|
About Us
Joanna grew up in northern Indiana, and met Ryan while at Purdue University. We got married in 1992, moved to Raleigh in 1995 after Ryan graduated from UW-Madison. We lived there for 11 years and moved to the Lynchburg area in 2006.
When we moved to Raleigh, we contacted Neuse River Golden Retriever Rescue and adopted our first two dogs, Odie and Lanna. We raised two dogs for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, then started raising Bernese Mountain Dogs. Our first was CH Wasserand Liam v Falkental. We thought he'd be a great breeding dog and we had three other Bernese girls, but for various reasons, neither Maia, Freyja, nor Meadow had the right qualities to become breeding dogs and we weren't willing to compromise our standards. In the meantime, Joanna graduated from UNC in 1998, worked for the AKC for 2 1/2 years, and spent four years running her own boarding kennel. Oh, and we started an alpaca farm!
After we moved to our much bigger farm in Virginia and heard the coyotes and stray dogs howling at the moon, we decided that the alpacas could use a couple of guardians. We contacted Tamoora Anatolians and soon we picked up Kelebek and Aiden. Aiden has developed into a lovely (and BIG!) guardian, but Kelebek was not only smart and tough, but beautiful. We decided to give her a try in the show ring and she took a reserve championship in her first show. The second show brought the first of her four majors. She won her last points (two four-point majors) in March 2008 at the Raleigh shows out of a large open class, and after several months of being out of the ring too - our fault as we had our second daughter in the middle of that. I thought I might just finally have a bitch worthy of breeding. She passed her health clearances easily and at the suggestion of our breeder, we bred her to "SciFi" - another dual-purpose show and working dog, who just happened to finish his championship at the National Specialty.
We are so excited about this litter and hope to get some wonderful puppies.
|
