Category Archives: Puppy Raising

Remembering Tracy

Tracy at the Marriott Residence Inn in Colorado Springs, May 13, 2011.

I named her Tres, because she was my third Angel Service Dog, but in an ill-conceived bout of inspiration, I engraved “Tres-E” on her bone-shaped stainless steel ID tag.

Over the past year, as she’s progressed through a series of Angel Service Dogs guardians and trainers in Colorado Springs, Tres-E has morphed into Trac-E, but no matter how you spell her name, it’s pronounced Tracy. To me, her puppyraiser, Tracy will forever be Tres, my Number Three. As time has passed, and other puppies have come and gone, I’m pretty sure Tracy was my one-in-a-million dog, the puppy with the soulful amber eyes and boundless canine spirit that padded into my heart, circled three times and nested; for whatever reason, she chose me exclusively as hers, bonded with me like no other animal probably ever will.

Funny thing is, Tracy was an accident. Credit Gunner for that. Kim and Mike Piedt’s purebred Labrador retriever, an intensely driven hunting dog with a luminous coat a-ripple with muscle and a vertical leap of five feet or more, had escaped from his kennel at Killara Ridge Breeding & Research Center one summer day in 2010 while his owners were away. A helpful neighbor found Gunner ranging through the brambles of Portland’s West Hills and returned the AWOL Lab to Killara Ridge. But instead of leaving Gunner in his kennel, the neighbor mistakenly locked him into an adjoining pen with Sammy, a supersweet shaggy multi-gen Australian labradoodle I think of as Mrs. Snuffleupagus, a female in heat that had already been bred with another multigen labradoodle and was in the early stages of pregnancy. Gunner did what any intact male Lab would do in such a situation, so when Sammy gave birth that September, half the pups emerged from her womb as fluffy as Muppet Babies while the others were miniature Super Labs, flat coat carbon copies of Gunner. In November, after I had left Gus, my second Angel Service Dog pup, with trainers in Colorado Springs, I loaded my kids in the car and drove up to Killara Ridge to claim our third service dog puppy. We chose a Gunner pup, a seven-week-old chocolate girl with flecks of gold in her then-grey eyes; in the kennel, where collar colors serve as placeholder names, she was known as Purple, then graduated to a larger collar and was called Pink. When I picked her up, held her close for the first time, she claimed her name:

Before she could leave the kennel, the pup needed to be vaccinated, and I volunteered for the job. Here’s a video of Kim Piedt watching over me as I give a trembling little Tracy her first shot:

At home, I plopped Tracy down on the hardwood floor of our puppy nursery, a corner of the living room behind the couch that’s segregated from the rest of the house with a baby gate, where I introduced her to her fleece-lined crate, and a bevy of new toys–including a yellow rubber binky for teething–but at first, all she wanted to do was curl into my daughter’s lap:

And so like the dogs before her, and the others that have followed, Tracy became part of my family. As days merged into weeks and the weeks blurred into months, Tracy grew, and her training advanced in a rapid, and sometimes not-so-rapid, succession of firsts: learning to nose the bell hanging from the knob of the back door when she had to go outside; leaving her playpen to explore the house–including counters and the dishwasher; graduating from obedience school and into a red Service Dog In Training cape; then socialization forays in public: grocery stores, movie theaters, libraries, public schools, restaurants, buses, trains and escalators. And whenever she wasn’t working, we played, endless games of fetch and Frisbee (athletic like her sire, Tracy loves nothing more than to soar through the air) at Vancouver’s eight-acre Ross Off-leash Dog Recreation Area, road trips to Mount Hood to romp in the snow or climb a fire lookout, chasing seagulls through the surf on the Oregon coast.

