It Started Last Summer
About this time last year, I started looking for a stud dog for Wendy. As you can probably tell I really like the Swedish Flat-Coat type. Their dogs are robust but still maintain the raciness of the breed standard. There are many nice Flat-Coats in our area as well. The Swedish type has many other positive features I like, but that is not the point of this posting. A friend in Sweden, recommended a particular dog, Inkwells Truly Yours, call name “Bamse” the little bear from a cartoon character. As it turns out, Bamse is a son of Inkwell Let it Be, a great Swedish and International Flat-Coat Champion in five different events. Bamse has done very well in the breed ring, in hunt tests and field trials. He has also sired several litter and the offspring have been healthy and had excellent hip scores . Based many on Ulla’s recommendation, I contacted Bamse’s owner, Gunilla Grahn, and over the course of a couple of months we reached an agreement to breed.
The summer months in Sweden is the time for vacations and from my perspective, not much happens. Even the Swedish Canine Semen Bank is mainly offline until early September. Gunilla lives about four hours north of Uppsala and needed to coordinate her trip with a bitch coming into season. All this came together in late September of 2010 after Wendy came into season. I was very fortunate to have also located a superb Flat-Coat just outside of Stockholm, Almanza Wild at Heart, call name “Sune” to breed with in time for last fall. As you can read in our C-Litter postings, the puppies out of that breeding are doing great and the dogs have a wonderful demeanor.
Bamse’s semen collection was performed by Dr. Catharina Linde Forsberg of the Canirep Semen bank. The collection produced good results with 100 million spermatozoa per straw with 65% motility. Prior to Wendy’s breeding, Dr Dove thawed a sample to confirm the quantity planned for used. He exclaimed how excellent was the semen quality and only two straws were needed. So on May 17 and 18, Wendy was breed with Bamse’s semen by Trans-Cervical Insemination.
P