DNA Test For Fluffies
November 1, 2007 by AKC Gazette Breed Columnist • Categories: Breed Columns, Health
They are adorable, round balls of fur, unmistakable with their jackets of soft cottony hair. They are homozygous recessive—fluffies. And that’s how breeders have traditionally found out that their perfectly normal-seeming parents were heterozygous recessive—fluffy gene carriers. One breeder describes her experience this way, “By six weeks of age, the fact that puppies are destined to be fluffy is indisputable. They just puff right out as if someone had pumped them full of air.” It’s a serious fault in our breed. But now there is a new tool to avoid the Michelin puppy scenario.
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Breed Type
August 1, 2007 by AKC Gazette Breed Columnist • Categories: Breed Columns, Education
The breed standard is the blueprint. The breeder is the builder. And the judge is the building inspector.
— Percy Roberts
Heads You Win, Tails You Lose?
May 1, 2007 by AKC Gazette Breed Columnist • Categories: Breed Columns
On April 19, 1998 Anna Bellenger steeled her courage and strode into the ring at the Baltimore County Kennel Club show. The crowd stared in astonishment at her long-tailed Swiss import, Little Tramont Licorice. But then astonishment turned to admiration as the charming six-month old puppy, proudly waving her forbidden appendage, went through her paces. Cori captured not only the onlookers’ hearts but Judge Phyllis Haage’s as well. It was little Cori’s first show and she went home with a big win, a four-point major. The rest of us took home an enduring memory.
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