After six months, when she was inseparable, glued to me like a tail, it was time to say goodbye, with a final test: a plane trip to Colorado. Wedged beneath the seatback at my feet, she rested her nose between my knees and shivered with fear as the jetliner roared into the sky; eventually, she struggled to stay awake, eyes blinking once, twice, then with a heavy sigh, she drifted off to sleep. Just before the Angel Service Dogs commencement ceremony at the Colorado Springs Marriott Residence Inn on May, 13, 2011, I handed Tracy’s leash to Roberta Swanson Ross and her teenage son, Adam, the guardians who would school her for six months until she was ready for her scent detection trainer. As Gus, my second pup, graduated and received his blue-green service vest, I stood in the back of the ballroom, and tried not to notice that Tracy was scrambling under the chairs, straining at the end of her leash to get to me. I saw the confusion and pleading in those amber eyes. Yet somehow, I found the courage to turn my back on her, and walk away.

Exactly one month from today, when I return to that very ballroom with another dog, and watch Tracy graduate with her forever family, the Nicholses of Minnesota, these will be some of the images running through my head:

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Service Dog Versus Service Mom

Sara, Jess and Tyson Owen (foreground) meet Tobi for the first time on April 6, 2012.

As the guardian of a service dog puppy, sometimes I think I understand what it must feel like to be the parent of a foster child. I’m thinking of Tobi, this precious and precocious little creature I’ve potty trained and praised and disciplined and exercised and played with and lived with and loved, a constant companion who’s been at my feet or by my side, hungry for my guidance and approval, practically every day for the first year of his life. And soon, too soon, I’ll fly or drive him to Colorado Springs, where I’ll remove from his collar the bone-shaped stainless steel dog tag that just before he came to live with us I had engraved with his name and our address and will be tacked to the frame of his portrait that will hang with the others on the west wall of our living room. Then I’ll hand over his leash to the Angel Service Dogs scent detection trainer who will school and certify Tobi as a peanut dog. If all goes well, in six months, maybe a year from now, he’ll go home with his forever family. “How do you do it? I could never let go,” is what the regulars at Vancouver’s Ross Off-leash Recreation Area typically say when they learn that the pup I’m walking is destined to be someone else’s.

I’ve done it three times, I explain, and each time, it felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done. But from now on, if anybody asks me not how but why, I’ll tell them about Sara, Jess and Tyson Owen.

Last Thursday, I received an e-mail from the executive director of Angel Service Dogs, asking if I wouldn’t mind showing off Tobi to a new client, a couple from Washington who were coming to Portland for the day and were considering acquiring an Allergy Alert dog for their 10-year-old son, a fifth-grader severely allergic to several different foods. Of course I said yes, and so a week ago today, after taking Tobi to Vancouver for his usual morning romp, I do something unusual: I give him a bath. Not because I want him to look his best (but I do), but because the previous night I had allowed a little girl at a neighborhood candy store to pet him, and I couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t left peanut or egg or milk residue on Tobi’s fur, invisible, but perhaps enough to trigger a reaction in a medically fragile child diagnosed with multiple life-threatening food allergies.

At the appointed hour, I leash Tobi and trot a very excited dog, his curly black locks tamed and gleaming, out the front door and down to the parking strip just as a silver Mercedes with Washington plates coasts to the curb.

A back door pops open and instead of the socially awkward and sheltered food allergy kid I’d been expecting this quintessential American boy with a dimpled chin and a Tiger Beat coif and smile, au courant in modish black jeans, jacket, sneakers and shoulder bag, jumps out and exclaims “Tobi!” Tyson Owen falls down on both knees and Tobi jumps into his lap and accepts the laughing boy’s hug, burrows his nose deep into Tyson’s jacket, his butt-wiggling and tail helicoptering so furiously his back end’s almost levitating.

“Hi, I’m Sara,” says Tyson’s mom, a mama griz in bluejeans and cashmere accustomed to looking out for and protecting her cub. Smiling, watching this boy-meets-dog scene unfold, Sara tells me about Tyson’s allergies, to eggs, milk and peanuts. He was colicky as an infant, she explains, realizing now that her son already had been reacting to the diet of cheese and ice cream she practically had lived on while nursing. As a 10-month-old, Tyson experienced his first full-blown anaphylaxis reaction, when, after biting into a bread roll, his lips starting swelling to cartoonish proportions.

“We had him tested at 11 months, and that’s been our life ever since: learning how to read labels, looking for product recalls, learning how to cook for him,” says Sara. “As a parent, you know you have to teach your child about Stranger Danger but you don’t think you’ll  have to protect your child from ice cream, from candy, protect him from something that’s  part of most kids’ lives.”

