One of the greatest joys of being a breeder is when there is new life. Watching a puppy be born is such an awesome experience, from the nurturing of momma to the puppy’s first taste of milk. I (Steve) always dream of the family that is going to bring the puppy home and love and care for it. Is this puppy going to have kids to run around with and help raise? Maybe this puppy will be with a retired couple and live the easy life in front of the fireplace. Maybe he/she will live in Florida or Canada or California…It’s so fun to dream of the future for the puppy and even more fun to watch it happen!

But, along with the joys of new life is the harsh reality of death. We realize death is a part of life, but it is NEVER easy. Recently we lost a week old puppy. She was the smallest in the litter but she was tenacious and we loved that about her. She gained weight, loved to nurse, loved to cuddle and we thought she was going to grow up and be a really nice Lab. But, over a 12 hr period, she took a turn and wasn’t thriving. Nothing we, or our vet, could do helped her and we lost her. It’s so, so hard when that happens. Momma new it too, she howled and had a hard time for a couple of hours. It’s no fun at all.

With saying that, we came to realize a truth again that we’ve been taught several times over the years. It’s the Bible verse at the top of this blog. We are believers in God and have a strong faith in Him. When a litter of puppies are born, we always pray that they will be happy, healthy labs and that they will bring happiness, love and protection to their forever families. There’s a peace that comes over us in the midst of the pain of losing a puppy because we know that God is in control. Sometimes (a lot of times) that is hard to understand but we just simply believe it anyway.

I just wanted to make a short post about this, maybe as encouragement to myself or anyone reading this who has dealt with loss of any kind. I know this doesn’t end with just puppies. Well, God bless and Happy New Year!

There’s nothing quite like bringing home a new puppy. The love, connection, fun and excitement that surrounds it is something that every family should experience. Bringing home a new puppy, however, requires a lot of work as well. We start the puppies off on the right path and do our very best to make sure they are on their way to being wonderful family members, but there are a few issues that will no doubt arise when you have a young lab puppy.

The biggest issue that we’ve heard back from our Elite families over the years is probably the issue of puppy biting. Puppies use their mouths to play, feel, communicate and since they are teething, it feels good to chew on things. Some of that is really cute, unless it’s your fingers of children’s hair, shoes or pant leg. There are several things you can do as a new puppy owner to make sure the biting doesn’t get out of hand.

The number one thing to do is to be consistent. Labs LOVE to be trained, and training takes consistency. Doing what I’m going to describe to help cure over biting will work, but only with consistency. It make take 200 training sessions with your puppy until he learns what you’re teaching him, but as soon as he learns it you’ll be so happy that you stayed consistent. Kids are generally more excitable which encourages the puppy so we advise adults to do this training alone for the first couple of days and then once the adult gets the hang of it, they can teach the kid’s what to do.

So, when a puppy is playing with you and starts to go for your hands, you need to recognize if it’s something that needs a quick distraction of a toy to get him not to go for your hands or if it needs correction. If he just goes for your hand quickly and you can grab a toy and distract him, then no correction is needed. Just grab a toy (we like squeaky ones for this) and get his attention with it and continue playing. This will happen a lot and its okay, not every time he goes to bite your finger needs to be corrected.

The difference when he needs a correction is when his mind is set on biting your fingers or any part of a kid’s body or clothing. What you are going to teach is to stop his state of mind from getting to the point where he is fixated on biting you and if anything you do to get him to stop only encourages him even more. The key is stopping that state of mind and it will be very healthy for the puppy when you do so.

If the puppy gets fixated on biting you, be very calm and assertive. Imagine what you’d like him to do (stop biting you) and slowly get up and turn your back to the puppy. If he continues to go after your feet, slowly back him away from you with your foot (do not kick or make any fast movements) until his attention is on something else. Then go back and play with the puppy. Do this every single time he gets fixated on you instead of a toy. He will learn (normally in a week or so) that he doesn’t get attention if he bites you. It works! The KEY is to be calm and assertive when you get up and turn away from him and stand still. If you yell “ouch!” or run away, it will encourage him to chase after you and continue to do what he thinks is playing.

