It’s funny the things that can be inherited. Dexter, for example has the exact same mark on the back of his neck as his grandmother, Sailor. It’s a sort of elongated triangle – in fact, when Sailor was a wee thing just a few days old, I said it looked like the sail of boat. Hence her name – Sailor, or Bullmarket Roch the Boat.
There are many things that Weezie (aka Absolut Bullmarket Eloise IceBat, aka Dexter’s sister) has inherited from her mother, Bunny.
She has Bunny’s limpid, doe eyed gaze. She has Bunny’s snowy white coat, which is as soft as down to the touch, and extremely snuggly (Dexter, on the other hand, has coarse, steel wool hair, more similar to his great Grandmother, Tessa).
Weezie even has her mommy’s caramel ear spots – little tiny butterscotch colored polka dots on the backs of her ears. These spots are what tell us that both Weezie and her mom are, despite appearances to the contrary, not genetically ‘white dogs’, but are actually fawn pieds. Color in Frenchies – it’s a baffling thing.
Weezie has inherited something else from her mommy – the ‘rip it to shreds’ gene.
That’s the gene that makes her decide to shred an entire dog bed, much to the dismay of her much better behaved Puggie brothers, Nixon and Linus.
Nixon and Linus remind me of a pair of quiet, rather sedentary bachelors who have suddenly had their house invaded by a leather jacket clad, juvenile delinquent teenage girl.
I picture them huddling together, reminiscing about the days when the most excitement they got was the premiere of a new episode of Antique Roadshow.
It’s an awfully good thing that Weezie’s mom and dad love her as much as they do, but how could you not love such a cute face? After all, it’s something else she inherited from her mom – the ability to be so adorable that you forgive her for all her bad behavior.
You can see the rest of Weezie’s photos here. She’s awful, but she’s also awfully cute!
https://i0.wp.com/www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Brindle_pied_frenchbulldog.jpg?fit=662%2C662&ssl=1662662frogdogzhttps://www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/bullmarket-logo.pngfrogdogz2008-08-12 12:50:292008-08-12 12:50:29French Bulldog Profile - Weezie is Her Mother's Daughter
The French Bulldog world can sometimes seem like a small, small place – especially when there’s a Frenchie out there doing remarkable things. Testament to this is the fact that within three days, not one, not two, but five different people had emailed me to say “Have you seen the dancing Frenchie?”.
A Frenchie doing what? Dancing? This I had to see – and if I’d been in Warwick, Rhode Island on the first weekend in August, I could have, because that’s where they held the World Canine Freestyle Competition. Sarah Stoodley was there, with her French Bulldog, Jubilee.
Sarah Stoodley loves her sport, but not sharing it with others.
“I don’t tell my friends where I’m performing because I’m afraid they’d show up.”
Yesterday, the woman from Silver Spring, Md., a professional dancer of 10 years, performed in a ballroom at the Crowne Plaza. She danced, of course. And she did so with a dog.
Jubilee, a 2½ -year-old French bulldog, rolled over, bowed down and did several other choreographed tricks to music.
You have to have owned and trained French Bulldogs to realize just how unusual this is, and why it created such a stir in Frenchie circles. The dogs we love are a lot of things – funny, goofy and cute – but agile and athletic isn’t usually up there when they’re being described. It would take a special kind of person to decide to dance with a French Bulldog, and that’s just what Sarah is.
She kindly consented to an interview in which she shared more about herself, about Canine Freestyle, and about Jubilee.
Sarah, tell us a bit about yourself, and your background in dance.
I am 29 years old and presently in school for nutrition. I grew up in Maine with many different animals and have lived in Maryland for about 8 years now. I teach dance to kids and adults of all ages, and do school. Life is pretty hectic and Ju is my ride-along buddy, except when it’s too hot in the Summer. She is welcome at some of my jobs and is happy to sleep in her crate in the car when she needs to.
Tell me more about Jubilee.
Jubilee is almost 3 years old. I got her when she was just over 4 months old, after considering many different puppies, from Carol Watson of Libellule French Bulldogs in New Jersey.
We had a hard year last year though when she fractured her elbow in a freak break (nothing any of the 5 orthos we saw had ever seen before) while running in the yard. She had surgery to take out the piece of bone and reshape the joint and we spent most of the winter just resting, recovering and doing physical therapy. Given that, I’m glad she has 4 legs that function properly and we are still training and having fun. After surgery, my biggest goal was for her to be able to be a “real dog” and anything above that was icing on the cake.
I call her my “mental health investment”. She makes me happy day after day, and even when things go really badly, I can’t watch her race through the woods with her big old grin and not want to smile too. She’s quite a special little dog and my best friend before any titles or awards.
