I support a few Bulldog charities and also work with many amazing Bulldog Breeders in the UK.
One of the things I am most passionate about is breeding healthier Bulldogs for the future generations so that we don't lose our beloved breed to bad health.
The Bulldog (along with many other breeds) has been badly bred in the past, but over the last 20 years there have been some amazing improvememnts made through selective breeding programmes and health testing breeding pairs. The results were clear this year at Crufts with the amazing standard of dogs there on show.
Such a gorgeous boy here!...
Unfortunately, there are still some pretty bad breeders out there too who just breed for money and don't care about the health of the puppies they produce, as long as they get their £2000 per puppy.
It is hard to fight against greed, so the best way to do this is to educate would be puppy buyers,so here I am putting myself out there as a bulldog breeder and explaining how it is from my perspective.
Most of the Bulldogs you will see in the media ARE NOT good specimens of the breed. There was a TV programme recently about the health of the Bulldog and I was hoping it would show the good breeders and the healthy Bulldogs that people should be looking for and warning against buying from unreputable breeders, but unfortunately the program focused on unhealthy Bulldogs.
As a result it seemed like a very one sided story and didn't show just how many amazing Bullies there are out there. It wanted to demoninse the breed. I guess that pulls in more viewers, but hey ho; here I am to tell the story from the other side!
As an ethical Bulldog Breeder, I strive to produce puppies that are an improvement on the parents. We always start by health testing the dogs BEFORE we decide to breed them to make sure we are giving the puppies the very best start that we can.
We then look for a complimentary Stud with health tests and also look at the inbreeding numbers to make sure they are not too closely related, although some breeders do line breeding which means they want a certain trait to continue, so they may choose a more closely related pair to acheive this to try and ensure the specific trait is carried on.
My Bullies are an athletic shape. they can run around a field like any other dog and can breath before, during and after!
Today, I will be assisting with a Dutch Health Test run in the UK for breathing. This involves walking the dog for 1km in under a specified period of time and the dog is then checked by a vet for breathing and scored as a pass or fail as a result.
We also have the UK breathing test which is called the BOAS test, however the dog is put into a chamber to test oxygen levels and some of the dogs get freaked out by this and fail the test due to panic, so the Dutch test is deemed as a more accurate result and in my opinion much better because of the 1km walking distance. A dog should be able to walk 1km easily, or else what kind of quality of life will it have?
So that is my day today, I will be out in the field (in the rain) working with my amazing Vet and a group of Bulldog breeders to continue the hard work that goes on every day in the Bulldog Breeding world.
I will post some pictures later on and let you know how we get on!
