17 November 2006

The hovawarts in the press

The December issue of Your Dog, which is now available in the kiosk, has a very interesting feature on the hovawarts, written by famous judge Andrew Brace.
I was very happy to see that it emphasises so much the working background of the breed. A recent article about the hovawart in a French canine magazine disappointed quite a lot of people from the hovawart community by hardly talking about the hovawart as a working dog while it is what the breed is mainly about.
The article in Your Dog also describes the hovawart as a "no nonsense" dog and I think it fits perfectly well. If you don't have the magazine at home yet, I suggest you treat yourself now. It is worth reading!

The only thing that made me twitch a bit was the maintenance cost of £10 per week. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but adding cost of food, vet bills (and I'm lucky enough to have dogs that are rarely ill) and the odd collar or bedding that need to be replaced seems to be more than that, especially if you don't have enough dogs at home to qualify for breeder pricing. I also saw that the cost of a hovawart was said to be £700. It is true that it is the price that most breeders charge nowadays for a hovawart puppy. It is not a ridiculous price for a well bred dog, but only 2 years ago, it was not uncommon to find hovawart puppies at £500. I find a 20% increase in price in 2 years quite steep and I'm wondering if the trend is going to continue. I can't really blame breeders who sell their dogs at that price as there are people out there happy to pay this. But I think we need to consider the consequences for the breed if the puppies become more and more expensive. First of all, there are out there people who steal dogs for ransom. If the price of our breed increases, don't we risk attracting the attention of these people? Secondly, the possible financial gain of breeding hovawarts if our prices keep increasing could bring to the world of hovawart breeding people who may not have the best interest of the breed at heart. So I do hope that this trend will calm down before we all regret it and that the price of a hovawart puppy will stay reasonable.

Discover Hovawarts

Last week-end was Discover Dogs at Earls Court and even though our stand was on the edge of the hall this year, it was pretty busy with people coming to meet the hovawarts. It was actually so busy that we ran out of club leaflets on the Sunday afternoon!!
I've read the total attendance for the whole show was 26,000 over the 2 days, which is 2,000 more than the previous year. So I guess we were not the only stand to be busy.
The dogs as usual did a wonderful job and really enjoyed their day getting fussed and demonstrating some of their skills for a treat.
A lot of people were mainly looking for a family dog, but it was also nice to meet visitors interested in doing agility, obedience or heelwork to music. And I hope that we will also see more and more people coming to the hovawarts with an interest in tracking and other scentwork as this is what hovawarts do best. I remember the first time we put our Scamp on a track. She was not older that 4 or 5 months old. We only showed her the beginning of the track and off she went, with a precision and a dedication that amazed us in such a young dog.

Read the previous breed notes