Had you owned French Bulldogs before? If not, what made you choose one?
I had not had a Frenchie before. I grew up on a small farm in Maine and had a variety of different dogs growing up.
Somewhere along the line I decided I really liked Frenchies. I honestly can’t remember the exact moment. It might have even been seeing a picture and doing some reading.
When I moved to Maryland, I spent several years with only my often grumpy shelter rescued cat, finally deciding I needed a dog again. I looked at rescue dogs, but never found the right one. I wanted one young enough and physically sound enough to compete in some performance activities, but also one that could co-habit with Smudge. Eventually I had to give up on finding the right rescue dog and look to breeder puppies. In the end I was considering two puppies who met my criteria of slightly longer faces, lighter bodies and the personality to attempt some obedience training! One was in Texas, and one much closer in New Jersey. Since I was able to meet Jubilee in person, I decided to pick her.
Tell us a bit more about Canine Freestyle. How did you get interested in it?
Canine Freestyle is often called “dog dancing.” It is a combination of obedience skills and attention, tricks, and fluid movement from both handler and dog. Our routine is on the cutesy side of the spectrum, something that showcases Jubilee well and sets us up to be successful. Pretty easy to be cute when she starts out adorable!
I am a professional dancer and teacher of ballet, jazz and modern. I teach students as young as 2 ½ and as old as early 70’s. I often say that teaching dance to two and three year olds and training a bulldog are remarkable similar.
Having seen Freestyle on video and heard about it in various dog circles, Jubilee and I fell into it sort of by accident. It just happened that the woman, Mary Jane, who taught our puppy K class, also taught a freestyle class. She invited us to join and we spent over a year working with her. I went back to school last year and had to adjust my own teaching schedule so that we could no longer attend her class. However, we kept working on our own, and also occasionally attended a training group for freestyle dogs at another club. I am also lucky to have a WCFO freestyle judge and competitor who is on our Flyball team (yes, Jubilee also does Flyball and will be racing her first race in September). My Mom also trains dogs and has a three year old Dobe. She has been working on an individual routine with Fiesta and she and I have been working on a pairs routine with both dogs. It’s hard, since she lives in Maine and I live in Maryland, but we practice on holidays and make choreographic adjustments over email.
Were you planning to do Freestyle with Jubilee when you bought her?
I was not planning to, I was considering obedience and agility, and fell into it mostly by accident. I hadn’t done it before, but consider it a sport where I can build choreography that is reinforcing for her and makes it much for fun that something more traditional where we have no say about what we present. And we feel pretty special since we are often the only Frenchie at competition events. We are happy to be out there proving that Frenchies can compete with the best of them.
Tell me a bit more about training a Frenchie for freestyle – any special tricks or training methods?
I train with a clicker and use that to capture and shape behavior. It keeps Jubilee highly motivated and eager to work. She is extremely bright and loves to work hard on new behaviors. And I have learned that on days where she goes to her “bulldog place” that I should find a good note to end on and try again later. She also loves to offer her most recently learned behavior. I had taught her to “sit pretty” right before I went to visit my family in June and my Mom and I were practicing our pairs routine. When Jubilee would go faster than Fiesta, she would add that trick every time she would need to wait. And the more I laughed the more she did it. Needless to say, she’s a bit of a clown.
What’s coming up next for you and Jubilee? Do you plan to keep competing?
Jubilee got her RN in the Spring and we hope to soon be showing for her higher level AKC Rally titles. We also attend Novice Obedience class and someday will be ready to attempt our CD. I joke that she enjoys backing more than walking forward and I wish we could get our CD in reverse. She is also struggling with stays, especially around big dogs and we are working hard to put the pieces together so we can get that title. We also do Flyball with 4 Dog Night and Ju is scheduled to run her first race in September.
And my Mom and I are entering a WCFO competition in Red Lion, PA in November. Hopefully we will qualify there and have get our first freestyle titles together with the mismatched pair of goofballs.
-Flyball Tourney at Howard County Fairgrounds in Howard County, MD on September 13th and 14th
Others TBA! Gotta see how my school schedule looks and feels once the Fall semester gets rolling. Oh, and also on an Animal Planet special on Freestyle currently scheduled to air on December 13th. She was a bit hit with them as best I could tell. They were filming the special at the competition we attended last week in Rhode Island.
Fantastic! Thanks, Sarah and Jubilee – and we look forward to hearing more about you both! I have a feeling you’re both rising stars.
If you want to get a look at Jubilee, the dancing French Bulldog, and her partner Sarah, check out this video that Sarah has on YouTube. Sarah and her mom plan on uploaded more videos of their routines in the future!