Tyson outgrew his egg allergy by the time he was three, and he is slowly overcoming his allergy to milk, but his peanut allergy, which is so severe it’s almost off the charts, isn’t getting any better and will probably be with him for life.

“If I touch [peanut protein], I go into anaphylactic shock,” says Tyson, matter-of-factly. “That’s why I carry this.” He’s talking about the satchel stocked with emergency epinephrine pens that’s always within arm’s reach, even when he’s rolling around on the grass with Tobi.

A burly guy in bluejeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket, a head taller than Sara, offers his hand.

“This is my husband, Jess.”

Also known as “The Culinary Madman,” a nickname he earned during a tw0-year stint as executive chef at Ocean Crest Resort, a 45-room getaway on the Washington Coast that’s been in Jess’s family for three generations. Last summer, the resort’s restaurant and gift shop burned to the ground. Jess and his family manage the property together (Sara’s the resort’s public relations and marketing manager) and now they’re rebuilding. Just another setback that a decade of parenting a child with life-threatening food allergies has taught them to handle with grace and aplomb, an attitude they model for their son. I invite Tobi’s guests inside; Tyson and Sara sit next to each other on the couch, and Jess folds himself into a love seat.

“When we first found out about Tyson’s allergies, it hit us really hard,” Tyson’s father explains. “It was very scary for us and we cried quite a bit. But then we put into perspective all the different things that could be wrong. He could’ve been born with Down syndrome or spina bifida or whoever knows what else. All we have to do is control his environment. This is manageable.”

Tobi, adopting the role of canine host, trots back and forth to his toy basket in a far corner of the room and brings out a ball for Jess, a mangled rope bone for Sara, and a tug toy for Tyson.

“When Tyson starts feeling sorry for himself, I remind him there are kids who are fighting leukemia,” adds Sara. “It’s not to belittle how he feels, but there are kids with challenges that are far greater than what we’re dealing with. We tell him, ‘you just have food allergies. We can control this.’”

And control it they do. They don’t allow peanuts or peanut products in their home. They rarely dine out (as Sara says, “It’s just too nerve-wracking.”) and when they do, there are only a few restaurants they trust (including Red Robin, and its accommodating allergy-friendly menu), and even then, only after a rigorous Q&A with the server and the manager, who sometimes feel sorry for Tyson, and offer freebies, which is perfectly fine with him.

“They freak out, ‘Oh no, it’s the kid with food allergies!’” says Tyson. “Sweet! I’m getting free sorbet. Pity sorbet!”

Jess adds: “The sweetest sorbet of all!”

Once after learning Tyson was allergic to ice cream, a server commented, ‘Gee, that sucks,’ which prompted a scolding from Sara, who notes, “I wouldn’t say [I went] ballistic, but I do correct people when they tell Tyson his life sucks.”

“Why would you tell a kid his life sucks?!” she asked. “He eats well, he has a wonderful family who supports him. He doesn’t do without!”

Certainly not with The Culinary Madman for a father.

Tyson only eats food that his parents have prepared or packed for him; he sits at a peanut-free table at school, and he has taught his classmates how to use an EpiPen, and regularly quizzes them. I ask for a demonstration, and the boy stops playing fetch with Tobi, opens his satchel, and takes out an EpiPen Trainer, an injector without a needle or medicine cartridge that’s used for practice. He stands, becomes the teacher.

“What I tell everyone is first you take the blue cap off, then jab it into the fleshy part of my thigh.”

He bangs the pen into his leg, and the spring-loaded barrel contracts.

“Wait ten seconds, then pull it straight out because if you pull it sideways the needle will break off in my leg.”

Jess prods him: “What else?”

“Find the nearest adult and call 911.”

Passing the EpiPen quiz is a precondition for sleepovers, which are allowed at the homes of only two friends whose parents have been screened and prepped and passed muster with Sara and Jess and are supplied with the dairy- and peanut-free staples of Tyson’s restricted diet.