Once you learn how to do this correction, teach the kids. It is imperative that you teach them how to react calmly, even if he bites one of their fingers. Once the kids understand when and how to do the correction, you’ll be free of puppy over biting until those little shark teeth fall out (4-5 months old) and he doesn’t really bite anymore anyway.

Good luck with training! It’s so rewarding when you connect with your puppy in training and you realize that he is listening to you and wants to please you. Once you’ve made that connection, training is even more of a breeze.

Alisha surprised me with Cocoa, then an 8 week old cute chocolate lab puppy, as a housewarming gift in 2005. I remember telling her how I always wanted a lab puppy when I moved into my first house. I had just finished remodeling the house and was moving in right around my birthday in June 2005. I was 21 years old and so excited, but I didn’t have a puppy. We found an ad for a mixed breed litter that had labs in the mix so we went and saw the puppies. Their living conditions were terrible and I felt really bad for the litter. I wanted to rescue all of them out of there, but I knew I couldn’t. I was brand new to the “puppy world” and we started to experience how hard it was to find a sound, healthy lab puppy. We called breeder after breeder, only to come up empty. Half the time the breeders were rude to us or never returned our calls anyway.

Alisha stumbled on an ad in the “Wheeler Dealer” and found a litter of lab puppies. 🙂 She drove me out to the middle of nowhere (much like the same feeling those have when they come to our house now), I had no idea where we were going. When we pulled into this driveway, I saw an adorable chocolate lab puppy in the yard and I fell in love in about 1.5 seconds. I go back to that feeling every time a family steps out of their car to meet our puppies, it is such an amazing feeling.

Bringing her home with me and moving into my new house the very same day is something I’ll always remember. In a way I feel like we grew up together. She became my best buddy and we did everything together. We still have the chocolate brown furniture I bought just for her, she sleeps on the loveseat every night in our puppy nursery.

That started our love for labs and I am so glad we went with a healthy, purebred lab! Now she’s 12 years old and still my best buddy. Her tail is a weapon and she gets what she wants. She was one of our first moms and we LOVED her puppies with Chopper. Now she’s “Aunt Cocoa”, who turns into a puppy again whenever she plays with them. It’s fun to look back and think about where our love for labs began.

When Alisha was a teenager, she worked at “Deer Acres” a fun place to go for families. Deer acres included puppies in their petting zoo every year, and at the end of the season they would place the puppies. Well Alisha fell in love with a male Lab/Irish Setter mix puppy and she brought him home. His name was Duke and he was a great guy. When Duke was about 3 years old, he went blind. It was the hardest thing to watch him go through, it robbed him of so much in his life.

When we started raising Labs, we knew we wanted the health of our adults and puppies to be of utmost importance, so we began health testing all of our labs. One of the tests that is important to us is the test against PRA, a disease known to Labs that will cause them to go blind between ages 1 and 8. We’re proud to so that none of our Labs even carries the gene that causes this disease! Unfortunately so many of the health issues we have in Labradors in America today are hereditary, they are completely avoidable if breeders would be responsible. Right now we test for 11 different diseases known to Labradors, including PRA, and we don’t carry genes for any of them.

Here’s an article that explains PRA well if you’re interested: http://www.thelabradorsite.com/progressive-retinal-atrophy-in-dogs/

We hope you like our new website! For years we’ve enjoyed our old website- mostly because it was easy to manage! Drag and drop, cut and paste, put-anything-where-we-wanted-it-kind-of-a-thing. New website designs meant more coding and knowledge of coding. I (Steve) knew just enough about WordPress and CSS to get me in trouble.

Luckily, Alisha’s brother is a web developer and a free lance web designer on the side. (www.cullenjwebb.com) He’s talked to us so many times about creating a new website, so we finally gave in a decided to give it a try. After many, many hours of work and design, we’ve come up with something we are so in love with!

We wanted to create a website that connected with who we are as a family of lab lovers. We wanted something that was excellent, because we have always tried our best to be excellent in everything we do with our dogs. We’re firm believers that if we always did everything we could to produce healthy and happy labs, that people who brought home puppies from us would be so blessed and happy.

We think this new website captures all of that! We’re so excited to keep improving it and to see where our venture continues to lead us. Raising labs is our lifestyle, it’s our passion, it’s who we are and we couldn’t have asked for anything better! Thanks so much for checking out the site!