Sarah also shared some photos of Jubilee, and it’s obvious that she got beauty, as well as brains!
https://i0.wp.com/www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Brindle_pied_frenchbulldog.jpg?fit=662%2C662&ssl=1662662frogdogzhttps://www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/bullmarket-logo.pngfrogdogz2008-08-11 11:03:232008-08-11 11:03:23Forget Dancing with the Stars - Dance with Jubilee!
My plans for the weekend included a drive to Tobermory, with some kayaking around Fathom Five National Park, and maybe some swimming thrown in for good measure. Mother nature said “Nice try”, and rewarded me with two days of non stop rain and thunderstorms, so I’ve spent the weekend playing ’email catch up’. That’s where I dig through the stratified layers of unanswered mail in my in box, and file and upload all the photos people have sent to me that I’ve buried on the third page of my Gmail account.
In the morning, though, I shot these photos of Dexter and Penelope, sleeping together on the couch. They were playing a game of “Frenchie Bunk Beds” – first Dexter slept on Penelope.
Then they swapped spots, and Penelope slept on Dexter (as fat as she’s getting, I think Dexter got the worst of the deal).
Imagine my happy surprise, then, when I found this photo, titled “Bunk Beds”, in a group of pictures sent to me from Carol Rowbo –
Jacques and Jewel are brother and sister Brindle Frenchies that were bred by Barb. They live in NYC, with their owner, Carol Rowbo. Here’s a gallery of their photos (as you can no doubt tell, they’re extremely photogenic).
Jacques and Jewels’ mom Lola is now retired and also living in NYC, with Lauren Melkus. Lola rules the roost over her adopted little ‘brother’, Tucker. Here’s a photo of Lola, luxuriating in life in New York.
Oh, and Jacques and Jewels’ litter sister, Isabella, showed in New York at Westminster this past February. Maybe next year, her family (or at least her family’s family) can come out and cheer her on. Here she is, on the carpet at the Gardens.
The last piece in this puzzle — Tucker was formerly know as ‘Harley‘, and he’s Dexter’s litter brother!
OK, now we can all hum ‘It’s a Small World’.
Coming up next week in blog postings:
Izzy Eats EVERYTHING
Lola Updates and Photos
GiGi gets even cuter
Responsible Frenchie Breeders Launches
Frenchies in the UK
.. and lots of other stuff, including some musings on trying to turn an outside, semi feral cat into a house pet (hint: it’s not easy).
Unless the sun comes up, in which case I’m outta here and off to the beach!
https://i0.wp.com/www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Brindle_pied_frenchbulldog.jpg?fit=662%2C662&ssl=1662662frogdogzhttps://www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/bullmarket-logo.pngfrogdogz2008-08-10 07:56:582008-08-10 07:56:58Jacques and Jewels and Frenchie Bunk Beds
I wrote the other day about accumulating and prepping all of my ingredients for making a batch of raw dog food. Sean and I decided that if we were going to make a batch, we might as well make a big batch — and that’s what we ended up doing. Here’s a photo series of the steps involved in making a batch of raw dog food.
If anyone wants more detailed instructions, visit this page. Bear in mind, though, that what works for my dog might now work for yours.
The first step I usually do is to grind all my vegetables. I buy vegetables here and there, as they’re on sale or available, and then I grind them and freeze them into plastic containers — one for greens, one for carrots, another for fruit (my guys love bananas, melon, apples and pear). Then I partially nuke sweet potatoes and squash, and rice them using a ricer before freezing them into batches. The day before I’m going to make my dog food, I get them out and thaw them.
I’ve been getting a really good deal on whole, frozen salmon lately, so I bough ten of them and tucked them into the freezer. I poach them, mix them up with canned Jack mackeral, and put the whole lot through the grinder, bones and all.
The veggies and fish get mixed up with my yogurt, eggs, nutritional yeast, molasses, apple cider vinegar, pressed garlic cloves, hemp hearts and flax seed (I got a good deal on some at the co op, and decided to add some to this batch of food). I mix it all up in a giant corn pot (or lobster pot, or stock pot) that I got at a yard sale. I buy these giant pots any time I see them at a garage sale or second hand store – they’re perfect for mixing up dog food.
Sean grinds the turkey necks, hearts and livers for me — another reason why a tall guy is always useful to have around the house. We use a basic grinder from Northern Tools, and it’s lasted me a year and change so far, with two blade changes. I don’t expect it to last forever, with the amount of work we ask it to do, but I’m OK with that. If it wears out, I’ll probably buy the next model up. We buy our beef already ground, so it just gets mixed into with the turkey.
Did I mention we decided to make a big batch of food? So big, that I had a panic attack about where we were going to mix it all. Usually, we have a three quarter pot of meats, and a quarter pot of mixed gunk (that’s our ‘technical term’ for it). I then mix it all together in a third big pot, but this time, there was no way that would work — we had two full pots of turkey and ground meat, and a full pot of mixed gunk.