I ask Tyson what it’s like to be the food allergy kid, and he responds in a way that’s atypically nuanced and reasoned and perceptive for a ten-year-old, which may have something to do with the way his parents speak to him, not as a kid, but as an adult.

“It’s not very easy because kids are constantly asking me to talk about it and I don’t like to,” he says. “It’s uncomfortable for me because I don’t want to come to terms with what’s going on. When they ask me about it, it means I have to come to terms with it and I don’t like to think about it at all. If I think about it, I remember I have this huge roadblock in my life and I have to get over it so I try to forget about it.”

Sometimes, kids at school tease Tyson about his EpiPen satchel, calling it a purse.

“I think as a society, we all focus on our similarities because everybody likes to fit in,” observes Jess. “When we start focusing on our differences, it’s a little bit more uncomfortable.”

And sometimes, as much as Tyson and his parents try to insulate him from being labeled as the peanut allergy kid, there’s no getting around the fact that he’s different. Sara talks about how after the final game of T-ball season, after all the kids received their trophies, the team celebrated with a party at a local pizza party. Everybody but Tyson. Even though she and Jess took Tyson someplace special, it helped, but it didn’t make the hurt go away.

“It breaks my heart all the time that he can’t have whatever he wants, that he can’t do whatever he wants, that there are things he can never eat,” says Sara.  ”It’s not like he’s missing out on a lot because if I take the right chocolate and soy nut butter, he can have something that tastes similar. But it’s not the same and he’s going to have to be careful his whole life. And he’s going to have the conversation every time he goes into a restaurant. It’s just going to be there. That’s always going to be his challenge.”

This seems to be too much for Tyson to bear.

“I don’t want to be special all the time!” he insists, sitting there on the couch, overcome with emotion, hating that his voice is breaking. “And I do appreciate a lot that you guys try to make me feel okay when my friends are going off and having a pizza party and you try to do something for me so I don’t feel so left out. But I don’t want to have to do that. I don’t want to have to be the kid who has to leave just because the pizza got brought out. I don’t want to be the kid who has to go someplace else … “

Tyson’s crying now. And Tobi pulls him out of his funk, literally, by initiating a game of tug of war.

I ask Jess and Sara why they came all this way to see Tobi, about what they hope a $20,000 dog can do for Tyson.

“We can protect Tyson from the dangers that we can see, but the service dogs, with their sense of smell, they can detect such a minute amount that we can’t see, a smudge of something under a table or a chair,” says Jess. “It’s just such a larger safety net. Which would give us an immense peace of mind.”

I point out that they seem to be doing a pretty good job of protecting Tyson themselves, given that Tyson hasn’t been to an emergency room for anything other than the usual stitches or a broken bone since he was an infant.

“If I could wrap him in bubble wrap and keep him in the living room I would,” says Sara. “When he’s little, when he’s four or five, you can completely control his world wherever he goes but the older he gets the more he wants to be independent and the more I want him to be. We need to be able to let him go out and traverse the world and having another vigilant partner that’s not Mom or Dad, I hope it helps him gain independence to be able to do things with his friends on his own as he gets older but still stay safe.”

Tobi brings Sara his rope bone, looks up expectantly at her with a doggie grin

“Having a partner like you, Tobi,” she says, putting her nose to his. “If I could take him right now I would!”

“Do you mind,” Tyson asks me. “After meeting Tobi, I want to take him home right now.”

“I think he does,” says Sara.

I don’t. If it were up to me, this would be the family I’d want for Tobi.

“At first, he thought that if he didn’t get the dog, he didn’t have deal with it,” explains Sara.

“It’s classic avoidance,” adds Jess. “Like when my grandpa died and Grandma put his things in a box and told me to look through it and I’d find every reason not to because if I didn’t go through the box, he wasn’t gone.”

“And that’s someone in his thirties,” points out Sara. “Imagine trying to deal with something like this when you’re ten.”

Tobi’s fully engaged Tyson in a tug of war, and the boy’s winning, lifting the dog off the carpet.

“Careful Tyson! Don’t pull his little teeth out!”

