Lakeland Terrier Puppies for sale

The title of this blog was deliberately worded in hopes of getting to people looking to buy Lakeland or any other breed of puppies. If you found it because you are searching for a puppy, please read on before resuming your search.

I am the proud owner of two Lakeland Terriers, a dog trainer, and the friend of three of the finest Lakeland breeders you could ever know.

Last week one of them spent a couple of days visiting us. She just ended her term as president of the US Lakeland Terrier club. She told me that they had registered about a 165 puppies with the AKC each year the last two years. What she then said shocked me. She said that half the puppies came from puppy mills.

That hit hard because the last time I had checked it was difficult to find my breed in the puppy mills. I was pleased with that then because I knew that it meant others would not go through the heartbreak we went through with our first Lakeland Terrier who was a puppy mill dog.

So I searched for Lakeland Terrier puppies and was horrified to find quite a few were available from puppy mills.

I would like for my breed to be more popular. And the more Lakeland puppies that get bought, the more likely the breed is to stay around and have a stable breeding population. And on a philosophical level, if people buy puppy mill Lakelands, they might be a Lakeland owner for life.

And that is exactly what happened to me. We moved into a new house and could get a dog. Two days later I went to work and when I came home that night my wife and youngest daughter had gone to the puppy store and we had a dog.

I had heard you don’t buy a dog from a puppy store but did not know why. But I also knew you do not tell your fourteen year old daughter she has to take a puppy back.

Back then I could not find anything out about the breed but by day two I was a lifelong Lakie person.

The reason you don’t buy puppy mill dogs quickly became apparent. Button no sooner became an adult and her kidneys started to fail due to a genetic fault. We would keep her alive until she was seven, but the average life expectancy for a Lakeland is 12 to 14 years.

I would spend more keeping her alive those seven years than the two breeder produced dogs I own now would cost me.

It would have been easy to assume that Lakelands are short lived with very expensive medical costs from that experience. Fortunately by then there was a lot available on the internet. That is when I found out why you buy puppies from reputable breeders. The higher cost at the start is quite often more than offset by longer life and lower vet bills.

Many of my training clients buy puppies from the puppy stores, who get their puppies from puppy mills. Now these are usually nice dogs. Their owners often tell me that they paid one third to one half as much as they would have paid from a good breeder. I hope that they were lucky and got a dog that will live a normal life span. But on more than one occasion I find out they had the same bad experience I did.

I also see dogs from good breeders. And they did cost more. But they have fewer health problems.

Losing a dog is never easy. But losing a dog well before its normal life expectancy is horrific.

The sad fact is that puppy mill puppies are cheaper because the breeding programs these breeders aren’t sound. They mass produce dogs using female breeding stock too often and too long. And the older a female dog and the more often she breeds, the more likely the puppies will have genetic problems and shorter life spans.

The fear is that the puppy mills will make it harder and harder for good breeders to place their puppies. And since good breeders don’t make money from breeding, there will be fewer and fewer source of sound and healthy dogs, especially in the lesser known breeds.

It would be a shame if my grandchildren wouldn’t be able to consider owning a good Lakeland when they are adults.

Doug

If you are looking for a reputable breeder for Lakeland Terriers go to the United States Lakeland Club website. There is a list of reputable breeders.

Never ask a Lakeland their opinion

This blog is brought to you courtesy of my wife Yvonne. This is an e-mail she sent out a couple of weeks ago:

Lesson #1: Never ask a Lakeland their opinion……….. If you don’t want to hear the truth.



And so it was…………………………

Sears delivered my new treadmill yesterday. When I arrived home and after letting Tag and Chicklet out to go potty and rid the back yard of dreaded foxes……………..Chicklet came back in to inspect the new arrival. I asked her what she thought of Mommy’s new treadmill………. where Chicklet promptly jumped on the virgin track, daintily squatted, and produced just a few droplets of pee.

After my shock and horror, Ms. Chicklet spent the night tethered a few feet away from Mommy’s new treadmill, a pretty weighted collar added to her neck jewelry, where she watched as Mommy walked on the treadmill.

Chicklet is home today…………………glaring at the ###!!!@@@!!! treadmill.

Lesson Learned: I will not ask Chicklet her opinion of my new lamp. I can’t handle the truth.

Love to all, Yon

Doug

Another Lakeland Terrier

This is Joie. She is a Lakeland Terrier who started training Monday.

About two weeks ago I got an e mail from a rescue group asking for help. I replied with our standard offer. We will give a discount to rescue dogs from recognized organizations for dog’s that come in within thirty days of adoption. I also added that we will donate a free training package to any rescue Lakeland Terrier as part of our commitment to our breed.

