health screening

Our aim is to breed companions that will give their owners a lot of happiness and joy. To achieve this, good health is a very important factor.

Therefore we only breed from dogs that have had certain breed specific health screenings, for Golden Retrievers these are mainly hip-scoring and eye-testing. Once we know the results we can choose the stud dog carefully to match a particular bitch. This reduces the likelyhood of those conditions being present in the puppies but doesn't rule them out completely.

In addition to the diseases that we screen for there are lots of other things that could be wrong - just the same as in humans. Obviously we hope that our puppies are not affected but inevitably the odd one will be.

We always try to outcross (i.e. not linebreed or inbreed in any other way) as far as this is possible which we consider fundamental in producing healthy puppies.

Another very important factor is the puppies' temperament. Again, we try to find suitable stud dogs for our bitches to achieve our aim: happy puppies/dogs that can cope with everyday life and enjoy life with their new families.

Please let us know if one of our puppies has a problem - it is very important that we are aware as it might influence future matings.

So finally there is unfortunately no guarantee that all puppies will be healthy or have long lives. While we would never knowingly sell a sick puppy, some conditions only become apparent later in life and vet bills can be expensive. Please bear all this in mind when you decide whether or not to get a puppy!