“He’s pulling my arm off!” Tyson exclaims, delighted. “At first I didn’t want him, because … if Mom wasn’t with me, there has to be someone watching over me because I couldn’t do it right. That’s how I felt.”

“So how do you feel right now?” Sara asks. “That’s what I want to know.”

This is the moment of truth, the reason they’ve traveled three hours to Portland. Does Tyson want a service dog?

“I still haven’t fully changed my mind yet,” he waffles. “But I think I’m coming to terms with it, that if I don’t have this dog, I could possibly die.”

“As you can see, we’re still struggling,” apologizes Sara, who delivers an ultimatum, posed as a question, a tipping point for Tyson. ”Which would you rather have following you around in high school, a service dog, or a service mom?”

“I definitely don’t want my mom following me around when I’m 15!” concludes an aghast Tyson, still attached to Tobi.

A dog would be so much cooler, I point out.

“Absolutely,” agrees Sara. “Especially when it looks like a Fraggle!”

A Super Sniffer Is Born

Sammy's fourth puppy, minutes after birth.

Puppy Number Four, still slick from the womb.

“Sammy’s in labor.”

The call came as I was driving through downtown Portland just after 7 on Thursday night. It was Kim Piedt, proprietor of Killara Ridge Breeding and Research Center, who provides allergy-friendly labradoodle puppies for Angel Service Dogs. Sammy was the mother of Tres, the third puppy I had raised for the Colorado-based nonprofit, and might be the mother of my fifth: Sammy was pregnant again, and in June I’ll say goodbye to Tobi, my fourth Angel Service Dog. So very soon, I’ll need another. Since I had never witnessed the birth of a puppy, I wanted to be there for this one, and had asked Kim to call me as soon as Sammy’s contractions started.

“Wow, that’s great,” I said, and asked how things were going. Long pause. Then Kim told me, matter-of-factly, that the first two puppies had died, and nine more were on the way. “This isn’t exactly how we want things to start out,” she said.

Ninety minutes later I was winding down the drive to Killara Ridge, a secluded wooded hollow just below the summit of Portland’s West Hills, and parked in front of a barnlike shed behind a handsome modern home carved out of the hillside. It was a beautiful night, so I lingered outside for a few minutes in the absolute blackness absorbing the view, and the sounds: fir trees creaking and roaring in the wind, the firmament above the treetops seemingly reflected onto the floor of the Willamette Valley, a carpet of twinkling lights spreading west to the Coast Range. It was so dark outside that I was momentarily blinded when I opened the door to the kennel, which was ablaze with light and the warmth of hot water circulating through plastic pipes on the walls and in the attic. I smiled at the athletic and exuberant greeting I received from Gunner (see my post of January 31), Kim’s pure-Lab stud/bird-dog, who was rowfing and leaping and pirouetting in his pen; add to that a rapturous duet from two shaggy Snuffleupagus-like labradoodles (retired breeding females) in an adjoining pen, both barking in that excited “Oboyoboyanewperson!” way that’s so characteristic of the hyper-social breed. One pen was walled off from the rest with blankets and this is where I found Kim, kneeling over Sammy in the whelping box, a wooden short-walled pen with a raised water-heated wood floor. It looks like this:

Kim Piedt attempts to coaxe Sammy into labor with a technique known as "feathering."

Kim looked uncharacteristically disheveled, hair mussed and wearing black sweatpants and a ratty white t-shirt and she was showing the stress of hours spent ministering to Sammy while simultaneously tending to two sleepless little boys who were finally tucked in bed. Curled in a corner of the whelping box, Sammy looked exhausted and seemed discouraged yet she welcomed me with round marble-sized eyes, panting heavily, her puppy-swollen abdomen heaving up and down. There had been progress: Kim lifted a heating pad, revealing a mewling newborn, a male, shiny black, fourteen ounces, hefty for a newborn yet no bigger than the palm of my hand. The pup’s core temperature was dangerously low; unable to regulate body heat, a newborn left in the open can quickly succomb to hypothermia, even in the balmy, near-tropical drafts wafting around Kim’s kennel.

