Texangals

  Zoot is from the very first litter I ever bred at Texangals, the Monty Python and the Holy Grail Litter, and coming off the back of a wonderful set of five potential show puppies, I have really high hopes for the quality of her litter with Robbie. I bred Robbie, too: he was the gentle and sweet boy from the "Bizarre Adventure" litter from 2019 (Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure is an anime that I'm particularly fond of, and Robbie's registered name comes from one of the characters on it). He is owned by Tonda Curry and Terry Fehrman from the Canton area of Texas. Rohan Kishibe, aka "Heaven's Door" Both Zoot and Robbie have pedigrees that are heavily influenced by their English roots, with a generous helping of Maggical/Rosewood and a splash of St Lazar. They're also a couple of lovely, portable, compact 10-pounders, and talk about athleticism, Zoot has always shown that she was born with springs in her legs, jumping over 32-inch x-pens from a standstil...

  Zoot fooled us all and had her litter of 5 puppies in the week BEFORE Christmas, all hearty and hale at the very creditable weights between 5 and 6 ounces. All puppies are currently reserved, but we are taking applications to get on the list for the next set of puppies we hope to have in the summer.

It’s the big, big thing on Facebook right now, showing a photo of your dog with another beside it that relates to your dog’s name. I have been wary of joining in: these Facebook things are ways of data gathering, and I’m very suspicious of them. Also, you may be hard-pressed to work out most of mine! So for your viewing pleasure (or not), here is the dog name challenge for Texangals while I’m down to just the three girls.

While we've all been staying home and sheltering because of Covid-19, we have taken advantage of the AKC's offer to video our dogs doing tricks, submitting them to evaluators online, and qualifying for Trick Dog titles. Today, we got official notice that Bonnie and Trish have both received their TKN titles, meaning Trick Dog Novice. Bonnie, being a champion already, had to do only five tricks, but Trish as a 7-mos old puppy and not yet a champion, had to perform 10 tricks. Their entry videos that their owner/handler junior, Joey, edited and submitted are on our Texangals youtube channel: I'll link to them at the bottom. So without further ado, I now give you: CH Bluebonnet Dreaming Spires at Texangals TKN Texangals Trish Spicy Lady TKN Bonnie's video:  https://youtu.be/H6IWvGwPKSU Trish's video:  https://youtu.be/gzDy05GBfK8

We had three beautiful puppies born on April Fool's Day, 2020. They came out the easy way, head first, and none were what I'd call a runt, though we do have one that currently is a couple of ounces smaller than his brothers. Because Dad's nickname is Bentley and mama is English, we decided to think about names of famous British cars for this litter, and so meet: Robin Reliant (red), Mini Cooper (light blue), and Aston Martin (silver). Mom and babies are doing well, and we're starting to see those lovely little peepers! They have been good company in these weird days of shutdown over the virus fears: if it hadn't been for the virus, I'd be going for a business trip to England soon, and missing 3 precious weeks of their lives and socialization period.

Introducing our "Bizarre" litter: Rohan, Trish, Lisa-Lisa, and Suzi Q, named after our family's favorite anime show, Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure. Our 3-ounce diddy Lisa-Lisa alongside Rohan and Suzi Q Like most popular culture, particularly films or comic-type stories, we had a lot more boys' names lined up than girls, but are thrilled to pieces that we have 3 girls and one boy from the breadth we get from the stud dog's line and its St Lazar influence. The puppies arrived in the early hours of Sunday, at least four days earlier than expected, but being (mostly) larger than any of the mama's previous pups, we're assuming she had ovulated earlier in the week than we'd thought, and probably just caught the end of her fertile period when we bred her the day of her progesterone test. Phew! That was a close call, then! Mama and babies are doing well, but the up-shot of this is that I'll be having puppies looking for homes in about 8 weeks...

