Welcome to D'Tresors Kennels

Welcome to my world. It sits almost exactly in the center of Whidbey Island, just south of Coupeville. My world consists of the house and land I spent 20 years saving for, a community that I’m proud to be a member of, and a circle of friends I hold closer than any in my life. I spent those 20 years in the Navy, traveling and working all over the world. It pretty well ruined my health and I needed something to restore myself, body and soul.

One of the things I decided to do was indulge my love of animals and return to breeding dogs. I raised cockapoos while stationed in San Francisco and found them to be highly trainable and extremely charming. When I first started looking around for animals, I concentrated on cocker spaniels. A couple of years ago, I finally found a miniature poodle to start a line of cockapoos, in addition to my cockers. This last year, I found a parti colored poodle to expand my color selection of "Poos."

I’m a firm believer in a process of training taught to me by my step-father. I combined his training techniques with those I learned about from a horse trainer – Monty Roberts. They both worked from the animal’s perspective, rather than being coercive. Essentially, you observe what an animal does and reinforce what you would like it to do while ignoring or redirecting those things you don’t want them to do. If you work within a dog’s natural behavior, you can get amazing results.

Cockers are bird dogs and they range back and forth trying to flush birds. They were originally bred to flush, find and retrieve birds. Poodles are also bird dogs. That really funky poodle cut was originally to trap air and help the poodle keep his head above the water with a bird in his mouth. Poodles are incredibly intelligent and trainable, you may have seen them in a circus act doing all sorts of stunts. Combine the two breeds and you get a very personable, happy dog that is extremely trainable. Another side affect is that the “hair” that the hybrid has is hypo-allergenic. Many people with allergies can deal with a cockapoo when they can’t deal with any other of the “furred” dogs.

My neighbor and I go walking with all of the dogs every morning the weather and work permits. She has a border collie and two of the cockers from my litters. I have 11 adult dogs, 1 juvenile and 2 puppies. It makes for quite a sight. I work with my dogs every day in one form or another. They’re kept in pairs so they always have one another to play with. Pregnant females come into the house prior to whelping and remain there until their pups are weaned.

The rest of my days are spent working on my place, canning specialty jams, jellies and chutneys, and finally being part of the community I live in. I live my life as healthily as I can and try to live by my credo. I believe that the majority of the world’s ills have been caused by coercion – by a person, a group, or a country, and that in order to do my part to make the world better, I must encourage, but never coerce. Again, welcome to my world.

Past Columns

July 07 Yeah, I know this is way out of date.  It’s coming… but I’m busy getting ready for two litters of cockers (January 2008) and two litters of cockapoos (Jan and Feb 2008).  The February litter of cockapoos will be merles!

Oh my goodness. There’s a very potent curse, “May you live in interesting times.” When I interviewed for my last position in the Navy in 2001, I told my potential boss that I wanted an interesting job for my final tour - I didn’t want to be bored. I got the job and took over as the Security Officer for Submarine Base Bangor on 9-10-2001! I definitely wasn’t bored and I thank God that I had such a professional crew to cover all my shortcomings. They did an outstanding job of keeping us safe; and those that are still in the service of us all - continue to do so. I hope you keep them in your hearts and prayers – and extend a helping hand to their families back here who are dealing with overwhelming problems and emotions that come from having their loved ones in harm’s way.

That being said, I should have known better when I started getting a little complacent about my dogs.Everything was going well, animals were all healthy, and good homes were showing up for all of my pups. THREE dogs went into heat on the same day! Since I walk them in groups, I was quite surprised to see my male poodle running between three different ladies. He didn’t quite know what to do. J Nature took it’s course, and I have several litters now ready or soon to be ready. Colors are black, chocolate, Silvers, and at least one Café au Lait. Most of the pups are females, but there is one chocolate boy and a couple of black boys. Time will tell if they turn into Silvers or Café au Laits. Base price for a solid female cockapoo is $600; silvers, parties, or Café au Laits are $700; and if there happens to be a combination of silver, parties or Café au lait, they will be $150-200 more than the base price. As always my boys are discounted $50 from the females.

In line with living an “interesting life,” my 30-year-old roof failed – during a series of storms last winter. About a square yard of tile was blown right off of my roof! So there I was, almost 50 years old myself, climbing a rickety ladder with a bundle of tiles over my shoulder trying to get new tiles put down - just a few hours ahead of the second biggest windstorm of the year. The tiles didn’t match the old roof, and I cursed the guys who put the first roof down without removing the plastic tape that would have allowed them to adhere better, but I finished the last tile just as the gusts of wind were starting to get dangerous. I had visions of the wind blowing the ladder down and being stuck up there for the duration of the storm. Did I mention that my nearest neighbor can’t be seen from my house and even though I can project a “command” voice fairly well, it probably wouldn’t have been heard over the howling of the wind? The reason I mention this now is that as I’m typing this, there is a guy up on my roof (driving the dogs crazy) putting on a new roof – good thing my neighbors are on vacation. When he came this afternoon, ALL BY HIMSELF, he looked at my 3-layer roof, all covered with moss, and took his hat off and scratched his scalp and looked at me and said, “you have a lot of moss up there.” The man has a positive genius for understating the obvious, but he’s going gangbusters now. He’ll probably have the roof finished before I (more correctly Bridget) gets this onto the website!

My biggest current joy, though, is that I FINALLY have a litter of merle cockapoo pups!!! I have planned and done my research for YEARS in preparation of this litter. My little Sandy, only 14 lbs., had FIVE pups and every single one of them was very large. Three of those pups were merles. There is one chocolate girl, a dark chocolate boy and a light chocolate boy. The two lighter pups may also be Café Au Laits. They should eventually weigh 13-14 lbs. Sandy is such an excellent mom, that she keeps trying to steal puppies from the other moms! She’s very attentive and is very good at keeping them and the nest clean. Believe me, the cleanliness part is VERY IMPORTANT.