And there already had been casualties from this litter as proof. Earlier that day, Kim had taken Sammy to the vet for an ultrasound, and progesterone levels from a blood test had indicated that labor wouldn’t begin at least until Friday. So on Thursday evening, she had made Sammy comfortable in the whelping box, secured the chain-link gate to Sammy’s pen with a bungee, and went to the hospital to visit her mother, who’s recovering from open heart surgery. When Kim returned, immediately she knew something was wrong from the tenor of the barking coming from the kennel. And sure enough. Sammy had gone into labor early, and for some reason the dog had left the heated whelping box and went through the doggie door in her pen to deliver her first pup outside in the run, and then had broken through the bungeed gate to deliver the second on the concrete floor of the kennel just inside of the front door. Both pups had frozen to death in the short time Kim had been away.

She sighed.

“It’s the death part I really don’t like.”

Kim put on surgical gloves and inserted a hand into Sammy and began massaging the dog’s birth canal to initiate labor. It had been two hours since the arrival of the last pup, and still, no contractions. While Kim phoned the vet for advice, I paid a visit to an adjoining pen, where a four-month-old male labradoodle with an apricot-hued fleece coat, a Xerox of my first dog, Tippy, sat wagging his white-tipped tail. I had first come to Killara Ridge nearly three years ago, inquiring about a dander-free puppy for my asthmatic young daughter, and after signing a short-term adoption contract as one of the first volunteer puppy-raisers for Angel Service Dogs, left with a beautiful eight-week-old gregarious and mischievous and full-of-himself pup, the pick of a litter that Kim’s kennel workers had named Tippy. Tippy, who’s now working for a family in Colorado Springs that knows him as Bentley, was one of those one-in-a-million dogs, a dog that pawprints your soul, and like a first love, you carry it with you, long after it goes away.

Here’s a picture of Tippy I took at eight weeks, soon after I brought him home:

Tippy I

And here’s his bright-eyed carbon copy chewing on my jacket sleeve at Killara Ridge:

Tippy II

Before Tippy had been neutered and entered into service, he had been collected, and over the summer, in Colorado Springs, as an experiment, the nonprofit had artificially inseminated a white poodle named Star, who gave birth to a litter of adorable white-and-apricot Tippys. The only one with a white-tipped tail–dubbed Tippy II–lacked the drive for service duty, and was offered to my family as a keeper dog, but I declined because I knew that Kim needed a pup to donate to a March 3 charity auction at St. Pius, the school where she sends her kids. On Saturday, Tippy II would be sold to a good home, a young couple with five children. But for a few minutes there in that pen on Thursday night, alone with that little pup, I was with my first dog again, reliving the baths and the 3 a.m. potty-training emergencies and the late-night trips to the vet and obedience school training and hours-long games of fetch and Frisbee and vacations at the beach and Mt. Hood and even soaking away the chills of a rainstorm together in a hollowed-out log at Bagby Hot Springs, a cascade of memories ending with a tearful hug goodbye outside the office of the vet where he would have his hips scored and health certified before he was crated and loaded into the hold of a jetliner bound for Colorado.

Overwhelmed by that unexpected squall of emotion, I extracted the pup from the cuff of my pant leg and returned to check on Kim and Sammy.

By now, the little black Sammy pup had recovered enough that he had wriggled out from his heating pad and attached himself to his mama, who tenderly licked her newborn as he contentedly nursed, then lay back down, panting. Following the vet’s orders, Kim injected Sammy in the scruff with a dose of calcium, then a hormone to jump-start contractions, then used another syringe to squirt Karo syrup into Sammy’s mouth; she hadn’t eaten in hours, and would need the energy for the labor we desperately hoped would resume. To get things moving, I took her outside out for a walk, and Sammy did her business as quickly as she could; I could barely hold onto the leash as she bolted back to the whelping box, where her pup, its belly full of milk, was asleep, snug against a hot water bottle. Sammy curled up next to him, and with her chin resting on the newborn and her nose pressed against his tiny head, she closed her eyes, inhaled, and sighed.

Sammy finds a moment of peace with her newborn.