Oh my gosh! You couldn't make this up! I return to Texas from a business trip to the UK to find that my foundation bitch (and new champion), Bonnie, is not only coming into season, but IS IN SEASON NOW!!!! Fortunately, I had lined up a stud dog in north Texas many months ago, and they were around to accept a flying visit right after the vet said, "Yup. She wants breeding today!" I didn't even have a chance to gather up her favorite food or pack her crate or anything, because it was a long drive ahead of me JUST TO GET THERE, much less come back that night. We left her up there for a few days and had a lot of good "action", so all being well, we should have puppies around the middle of August. We are already taking puppy applications for them, so if you want to get high up on the list, you'd better fill one out sooner rather than later! For your benefit, I've included the pedigrees of the dam and sire so you can feast your eyes on some lo...

It was so good to get out this weekend with the dogs and not be hundreds of miles away at a show. March in Texas means bluebonnets, so obviously, I had to get our foundation mama, Bonnie, out there for her annual photo: her official name is "Bluebonnet Dreaming Spires", after all! Then she started running through the butterweed. Zoot and Ted had a terrific time when chasing each other at the local lake, prompting people to come over to us and ask if they were Italian greyhounds!

It felt like the treadmill was on high speed, but the ultimate reward was worth it! Chilling after a crazy month The month of March saw my son and me traveling from dog show to dog show, all of which were more than 2 1/2 hours from our home so we stayed in Air BnBs rather than waking at 4 am and trying to get the girls to the ring in some kind of decent frame of mind. The long and the short of it was that all three of our girls - Bonnie, Zoot, and Ted - were picked as top bitches at some point during the month, gaining points and majors, and ultimately, we FINISHED the championship for Bonnie at Navasota! Bonnie, the new champion Ted gets her first points while still a puppy Zoot gets a major We're so excited that Bonnie can now retire and focus on having babies while her daughters, Zoot and Ted, can continue their campaigns for champion status. If you want one of Bonnie's future babies, be sure to fill in a puppy application and get into o...

I'm absolutely shocked to see that my foundation bitch, "Bonnie", is currently ranked 19th in the country in Toy Manchesters. We were hoping to "finish" her in the next few shows and retire her, but now we are re-thinking that plan: wouldn't it be great to build on this success and actually get INVITED to a show?? This may "pause" our plans to breed her till the next season so she can attend any show that she might get invited to, but I think it's worth it to plunge ahead while we have a start on it already. In the meantime, we are scouring the country from north/south/east/west for the best mate for her when we next prepare for a litter. It's so hard: so many nice dogs around, but we want to get the best breeding lines, best body type, best temperament, most genetically sound, and ... closest geographically??? ... dog we can find, and sometimes, all those competing details are hard to line up just right. Especially the geogra...

The past six months or so has seen a resurgence of interest in the breed in the great state of Texas. Whereas I spent most of the early part of 2017 on my own in the show ring, we've seen as many as nine at a single show, and more puppies are coming of age every month. I really should make an effort at the next one to photograph us all together. The top moment so far has been my foundation bitch's second "major" at the recent Austin area show. This means that she has jumped a big hurdle on her way to a championship. As of writing this, she needs five more points, and hopefully, with Navasota, Crosby, Kerrville, Rosenberg, and possibly a one-day appearance at Ft Worth, I think the likelihood of her success is pretty high. Bonnie and Zoot celebrate Winner and Runner-Up at Austin One of the best parts of having more people at the shows is the community we're building up: everyone is friendly and supportive, and we're making the effort to populate th...

Where has the time gone? My little hands-ful of black-and-tan are now arms-ful!! We have been hitting the dog shows in Texas and finding it very useful to have three female dogs to enter, needing only one more girlie to come along and make a major. Bill and Ted's mama won one of these in Tyler, but the big news was when Ted took Toy Group 1 in Beginner Puppy in one of the Belton shows. Our next appearance will be at the Nolan River club's show in Glen Rose on 5th and 6th of January. It would be lovely to see some "fans" to turn up and talk TMT!

