Ok, so I was having a FB conversation with a WSS friend of mine the other night, and we were both mentioning our desire to start to wind down our breeding programs over the next few years. Why? Because we didn't want to be in the position of having a large number of dogs to care for when we were 75. And really, that age isn't as far in the future as it USED to be.

The 'conversation' got me thinking about our dogs and what arrangements we've made for their care. And of course, I realized we've done NOTHING about this issue. Let's face it, telling friends who should take which dog in the event of our demise is not really going to work. We don't have anything in writing in the form of a will or pet trust or anything remotely legal, no money set aside from the estate to handle routine and vet care expenses for the dogs, and no AKC paperwork or microchip info convenient enough that anyone could find it if they needed it for settling the estate.

So, now seems like as good a time as any to do some research and get the word out that we ALL need to do this for our dogs. Before we get to that topic, let's make sure that you've also done it for yourself. Right NOW is a good time to get that ball rolling, too. There was an article in the NYT about a woman in her 30's trying to support herself and her daughter and untangle her bicyclist husband's financial matters when he died suddenly while riding. She created a website called 'Get Your Sh_t Together' and has excellent information about why you need to do something about organizing your life documents NOW, not later. Check it out-there are checklists and free templates for wills, living wills, power of attorney, etc. You can even sign up for monthly nag reminders to keep you focused on doing something about your own estate planning.

Back to the topic of your dogs and making sure they are cared for-If you type the words estate planning pet owners into your favorite search browser, you'll get tons of articles, blogs, presentations and pdf files to research the topic. But, remember that laws vary from state to state, and that what one author says may not actually apply for your state or situation. The American Bar Association has an article about pet estate planning that is an excellent overview of the topic and a good place to start. But don't stop there-speak with your relatives and friends who are interested in assuring the safety and care of your pets, because you will certainly have to designate at least one person to be responsible for them. Get all your AKC paperwork in order and easily accessible, and make sure all your dogs are positively identified with microchips or tattoos and that their identifications are associated with their AKC paperwork. 

So, go ahead-make that appointment with your family lawyer and make some decisions that will give you peace of mind and assure care for your pets. They give us unconditional love-we should do the same by making sure they will be cared for regardless of what life holds for us
 

It's been a slow week here, at least as far as Welshie-related topics are concerned. I finished an article about using the pedigree databases that will appear in the next Starter Barks, did some phone-mentoring with a novice breeder friend, and we've been knee-deep in renovations to the interior of the house to make it more dog-friendly. You'd think after living here 26 years we would have gotten to all these inside jobs already, but it's amazing what you can 'live with' even if it doesn't really work for you. 

This weekend we're going to be making preparations for Tigg's litter, due at the end of the month. The puppy room needs to be cleaned and straightened out, the whelping box put up, scale and heating pad located, and all the linens and newspapers made ready.  In hindsight, perhaps we should have done a better job planning all the renovations. Now we have to pack up ourselves and the dogs and move to a Holiday Inn for a few days so the hall tile can be put down. We'll keep Tigg with us and the others get to go to camp for a few days-not a cheap proposition but at least the tile will be perfect, and no paw prints will appear in the Thinset!

In the hallway, we've removed the 1970's sandstone painted sheetrock and ripped up the wood floors in the hall and the main traffic area in the dining room. I can hear all the real estate agents gasping now...too bad. It's just too burdensome to deal with the wear and tear of wood with dogs traipsing through the kitchen, dining room and hallway when you have a center-hall ranch style house. So, walls will be plain painted sheetrock (and will finally have all our WSS prints hanging up! on them!) and we're installing painted wainscoting with chair rail and baseboard that are IMPERVIOUS to male dogs and their marking habits because they are all PVC, plus tile flooring that is durable and moppable. So if we ever sell this house, it will be perfect for other dog owners!

Oh, and about that new breeder and her puppies-she called me about one of her pups needing emergency vet care. While talking with her, I drew on that saying "When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras" I'd had a similar situation in one of our more recent litters. Sure enough, a few days later she called back to let me know the vet felt a congenital problem with the pup was unlikely, and she was relieved the pup didn't need surgery or chronic medical care. And to me, that phone call gave me more satisfaction than anything else that went on all week. I'm glad 25 years of breeding experience was able to calm down a friend about their first litter. Sort of like paying it forward...

Well, the Canine Theriogenology course is over, and I've submitted my 2 required responses to all 6 case studies and taken all the quizzes. This course was offered free of charge by Coursera, and was presented by Dr. Peggy Root, a canine theriogenologist from the University of Minnesota. I have to say, it was just a FABULOUS opportunity to learn about canine reproduction. The only complaints I have are that the course's future is uncertain, and that MN is way too far away for me to Dr. Root to use her as my repro vet!

