At GWK we do not believe in over breeding our dogs thus are firm about planned breeding to take into consideration the health of our females as well as puppies. Currently we anticipate to only breeding once a year. We may consider bringing in another female to add to our breeding program once a suitable co-ownership home is ascertained. We are also considering bringing in a purebred female with Canadian lineages once all genealogy is reviewed for bloodlines. It is also our policy that once a female reaches the age of 4 she will not produce further offspring. We anticipate to holding back out of our litters the champion future heirs for a future breeder at the age of 2/3 for one time litters. We hope that we will be in a position through this program and strategy to commence showing these heirs through handlers.

The breeding strategy that we use is out-crossing and very distant line breeding.

Out-crossing is the practice of breeding unrelated dogs of the same breed. It is used as a breeding strategy to bring new traits into a breeding program, i.e., to introduce genes that may restore weak working instinct or clear up a physical fault. Line-bred puppies can come from two out-cross (non-line-bred) dogs that have a common ancestor. For example, if the bitch’s grandsire on her maternal side is the same dog as the sire’s grandsire on his paternal side, the pups will be line-bred on that common dog even though the bitch and dog are not themselves line-bred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-crossing http://www.nrta.com/breedforfoundation/breedingfor.html

With this strategy we will be closely monitoring DNA testing and gene testing with the offspring if we should consider keeping any heirs of the lineage to be out-crossed with prospective pedigree future mating.