Retirement homes

When breeders talk about retiring their females (and males!) the question that comes up is: What happens to them? Often the answer depends on the age of the dog, if the female is young and would benefit another kennels breeding program, they could be rehomed to another breeder for a litter or two, but in general, this option is done more often with stud dogs. If a breeder is keeping back pups from their stud dogs, the females cannot be bred to their stud, and if keeping back males, the older stud becomes obsolete. And since a stud dog can remain fertile and breed-able for a decade or more naturally, and for decades if collected and frozen, it is more feasible to sell him to someone who will either hunt/trial him, use him as a stud, or if not, neuter and retire him to a pet home. I do firmly believe in collecting and freezing your stud dogs as a "just in case", even before re-homing. Because unfortunately, accidents and disease can cause the lose of those genes, where as frozen semen lives practically forever. But that is a discussion left to another blog post. With our girls, we have in the past re-homed them. Not necessarily due to age, but we had to move our kennel from Missouri where we owned our own home with a large kennel building and acreage, to Nebraska after a divorce, and I moved with just 3 dogs, one of which has now passed away and the other 2, Twister and Ninja, are now spayed/retired and are 13 and 10 respectively. They will continue to live out their lives here.

Now, we have just a small "dog house" with attached platform runs and thus have limited space. We cannot keep all of our girls and like most breeders, our goals for our line are 3+ generations down the line. That means that once we have kept 1 or more offspring- generally more than 1, likely from different sires- that we need to make room for the next generation. As such, those youngsters that we "grow out" that for whatever reason do not make the "cut" for what we are looking for in our breeding program, and the original dams need to be re-homed for us to continue breeding. And as an added benefit, the females get to go to approved homes where they can be pampered with individual attention as "only" pets or as hunting companions. Most are spayed prior to being re-homed and the only fee is that of the actual cost of the spay and transportation. The youngsters can go on to productive hunting/trialing homes or even that of eventual breeding dog for another kennel that may have need of that particular line. Bottom line: We want the best for our dogs, whether it is with us forever, or with someone else in their new home. Keeping that in mind, we will be retiring Fenloch Rowan "Berry" and her littermate Fenloch Acacia "Shy" later this year. Both will be spayed prior to re-homing. They just turned 4 yrs old in July so they are young still with a lot of love to give.