Waiting for Sammy’s labor to resume, we had plenty of time to chat. I asked Kim, who was sitting in the whelping box and checking the pup’s temperature (already it had risen by 4 degrees, a good sign), how many times she had been through this ritual, and she stared into space for a full minute, mentally tallying all the litters: 30. Somewhere around 200 puppies. Understandably, she no longer gets the adrenaline rush she used to, but sitting on the lip of that whelping box, waiting for puppies, reminded me of how humbled and awestruck and anxious I was a dozen years ago sitting on the edge of a waterbirth tub awaiting the arrival of my firstborn son, with my wife laboring through the night, an 18-hour marathon. We didn’t know it then, but Sammy was just beginning a marathon of her own: it was going on 11 p.m. and she was still working on her fourth pup; her eleventh, and last, wouldn’t arrive until 11 the next morning. One key thing Kim has learned in all these years of delivering puppies, as you’ll discover in the following three-minute video, is that the amniotic fluid that seems to get everywhere is as indelible as ink from a neon-green Sharpie (hence the ratty t-shirt and black sweatpants):

A decade ago, Kim Piedt left a comfortable career in corporate banking to go into business for herself as a breeder of Australian labradoodles; her niche: high-drive, non-shedding dogs for service duty and hunting, a passion she shares with her husband.

The labradoodle was pioneered in Australia in the early 1980s by Wally Conron, then head breeder at the Royal Guide Dog Associations of Australia. To create a hypoallergenic dog for a sight-impaired client from Hawaii whose husband was allergic to pet dander, Conron had crossed a standard poodle with a purebred Labrador retriever, and coined the name “labradoodle.” Although he succeeded in breeding and training a non-shedding service dog, Conron ultimately abandoned the effort. But word had spread of the remarkable dog with the temperament of a Lab that didn’t throw its coat, and to satisfy worldwide demand, two Australian kennels, Tegan Park Breeding & Research Centre and Rutland Manor Breeding & Research Centre, took over the line from Conron. In 2003 Kim hosted the owner of Tegan Park at her Portland home and learned everything she could about the business and the breed, and founded Killara Ridge with five imported Tegan Park dogs descended from Conron’s original cross.

That was nine years ago. Now that the labradoodle’s one of the most popular breeds in North America (yet still not recognized by the American Kennel Club), commanding upwards of $2,500 per pup (as much as $25,000 per litter), entrepreneurs with little or no breeding experience have been clamoring to get into the business, thinking it’s as simple as mating a poodle with a Lab. It’s not. Far from it. Tegan Park is no longer in the breeding business, and Rutland Manor, distancing itself from watered-down lines of labradoodles flooding the American market, has reintroduced its authentic cross as the “Australian Cobbadog.” For his part, weary of being tarred as the father of the “designer dog,” Wally Conron publicly disavowed the labradoodle two years ago in this article from the Australian edition of Reader’s Digest. A year ago he told London’s The Guardian, “All these backyard breeders have jumped on the bandwagon, and they’re crossing any kind of dog with a poodle. They’re selling them for more than a purebred is worth and they’re not going into the backgrounds of these dogs … I opened a Pandora’s box, that’s what I did. I released a Frankenstein.” Meanwhile up in her tidy five-pen kennel on Killara Ridge, assiduously policing bloodlines and tweaking genetics (my 12-year-old son, who’s loved four of Kim’s dogs, is convinced she’s isolated the ‘sweetsie gene’), amplifying the hunting instinct a detection dog needs to clear a room for a severely peanut-allergic kid, Kim Piedt has quietly been carrying on the spirit and goal of Conron’s original work: to propagate a high-drive, allergy-friendly working dog.