Wednesday was a rough day ... my mama whelped, first losing one that hadn't quite closed up its skull (stillborn, thank goodness), and then two more straightforward, head-first, wiggly-body squeakers, and me with my excitement and trepidation, getting all their sexes wrong! My kids thought we'd got two boys long enough to name them Bill and Ted, and now for love nor money, they will not budge on the names even after we discovered that one of them was a girl. So, please meet Bill and "Theodora" or Ted: They're bigger by nearly about 30 g (1 oz) than any of our babies from last year, and over the first five days, they've been gaining at nearly an ounce a day! We are very relieved that both puppies have show homes ready for them, but there are never any guarantees in this kind of situation, so should you want a Toy Manchester puppy, please get in touch to fill out a puppy form. Just in case. The mama has been as good as gold as usual, ...

So now it's got to May and I haven't been posting in a long time. I don't know why not ... so much has been going on! The first thing that I want to show off is my new doggy buggy. It's a Gen7 Regal Plus that I bought to replace my old purple one after its zippers broke. This one is definitely better made: the zippers are silky smooth, the fabric of a higher quality, the frame more sturdy, and the wheels roll like they're on glass. I can't recommend it enough. The other thing we've been doing is taking Zoot to dog shows around central Texas. The highlight so far was winning OH Group 4 at Navasota back in March. In the meantime, we've had the most awesome time in catching up again with little sister, Coco AKA "Sophie Mae". She's no match for the speedy long legs of "Zooty-Pie", but they do nothing but non-stop play when they get together. And now for our biggest news: as I write this, I am on puppy watch for ...

After lots of video and lots of long phone conversations, after bribing my young teenager to splice film and photos into a montage, after changing my mind one way and then another, it is finally time to announce the puppy that we're going to keep with us at Texangals: Meet Zoot. Zoot was our first born. She has always been the confident one, and when it comes to moving on the lead, she's happy to move ahead of me instead of being tugged along like her mama! There are times when I see her in the grass outside that I'm reminded of our little boy puppy, Ozzie, who died last year, but she's got more balance to her than I remembered of him. Even from a young age, she impressed me with her commanding presence. What I like about her, too, is how she's so comfortable in the group or alone, such as here when she's showing off her new sweater made out of fluffy socks (she's in the bright green).               Of...

The pups are now sporting their collars so we can tell them apart. We took them through their paces this week to make videos that we could share with our breeding mentors: nothing too professional as my kids had the time and the desire to make a few bucks, and I didn't have the time to do more than that. My boy "Busy Timmy" with Puppy #1 Zoot After a few aborted attempts to navigate the AKC website today, I got a very helpful customer service person named Amy to help me through the process. The next step will be to choose the puppies' official names, but Amy suggested I do this with the owners so we pay only one fee. Sounds good to me! On the progress front, Mr Tim is not only the most photogenic because he keeps crossing his paws, he is also the first to use the doggy door! (Mr Banksy who is now 13 months took about 7 months to work this one out: Tim took about 7 weeks. Clever chap!) Tim with Mama, not to be confused with Busy Timmy I was very im...

We have puppies! Our lovely English Toy Terrier, Bonnie, delivered four puppies on August 31st, about four days before we were expecting them (thus ruining a romantic weekend for hubby and me, but we've been given a raincheck by the cottages so we'll get there eventually!). Shhh ... tired mama. The children have always intended to use Monty Python and the Holy Grail names for the puppies, so first one out was immediately called Zoot. Bonnie was quite restless and seeming to try to get comfy to nurse, but NO! She was actually contracting to deliver a teeny, tiny little thing we called Coco. The third was called Dennis, even though she is a girl, and finally, we were blessed with Tim. Dennis, Zoot, and Tim with the kids - (Coco was sleeping) Bonnie turned out to be a great mom, but we were worried about little Coco. The others were born at 4 1/2 ounces or around 130 grams, but Coco was only 2 ounces and 60 grams. We think perhaps she was Zoot's twin, sharing...