Q:Are these puppies available? When?
A: Yes, these puppies are available to good homes.
They should be weaned and available late August to early September. (Yeah -
Summer
Time Puppies! - So much easier than our last X-mas batch!).
Q: What do you consider a good home?
Well first, you must want to Luv a Bu. That's not very hard, they'll love you right back. A bit more difficult is to make sure
they will be happy at your place. Remember, Buhunds are very
active dogs. A fenced yard, kids and/or other animals to play with,
and lots of attention are important. Finally, some of these dogs
may be show quality. If you plan on showing them, or do other
organized dog sports with them like agility, flyball, rally, so
much the better. (We can give you hints and links to all the above
if you're interested.)
Q: So, why do you call it F-Litter?
A: One rather important feature of pure breed dogs is their lineage.
This is why their official names are all long and have their kennel
name in it (e.g Jotunn Bella Binna or
Tolgens Jaeren Kaare). Similarly, it's
important to know what litter the puppies are from. I'm not
sure how others do it, but several other dog breeders we know all
label their litters A,B,C, and so forth. This is our sixth
litter, hence the F.
Now the real crazy breeders like to give dogs names based on not only their heritage, but also based on the litter name. Our very first litter we had one dog (Anya). In our second litter, we had 5 (Baron, Beowulf, Binna, Bergitta, and Briet). This makes it easy to identify their brothers and sisters. When the puppies moved on to other homes, their names got changed, but we'll always remember them by those original names.
The C-litter was a problem - there are almost no names in either Norwegian or Old Norse that begin with the letter C (look it up, I dare you!). I started calling the little black boy Chewie, because he looked like a Wookie.
There weren't too many Norwegian names starting with D, so many of the litter had more american'ized names. To of the more noteable ones are Razzle Dazzle, who's doing very well in the show ring, and Deja Bu, who has seen it all before.
The E litter is sill pretty new. We have Enja. Need to ask Vali about where all the others have gone.
Luckily, the F-Litter won't be too much of a problem. There are lots of Norwegian names starting with the letter F. However, avoid calling one of these puppies Freya (unless you really really want to), that name is way popular for girl Buhunds, and is the name of at least one of their relatives.
Q: Why the current colorful names?
A: First of all, they need some sort of name so we can talk about
them, but we don't want to give them real names until much later if
at all. You get too attached to them that way. But the main
reason is that we can then coordinate their names with their collars
(velcro is a wonderful invention!). This way can tell who they
are in the photographs months from now when they're all grown up,
which is actually hard.
Unfortunatly, there are only 5 colors in the set of velcro straps I'm using and 8 puppies. So two are lucky and don't get the colars. I'm calling them tan and black (I'll let you guess what color they are!). Then there's Funky...