Sammy’s contractions resumed just before midnight, waves of them roiling her abdomen. She lifted herself off the blankets, climbed out of the whelping box, nosed the gate open and walked out into the kennel and circled in front of the door, anxious that it wasn’t open. Clearly, some instinct was pulling her outside, but Kim coaxed her back into the box, gently scolding her, “No, Sammy, we have our puppies in the whelping box.” Sammy stood in the box, staring at the gate. The moment Kim left to check on the linens spinning in a nearby clothes dryer, Sammy again climbed out of the box and circled in front of the door. Then suddenly a contraction stopped her mid-stride. Facing north, she stood perfectly still, bowed her head, fully extended her tail. The contractions started rolling down her abdomen in waves, as you can see in this short video:

And then it happened. From the swollen area between her hind legs a tiny tail appeared, wriggling, then a pair of feet; the pup was exiting the birth canal backward, in breech position. I called out to Kim, who came running and pulled the rest of the pup out with her gloved hands, and began massaging the newborn’s slick chocolate coat with a towel warm from the dryer. Sammy stood there, sniffing at the towel, then trotted after Kim, who quickly carried the pup–which squeaked as it took its first breath–into the whelping pen and suctioned amniotic fluid from its mouth. Kim checked between its legs and announced that it was a girl, all the while the blind pup was feeling around for a nipple with its little pink tongue and vocalizing and Sammy was looking up, at us, at her pup, at us, saying with her eyes, “I did good, didn’t I?”

Yes Sammy, you sure did.

Now watch the birth for yourself, and after the pup emerges, and Kim places it in the whelping box, see how Sammy greets and cares for it, and tell me this isn’t one of the sweetest things you’ve ever seen:

Good girl, Sammy. Good girl.

And welcome to the world, Sammy’s little one.

Very soon I’ll be welcoming you, or one of your siblings, into mine.

Puppy Love

You never forget your first service dog.

Tippy was with us for only four months, and for practically every day he was with us, always in the back of my head: “He’s not our dog.” But still, he winnowed his way into our family. The days that stretched into weeks of housebreaking, puddles of pee on the floor, diarrhea that oozed down into the heating grate, an emergency trip to the vet with my daughter cradling the yipe-ing pup in a blanket in the bike trailer, a hike to a hot springs in a sleet storm and the pup shivering against my skin tucked inside my jacket, the pup joyously leaping and bounding through fresh powder on Mount Hood, barking at and chasing waves on the beach in Long Beach. Then the phone call, Kim, the breeding program manager at Killara Ridge: “They want Tippy in Colorado. You need to drop him off at the vet tomorrow so he can get his hips scored, then I’ll pick him later that afternoon and put him on a plane.” One last romp at the dog park, leaving a little boy and girl heartbroken, me sobbing all the way to the vet’s, looking in the rear view mirror at Tippy in the wayback and saying “No. No. God, no. I can’t do this.” Then burying my head in the scruff of his neck and holding him, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” into his ear. I don’t even remember walking into the vet and handing over the leash to the tech, but somehow it happened. And I drove from the vet directly to Killara Ridge and get out of the car and Kim looks at my puffy eyes and says, “Remember why you’re doing this: I just got off the phone with Sherry at Angel Service Dogs and one of the kids who’s on the waiting list for a dog was just taken to the emergency room.” I left with Gus, a giant four-month-old shaggy-maned dog that looked more miniature wooly mammoth than dog, and started the whole process over again.

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About a Dog …

It all started more than three years ago now, when my then 7-year-old daughter wanted a puppy. But it couldn’t just be any puppy. Because she has asthma, our choices were limited to non-shedding breeds, and so we ended up one afternoon at Killara Ridge, a kennel in Northwest Portland that specializes in allergy-friendly Australian labradoodles. Ostensibly, we were window shopping. A litter had just been born, fuzzy little mewling pups with curly coats and golden fur. One chose us: an outgoing little guy with white paws and a white-tipped tail that kept following my daughter around. They called him Tippy. Asking price: $2,000. I’d just lost my job to the recession, so that was out of the question, but it turns out that these puppies had been pre-sold to a just-born Colorado nonprofit chartered to train peanut-sniffing service dogs for children with life-threatening food allergies. We could take the pup home, raise it as ours for a year, then hand him off to his scent trainer. And it wouldn’t cost a dime; the nonprofit would cover all expenses, from vet bills and obedience training to food. So we loaded a kennel and a few 25-pound bags of kibble into the wayback of the Prius, and with my daughter cradling Tippy in her lap, I drove home and so began our journey  …

Tippy, at eight weeks: the first of four incredible dogs born for service duty.