A lovely post by Claire Wolfe with cute dog pictures and comments inspired me to play back our conversion from the between-dogs state to where we so happily are today.
In adding my comment to her post, I tracked down the breed selector that helped during my search. I found several that looked promising before finding the one I had used. Because of the time I spent going down blind alleys, I share the good results with you here.
First is the one I had used, but the others look good as well.
Animal Planet
Select Smart
Doggie Dealer
What we ended up (wanting and) getting was a mutt, but she’s half Chesapeake Bay Retriever which has the “highly desirable” 😉 Newfoundland genes in them. It is a breed I would never have found if the Animal Planet breed selector hadn’t pointed them out to me.
While I say “highly desirable” tongue-in-cheek, we really did love the Newfoundland’s incredibly affectionate nature. Also impressive is their ability to laze-about seemingly forever, but turn on power, energy and endurance at will. Way high on my list too was their fearlessness coupled with a complete lack of aggression (I’m sure size helps a lot here).
I also wanted some protective nature which Opie demonstrated quite impressively a couple of times when it was important, but which is very non-breed-standard for Newfoundlands. It turns out so did those commercial duck and goose hunters of the Chesapeake Bay who used the Newfy genes in creating their designer breed.
Jazz/Jasmine looks very much like her black Lab half, but acts very much like her Chesapeake half…which, much to our delight, seems to be very much Newfoundland-like without the drool, the hair and the huge mops he had for feet that could transfer a truckload of dirt in the house with every trip.