So, we improvised, and used this big wheeled bin. Here it is, about half way full, with Tessa watching the proceedings with interest.
Hey, are you wondering ‘how on earth do you mix up this much dog food?’. Easy – you stick your arms in. Up to the elbows. Pretend you’re one of those big food processor dough hooks, and blend, blend, blend. Then, look down, see that you’re covered in bits of raw meat gore all the way up to your armpits, shriek, and jump into the shower fully clothed.
Here’s the finished product, with flecks of heart, liver, bone and greens. Mmm! Getting hungry yet?
We measure out the food into large sized, zip lock freezer bags – to be more exact, slide lock bags, which are easier to close. We buy them at the dollar store, because the same bags otherwise would be $5 per box.
We put five cups into each bag, and by the time we were done, we’d covered the island twice, for a total of sixty bags. That is a lot of dog food.
We used to just stack the bagged food in the freezer, but found that the occasional leaking bag could make quite a mess. Now, we put the bags into plastic storage bins, which we then stack in the freezer. It’s easier to lift them out, and I can still stack things on top of them (in whatever room is leftover for people food, which sure isn’t much). We ended up with five of these totes.
Finished! And a long day’s work it was, too. For those curious about these things, we ended up with sixty bags of five cups each raw, or 300 cups of food. Ignoring our time and work, the total cost was just under $95. Not bad, really.
Here’s Tula, enjoying a bowl of the finished product. I, on the other hand, enjoyed a well earned nap.
Addendum: Oh, and can I just say how stupid I feel for having defended the right of Bernann McKinney to love her cloned Pit Bull, only to learn she’s actually an on the lam, sexual predator whack job? Nice one, universe. Thanks for the metaphysical slap upside o’ the head.
https://i0.wp.com/www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Brindle_pied_frenchbulldog.jpg?fit=662%2C662&ssl=1662662frogdogzhttps://www.bullmarketfrogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/bullmarket-logo.pngfrogdogz2008-08-09 10:51:082008-08-09 10:51:08A Photo Guide to Making Raw Dog Food
I’m sorry, I know alliteration is the red headed step child of blog titles, but I couldn’t resist — It’s finally become apparent that Penelope wasn’t just being moody and picky and even more Princess-y than usual. She’s actually pregnant.
Which means — yay! Two sets of stinky bum, puppy breath, sock chewing little darlings to terrorize the old timers.
The downside, of course, is that if Paris is actually pregnant, too, I could be in for some fun times. Fun as in ‘no sleep, no eat, never leave the house again, clean up more dirty newspapers than should be humanly possible without losing your mind’ fun.
So far, though, she doesn’t look pregnant. She’s not getting all milky moo cow looking, she’s not gaining any weight (more than she usually carries on chunky physique, that is), and her baboon butt has disappeared. None of that bodes well for puppies, although to be quite honest it does bode well for my chances of ever getting any sleep after Labour Day weekend rolls around.
Both Tula and Penelope went off their food slightly, but Tula got her appetite back in about 48 hours. Of course, 48 hours is practically a hunger strike for Tula, but it was still worrisome. Penelope, who usually sucks down food like a vacuum cleaner on steroids, has been more stubborn about it. My usual raw mix wasn’t cutting it, and neither was lean chicken breast, ground beef and rice, or anything else we tried. Just as I was starting to get worried, I remembered we had a leftover box of Honest Kitchen ‘Embark’ in the freezer. I figured it was worth a try, and mixed her up a bowl.
Now, if you’ve never fed it before, Honest Kitchen has a sort of steep learning curve. It’s raw, but it’s been dehydrated, so initially it looks like a box of upscale chicken soup mix (if soup mix commonly had grass clippings and banana chips mixed into it).
Dry Embark – Banana Chip on top. The yellow lumps are chicken
You mix it with water, and it turns into a sort of slurry. Leave it sit for a while to re hydrate, and eventually it looks like.. well, like grass clipping, banana chip, chicken pudding soup.
Mmmm…
Re hydrated Embark – yummy!
But here’s the thing – after a week of refusing to eat more than two bites of food at a time, Penelope took one sniff of the bowl of green pudding, and sucked it back like it was the most awesome thing she’d ever tasted. She hasn’t let up since. Oh, and it gives them tiny little non smelly poops, which is an added bonus.
I’d always liked it in the past for weaning puppies, but now — big convert over here. Penelope gives Honest Kitchen two big, pregnant thumbs up.
Speaking of which, here’s a photo taken this morning of her chunkiness. Sorry for the bad stack, but it was starting to drizzle, and a grape can only hold a dog’s attention for so long.
