitting pretty for me. I never taught him to sit. I dont teach any of my show dogs to sit! But he has done this since he was a pup. He is very attentive and that is a Good thing in a show dog. Especially the males who can be spacey and sluggish.

Then the BOV class....many gorgeous dogs came and the sun was shining, there was a slight breeze and it was a picture perfect show day. Competition was hard and Mary put us through our paces. She had us move a lot, which was great for me because Java LOVES to move! She did beautifully for me, even giving me her ears at least 50% of the time, which is 50% more than usual!

Mary pulled us out along with 2 other bitches for a last look.....and then moved us to the head of the line. We took BOV! This was a weekend of a lifetime for sure!

We had a 10 hr. drive home but we had to stay for group, this had been Such an honor. I handed Java over to Pete Denbow (see him below in an older blog entry). Here is Pete and his assistant Ryan putting some finishing touches on Java before Terrier Group.

And here is Pete getting her to pay him attention and "give her ears".

He has a sibling of Rose and Huey's and he did beautifully with her in group and Java got pulled by the judge! Here they are waiting their turn.

And here is Pete's boy, the sibling, Iko. He will be hitting the show circuit soon!

Thank you to the Buckeye Club and Congrats to all the other winners. I know of a few that finished their dogs, which is always a great feeling of accomplishment! By the way, the Vendor Dollars as prizes were GREAT! I came home with two lovely leashes. Fabulous idea!

Here is a bonus pic of Rose playing in the mud before she got bathed for the show. Wet rat!

Ch. Hope Springs Eternal ROM x Ch. Action Captain America ROM

Introducing the white Mommy Hope

and brindle and white daddy Shayne. You can see more of him at the Action Bull Terrier site.

My second litter was whelped July 20th, 2009. Hope was Huge and very excited about showing off her belly to everyone. She became quite happy toward the end of her pregnancy and seemed to be looking forward to having her babies. Here is Hope in labor about 2 hours before she gave birth to pup #1). Marion predicted that she would have an easy birth and pop 'em out. I asked her why she thought that and she said it was just a hunch. Well, lucky for all of us, she was right! The birth itself pretty much went like clockwork.

All six babies were born between 4 and 9am. Four girls and two boys just like her last litter. This time we got 2 brindle and white girls, a black brindle and white girl, an all white girl, a white boy with black eye smudge and a black brindle and white boy. Hope, and therefore the humans attending her, had an easy time. Pam Rys, who has had bull terriers for a long, long time had never seen puppies being born. So she was on-call and came over in the wee hours to see the last 4 born.

Marion was there, of course, but BJ Ralston and I were trying to manage the litter as best we could by ourselves. I was trying to get the hang of this; BJ has more experience. But of course, whenever there was a question we would call upon Marion who with barely a glance would diagnose what was needed. It could be something simple....like she would tell us to take Hope out for a pee. And we would think, what does that have to do with anything, and sure enough right after she would pee we would get some more contractions. Or some time would go by and there would seemingly be no progression and Marion would stick her finger "up there" and say "Oh give it about 10 minutes and BAM damn if things didnt happen exactly 10 minutes later LOL. I equate it to my cake decorating and food experience (which you can see on my food blog). People will say things like "I cant believe you made that cake! It is so beautiful!" and Im thinking to myself, "This is what I do for a living, I better be able to make cakes that look this good!" LOL. Its the same with Marion. She's been doing this for almost 40 years so of course she knows how to whelp a dog!

Here is a pic of Pup #1 right after birth, a brindle and white girl with a thin white stripe down the center of her face.

She also has a "moustache"! I asked Franne Berez if any of the daddy's side of the family had that marking (as I couldnt think of any Winsor dogs that did). Guess what? It comes from her daddy and grand-dad. Here is her 'stache. She is leaning on her pure white (yellow) sister - more on her below.

Since this girl came out yellow from poop, I started calling her "Saffron".

Here is the white boy with black eye and brindle girl with broad white blaze.

Here is Pam Rys holding the two brindle girls. I know the pups are blurry but I wanted to get a pic of Pam in there!

Here is a wet pic of the black brindle bitch with the white face. The black Just reaches her eyes on both sides.

And here is her other side. She is held by Evie Chouinard, another friend who helped at the whelping.

We had an all-female crackerjack team. Here is BJ arriving with her daughter Bristol at about 3:00AMBristol came prepared with mask, gloves and a notebook to take detailed notes of who came out first, noted the time of birth, color, markings, sex and whether we got an afterbirth with the puppy. You Have to make sure you get all the afterbirths out; this time around once the last pup came out there were still 3 afterbirths int here! It took a few hours, but them came out with the help of a "clean-out" shot of oxytocin. NO I am not going to show you a pic of an afterbirth. I would if I had one, but I dont LOL. Consider yourself lucky. Hope slurped them up like candy.

Hope nursing her babies! Left to right: both brindle girls, then "Saffron:, then Cappy the black brindle boy, then black brindle girl and lastly my white male.

In the photo below we have top to bottom: yellow Saffron kind of hiding underneath, brindle girl getting a Big suck, black brindle boy Cappy, our mustache girl and the white boy with black eye. Cappy got his name because he has that little beanie style cap on his head and its short for Captain, an homage to his daddy. His AKC name will be Legacy Winsor This Is Your Captain Speaking.
And here is dear, sweet Hope having a well earned nap after the last came out.
Anyway, Day 1 went well with everyone, Hope and babies were thriving. Day 2 I was doing the day shift and the little white boy seemed very quiet. I was very careful all day long, making sure no one got squished. Instinctually I kept thinking he was different and mentioned to Marion a few times that I thought so...but I never did raise the alarm because nothing dramatic enough hit me over the head. Long story short, by the end of the day we had lost him. Looking back at Day 1 he had come out a bit blue, but this is not that unusual with bullies and he breathed right away after a vigorous shake down and some pinches (again not unusual for BT births). He also bled a bit when his cord was cut but again, this is not a huge red flag. He seemed to roll onto his back a lot and then not be able to right himself. So much so that we nicknamed him turtle. Did this mean anything? We chose not to do a autopsy, so we will never know for sure. There might have been something wrong with him and he might never have thrived. Or he might have become chilled or was under-nourished. It's almost too much to think about. After all, Hope didnt go looking for this. We acted as gods and made this happen and are responsible for it all, the good and the bad. And in this game the bad can mean death. I dont want to end on such a low note. It is just the facts. I am writing this a week and a half later and ALL are doing very very well. More pics to come.