In her farewell class announcement, Dr. Peggy Root said: "Some people have asked if this course will be offered again or if there will be a follow-up course. It is being decided now whether or not this course will be offered again. I will take your suggestions and make some improvements in this course. There will not be a follow-up course with significantly different content offered in the near future because teaching in this venue is not my “day job” and I just don't have time to create and teach another course."  In addition, Dr. Root has discovered that the vibrant and interested canine breeder community is a treasure-trove of information, and has invited us to  participate in a survey regarding breeding practices that she will distribute over the summer.

While the fate of the course is uncertain, Dr. Root encouraged us to continue our learning, and advised that "The Society for Theriogenology also sponsors a Breeders Forum every year in concert with the veterinary meeting; this year, it is in Louisville, Kentucky in early August and details can be found at www.therio.org". Registration information for the Canine and Feline Breeder Initiative sponsored by the Society for Theriogenology is found here, along with a contact name for additional information. The one day program will be held on Saturday, August 10, 2013 at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel in Louisville, KY. Cost for the program is $150, and includes lunch. The seminar starts at 8AM and a copy of the day's seminar topics can be found here.

I have emailed Dr. Root and asked her if I could either host or link to the class materials from my website, and I am awaiting a response. My hope is that if she provides approval, all the class notes, PPT slides and further discovery answers that were part of the original course will be made available to my WSS friends and web site readership. The section on progesterone testing and AIs is extremely helpful information that we should all know-that lesson alone was instrumental in my most recent breeding plans. 

Finally, I encourage ALL of you to check out the courses at Coursera.org and just sign up to take one - it is a rare opportunity to learn something you always wanted to know, and you can't beat the price-it's FREE.

OK, I arrive home from the Nationals and start to put together impressions of dogs I saw, filing away information for later consideration-stud dogs, breeding lines, etc. I start getting messages from friends who wanted my thoughts about potential stud dogs. To get my thoughts in order, I fire up my regular WSS pedigree database and discover the dog I want to see is not entered-and neither are his progeny. Hmmmm. I go to my alternate pedigree data source and repeat the exercise-ditto-no results found. How can that be? 

Both the HeavensWelsh Pedigree Engine and the WSS Pedigree Archive allows users to set up a profile and add dogs to the database. That means you don't need to rely upon the data administrator to add the information any more. Real-time database entry is a huge timesaver-it means the minute you register that puppy or buy that dog, you can add the name to the database. Recently I tried to produce a test mating pedigree of a proposed breeding I'm interested in. Guess what? I couldn't. That's right, neither of the dogs were in the pedigree database. Really people? We are squandering the most helpful and useful tool we could possibly have - our breeding program documentation - by not taking the time to input the dogs and bitches we show and use in our breeding programs and the progeny that they have produced. 

Hey, you folks who exhibited at Nationals this year-can you help the rest of the WSS fancy and get your dogs into the pedigree databases? You should really enter them in both-they each have different features and users may prefer one to the other. Chris Ford has been developing and managing the Heavens Welsh Pedigree Engine for many years, and has gradually expanded features and even delved into other languages and other breeds. Crystal Nolen's WSS Pedigree Archive is relatively new, but she has accumulated a lot of information and is able to present pictorial pedigrees for you to see what those dogs in the fourth or fifth or even tenth generation look like.

Breeders and owners-please go through your records and search for your dogs in the databases. If they are not in there yet, or you have not updated their titles or health clearances, go ahead and 'get 'er done'.  You are contributing to a project great than your own breeding program-you are providing information for the future of the breed. Please support the web developers who have so generously shared their time and expertise with us-without their creative talent, we'd still be writing out pedigrees on stand-alone pedigree programs and not have timely, updated or accurate data and photos to use. 

Oh, and I want to make sure that we ALL give a shout out to Chris Ford and Crystal Nolen to express a heartfelt THANK YOU for the volunteer hours they have contributed to making these web sites a reality. Let's not waste the opportunity they've given us to add to the WSS data out there.

I know, the summer show season is just getting started, and I'm already reminding people about the American Spaniel Club Annual Flushing Spaniel Show held in January. This is a premier show for Welshies, and gives prospective breed judges an opportunity to see a larger than normal entry of dogs. While it is not as large an entry as we used to draw in our WSS heydey (we once had 90 dogs entered at ASC!), it is still one of the top three shows of the year for us, behind the Specialty Weekend cluster of shows and a Regional Specialty cluster.