In the course of researching merle cockapoos, I found puppies (not so nice as mine) for as much as $1300. After a lot of soul searching, I’ve set my price at $1000, male or female. Because breeding merles can be tricky, these pups, and the other pups in the litter, will be sold on a strict spay/neuter contract. You can have a cryptic merle dog that doesn’t show any merle patterns, but still carries the gene. I may allow full breeding rights if the prospective owner can convince me they have done their homework and fully understand the intricacies of breeding merles. In support of my merles, I am in the process of building a page specifically for them. I expect to have one or two litters of merles a year (I now also have two male merles – one chocolate parti cocker and a silver, blue-merle poodle). Since these pups are VERY POPULAR, I am going to start a wait list for merles only. There will be a $200 fee (not a deposit) to be on the list. Only two “holds” per litter will be accepted (genetically, only 50% of a litter will be merle since you NEVER, EVER breed a merle to a merle). The fee will be applied to the final cost of the pup, but is not refundable. A payment schedule can be arranged, but the pup must be paid in full when it is picked up. I accept checks or Paypal for interim payments, but final payment must be in cash or by Paypal.

Feb 2007 The best laid plans often go awry; Washi unexpectedly went into heat (so far only 2 times in 4 years), so I found her a great stud at another kennel – her cockers are due March 21st.  Taku and Peaches, one of whom shouldn’t have gone into heat for another couple of months, will be having their cockapoos March 25th and April 2nd. Sadie has extremely short heat periods, but I THINK she and Bailey will be having cockers March 29th. Needless to say, March and April are going to be interesting months.

 

BIG NEWS; I’m going to try using a PayPal button and see how it goes.  You can make payments on either the cocker or the cockapoos pages.  Emailing or calling ahead is also a good idea until I have all the bugs worked out. Be sure to give me the name of the puppy you want.  Deposits are $200 and are only partially refundable, so be sure this is what you want to do.  Furthermore, PayPal charges me 3% to use this (plus a per action charge), so the 3% charge  will also be calculated as part of any payment made with PayPal.  Something else to keep in mind if you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest – while I do ship, I don’t like to send a puppy on a journey where there will be a lengthy layover and I MUCH prefer no layovers at all!

 

I’ve joined a couple of email groups.  One is a group of breeders of merles.  My Sandy is a chocolate merle and I’ve just received a little boy that I have named Merle’n (AKC doesn’t give you the option to chose merle as a coat color, so you should put it in the name).  He is a merled chocolate parti.  Breeding merles is a tricky business and I want to be as informed as possible.  They’re a really great group of people who conscientiously work towards spreading information about merles.  There’s a big controversy about merles and cocker spaniels.  You can’t show them in the AKC ring and the American Spaniel Club doesn’t recognize them.  But they sure do look great.  My plans are to eventually get the merle gene into my cockapoos.  It’s going to take a couple/three years to get the genes into the cockapoos, but they’re going to look really cool!

 

Dec 2006 For the first time since I’ve lived here, we’ve had two days of snow; Usually we only get a few hours of snow and then it melts.  Not only is this staying, we’ve got about 4” on the ground and it’s still coming down; Now I grew up in the snow in the mountains of Colorado.  We always used to say we could identify the Texans by the way they drove, now I’ve got a newer definition of drivers – low-landers who have never driven in snow.  I’m sure you’re seen them.  They’re either going so slow they’re going to cause an accident by making everyone else crazy or they’re going so fast they’re going to cause an accident because they have no idea where their car is going when they try and make that corner.  It’s a good day to stay home and work on the website; I did take the dogs out for a walk in the snow.  They LOVED it; But they really didn’t know what to do with all of those snow balls that soon coated their legs and bellies.  Bismarck got so much snow on his front legs he was throwing them wide like a bow-legged prizefighter.  Every once in a while, he’d not get his legs up high enough, trip himself and do a face plant in the snow.  He’d come up looking like, “I meant to do that.”   The snow is really wet, sticking to everything and I got a pretty good workout making my way through it.  The evergreens are starting to snap under the weight of the snow.  If you go outside, you can hear the limbs cracking.  Sets the dogs off every time.  The first picture is as we’re coming back from the walk.  You can just make out the fence that surrounds the chicken coop.  Behind all those trees is my house and the kennels.  The other pictures are of the dogs on the walk – it was tough getting even these blurry pictures; Finally, I took a picture of Mickey’s back leg just before I started pulling all the balls of snow off.  I’d like you to imagine cleaning up 15 dogs that way!

 

Sept 2006 It’s been a little while since I’ve had the time to update this site (me and my web builder that is!).  I’ve had four litters of puppies on the ground at the same time.  You’d think that each additional litter couldn’t possibly add that much work, but it sure does.  My two hours of maintenance chores turned into four – and that doesn’t include exercising adult dogs.  Since the last time we updated, Mandy has been adopted to a wonderful family with two children (see her picture on our Pride and Joy Page), Washi weaned her pups and has gone to spend some quality time with her previous owner (she’ll come back for her next round of pups), and we’re waiting for Taku to have her pups.  In the mean time, the proceeds from two pups rented some equipment and hired a man to clean out the underbrush behind the barn (see picture below).  That’s where my big exercise/fun yard is going to be.  I envision obstacles for the dogs to climb, platforms to loll about and watch the world, and toys for them to play with: but as you can see, there’s still a bit of clean-up to do, a large tree to drop before the fence can go in and some white clover to plant.  I’m 6 years into my 20-year plan and I might have to just turn off the imagination because I keep thinking of new things to do!