Match-making Puppies ( why letting your breeder choose is important)

When someone first inquires about a puppy they usually have a gender and color in mind. This is totally understandable and a valid request to make to a breeder. There are some instances where those requests are necessary, such as another breeder with a specific need for a color or sex for their breeding program, or a family that maybe has an intact male and does not want a female. All valid! It is even valid to just have a preference because you like it or because you have always had girl dogs or merle looks striking etc. I get it. There is much more to choosing a puppy though, and this is where a breeder’s experience is invaluable. We are with our puppies from the moment of birth until they time they leave us. We have watched them navigate through their developmental stages and have supported them through their fear periods. We know which ones were quick to recover and which ones took longer. We know which puppies can be bossy or shy and we are keen to the interactions between them and their littermates in different circumstances at different times. These observations over the 8 to 12 weeks that they are with us paint a picture that shows much more than meets the eye. Even if a family comes to visit the litter, they are seeing one moment of time in this puppy’s development. That day could be during a fear period or during the 6 week crazy shark toothed biting phase or maybe a week after a vaccine while their systems are being stressed from developing antibodies. Only your breeder truly knows that puppy. This is why we do not assign puppies to families until they are at least 8 weeks old. Not until after they have had their ups and downs and we know how they handled it all. It takes that long to know if that puppy with lots of prey drive is going to thrive as a working dog . Only then will we know if that puppy will be a couch potato, loving the neighborhood kids and maybe your own toddler or house full of teenagers. Even at this point, we can be wrong! Puppies like humans, change. They change as a result of their environment and as a result of their upbringing and how they were taught to handle their own emotions. We use the Puppy Culture method to help them navigate all these developmental stages but once they leave, we can only make a predicton, not a promise. You may be saying well then why even wait the 8 weeks to decide if you can’t make a promise? The answer is because it is still a very good prediction! We have been very successful with our puppy pairings because we really pay attention to each puppy as they grow and take their new family environment and lifestyle into consideration before making any decisions. For families that are looking for a show dog or a breeding prospect we use a different set of parameters to determine show/breeding quality. In this situation, color is absolutely the last consideration and sex is important depending on future goals. Here more than just temperament is taken into account and we are looking at structure, teeth,movement and personality. We evaluate all our puppies at weeks 4, 6, 8 and sometimes 10. Throughout this time, many things can change structurally . Your best prospect at 6 weeks is not always your best at 8 weeks or 10 weeks. In an ideal world it would be best to grow out puppies to 16 weeks before making decisions but breeders usually don’t keep puppies that long and doing so may compromise their socialization period. So, 8 and 10 week evaluations are important. Some believe that the physique you see at 8 weeks will be very similar to the adult body. I find this often to be true. These evaluations should be done by breeders who have been in their breed a long time and understand how their dogs grow. and have a deep understanding of their breed standard. For example, I know that my puppies can have curly tails, I also know that those tails will almost always fix themselves by 16 weeks. It takes having many litters to know this. As breeders, we learn how to read the growth of our puppies over generations. Seven generations in and I am not 100% right all the time but I have a pretty good idea. I also like to get experienced breeders of other breeds to look at my puppies and give me their opinion also. There is a lot of thought that goes into the choosing of a puppy. So rest assured that when we say this black boy with the green collar will be yours, it was not a spur of the moment decision. It took 8 weeks of observation to make that choice and it is with the hope that this puppy will thrive in your household and will bring you many years of joy because they are a good fit for you and your family.