Now Lakeland’s are rare so I was surprised to learn they had a mill rescue Lakeland. She got adopted this weekend and Jan called me on Saturday. Joie came in yesterday even though Jan had to come down from the Denver area.

Jan has a sister who lives here in Colorado Springs. Her sister, Debbie has shown Lakelands so Jan was familiar with the breed.

These rescue dogs are breeding dogs that are no longer used and are useless to the puppy mill. If they are not rescued they are put down.

The conditions for most of these puppy mill breeding dogs are horrid. Most are confined to a small cage or crate almost their entire lives. As a result they have never been socialized to people or dogs.

Usually working with this kind of a dog is a long and drawn out process. Some dogs come in to the center three or four times where all we do is let them get comfortable. There is no training, just desensitization to the environment. They not only have trouble making decisions, some of them literally do not know how to be dogs. So it can be months before we start. And sadly not all of them will make much progress.

So when Joie came in I was amazed at how confident she was. It was pretty close to a typical lesson I routinely give to dogs that have normal backgrounds. Joie and her new mom did well.

I think the reason she was so trainable so soon was one of the attributes of this breed. When they worked in England, they sometimes would get trapped and would have to wait days to be rescued. There are even stories of owners having to use explosives to get to them. To be able to lie in the cold and the dark is bred into them.

She will be back in a couple of weeks for her next lesson. She is a Lakeland, and they are the most challenging dog to train. So I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all she is still in the “honeymoon” phase of her relationship with her owner.

But whatever happens I’m pretty sure this dog will make it.

Doug

Pushing a Pumpkin

We picked up Chicklet, our female Lakeland, in September of 2004. In October my wife put out the Halloween decorations. She immediately seized on the plastic pumpkin we had by the door.

Periodically she digs it out of her toy basket. She will grab it and shake it, she will stick her head in it, and often she will push it around the floor with her fiercest growl. She will put other toys in it and then get them out and shake them. She will play with it for quite some time, and then unexpectedly leave it and go on to something else.

For the longest time I thought it was just one of those goofy things dogs pick up. Then I thought about what Lakeland terriers were bred to do. Unlike the other terrier breeds that are used to go after foxes, the Lakeland will not only bolt the fox out where the hounds can kill it, it will also go into the den and kill the fox.

Now in the Lake County of England, where the breed originated, fox are not hunted for sport. Most of the farmers have sheep and the fox endangers the sheep herd. So for economic reasons the Lakeland was developed to be able to go in the rocky terrain to make a kill so that the farmer did not lose sheep. They have been known to spend up to a week tunneling and digging to get to the fox.

When I read that I knew why Chicklet pushes the pumpkin. In almost every breed, play is also practice for the work they were originally bred to do. Chicklet is practicing pushing rocks aside to get to the fox.

And it isn’t just Chicklet. The picture is a puppy at nine weeks. Izzy saw the pumpkin and started working with it immediately. Izzy is a proud graduate on Pikes Peak Manners In Minutes and a wonderful dog. Hopefully I told her owners to get her a pumpkin, otherwise she may appropriate theirs this October.

Doug

Button and the TV remote

My first Lakeland was named Button. A puppy mill dog, she was a great pet and a constant source of amusement.

One of her more endearing, and sometimes frustrating, habits was stealing the remote to the television. Often you would go to change the channel only to find the remote missing. At first you might think it had fallen between the cushions or on the floor. When that search failed, the next step was to go to Button’s crate. And more often than not, there would be the remote. Button would be nearby with “how did that get there?” look on her face.

After a while the game took on a new dimension. Button would run through the room with the remote in her mouth. I did not know it at the time, but it was her way of initiating a chase, which by the way can be a dominance test. The way we dealt with it was to ignore her and change the channels by hand.

But the game wasn’t over yet. The next step was for her to change the channels with her teeth. That guaranteed she would be chased. At the time I thought that she had learned that trick by accident.

When we had Button we did not know anything about Lakelands or Manners in Minutes training. Later after she went over the rainbow bridge, I was talking with some Lakie owners. It turned out that she wasn’t the only Lakie that had learned that trick.

Like a lot of breeds, Lakelands absorb a great deal of knowledge by watching what their humans do. She had made the connection between the remote and the TV, figured out how important it was to her people and turned it into the game.

So now when owners tell me the amusing, and sometimes frustrating, little quirks their dogs have, I know where the behavior comes from.