The 2014 show site will once again be the Knoxville Convention/Exhibition Center, located at 525 Henley Street, Knoxville, TN. The host hotel will be the Holiday Inn World's Fair, at the same site. The date of the show is January 10 - 12, 2014, and as far as I know, we will once again have the same type of judging schedule as we did in 2013. Obedience and Rally judging will be held on Friday morning, January 10th. Sweepstakes (Puppy and Veteran) will be held on that Friday in the late afternoon or early evening. Regular class judging will be held on Saturday, January 11th, and Best of Breed judging will be held on Sunday, January 12th. 

The judge for Clumbers, Welsh Springer Spaniels and ASCOB Cocker Spaniels is currently listed as Sandra Lex,  from Ontario, Canada. I'm sure it will be a big event for her, since she probably has not judged large numbers of Welsh Springers previously in the States. The Greater Chesapeake WSS Club is sponsoring the Puppy and Veteran Sweepstakes, and approval has already been granted by WSSCA for this event. I will be the secretary for the sweepstakes, but I do not yet have the Sweeps judge's name. 

American Spaniel Club will be offering awards again for Rally, Obedience, Puppy and Veteran Sweepstakes, and all regular classes, Best of Breed, Awards of Merit and Select Awards. These awards are funded entirely by donations from the Welsh Springer Spaniel fancy, with the exception of an additional Best of Breed award offered by ASC. No money from WSSCA is used to finance any part of ASC trophies. In September I will send a request for donations, using the Yahoo list-serve and email and Facebook to solicit donations. 

There is a good likelihood that the ASC winter show will stay in the south for the foreseeable future purely for economic reasons. It is much less expensive to lease suitable space in southern locales, and this will weigh heavily with ASC leadership when planning the 2015 show. ASC had committed to three years at the Knoxville site, and 2014 will be the final year before a decision is made regarding staying in Knoxville or finding a new location elsewhere. 

You may have noticed that the new Rysan web site has nearly daily updates recently. I hope the frequent updates aren't intrusive, but Facebook is the most effective mode of notification available. 

So why a resurrection of the website, and why now? Well, why is because there are many people in the breed who don't know us and our breeding program and our involvement with dogs, and why now is because I happen to have the time available to tell the story.
When I was at WSSCA Nationals a few weeks ago, I realized how the composition of the breed club and the people attending the Specialty has changed. Where Rich and I were once the novices, then part of the established fancy, we are now the senior members of the club-OMG, we're the OLD TIMERS! We are the ones who remember the sons and daughters of the dogs pictured in Bill Pferd's book. For gosh sakes, we even MET Bill and Jane Pferd and visited their home and met Deckard's Pendefig and weown an AUTOGRAPHED copy of his book because we bought it from Bill at a WSSCA banquet in 1981!

We've been members of the WSSCA for over 30 years, I think. And in all that time, I've never written down the experiences we had with our dogs since the very first cocker we bought as a newly married couple. So, it was time to sit at the laptop and rustle up the memories, hunt around on the hard drives and in all the maddening places I've hidden scanned photos, digital photos, articles from the old website, and memories, oh the memories. It's like bringing back ghosts from the past. This new website is an opportunity to write about the 35+ years of living with our dogs. If I don't write about it now, then it'll never get done. It's true, there's no time like the present...
 
The easiest part of the website to put together was the general information about the breed, links to interesting sites to buy WSS memorabilia, our current dogs, health information, art and books about Welshies, and general puppy information. I enjoyed doing the research for those pages and they are pretty straight-forward. I hope folks use the information there. I try to update it as I find interesting things online, and I have topics I haven't brought on board yet, like rally, obedience and hunting, to encourage novice pet people to explore these options. They'll get done eventually, and I'm sure many of you are far more expert on most of those topics than I am, anyway, so I don't feel like there's alot missing because I haven't gotten to those sections yet. 

The hardest part of the website to put together is the 'Dogs in Our Hearts' section. This section will be constantly added to as I find the photos of our past pets and remember the special times with all of them. I'm recalling the stories of dogs who are long gone, and I want people to know why those dogs were important to us, and that they were loved by us, and trained by us, and taught us far more than we ever taught them. It has been hard because tears roll down my face when I look at the photos, when I remember the funny times, the wins, the disappointments, the puppies we bought, the litters we raised, the dogs we kept who are gone except in my heart. 

If the new Rysan Welsh Springers website is more than a collection of photos to you, and helps you get to know us, makes you see the hard work and commitment and love that we've put into the sport of dogs and our chosen breed, then it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.