Jotunn Norwegian Buhunds

G Litter

Frequent Questions

Q:Are these puppies available?  When?
A: Yes, these puppies are available to good homes.  They should be weaned and available mid September to early October.  (Yeah - Early Fall Puppies! - So much easier than our last X-mas batch!). 

Q: Are you a puppy mill?
A: Absolutely not.  We're more about showing Buhunds than breeding them, and we have them for fun, not profit. Our Buhunds have the run of our house, sleep at the foot of (or sometimes even in) our beds, and shred our toilet paper.   They are only sometimes crated when we have visitors because they like to ‘visit’ with them too much, when we are going on long trips in the car, or early on when we are trying to crate-train them.   We do have lots of puppy gates to keep them out of rooms they don’t belong it, but they are never banished to big kennels.  (The gates don't deter some of the older Bu's like Kaare and Binna too much, they hop right over them, but it keeps the smaller ones away from our nice stuff.) 

We only have 1-2 liters a year,  and don’t plan on having any more until next summer.   This double litter this summer is the first (and if I have my way, last) for us.  Anika, the mom of the other (F) litter, doesn't live with us.  Normally lives on a farm with 57+ other animals, but Vali thought that was way too active and unsafe for a litter of precious little puppies. Hence she volunteered to foster them for summer.    Oh the fun!

The puppies stay with their Mom in one of our spare bedrooms for the first couple of weeks until they start to walk. Mostly mom cleans up after them, but still we go thru lots of towels and sheets.  They then move to larger X-Pens in the basement with gated access to our fenced backyard.   We've a couple of big fenced outside play areas for when they get older.

All our puppies are checked over regularly by our Vet, get all their shots, and are microchipped and registered with the AKC.  They're all handled each and every day, by us, and socialized as much as possible.

Q: What do you consider a good home?
A: Well first, you must want to Luv a Bu.  That's not very hard, they'll love you right back.  A bit more difficult is to make sure they will be happy at your place.  Remember, Buhunds are very active dogs.  A fenced yard, kids and/or other animals to play with, and lots of attention are important.  Finally, some of these dogs may be show quality.  If you plan on showing them, or do other organized dog sports with them like agility, flyball, rally, so much the better.  (We can give you hints and links to all the above if you're interested.)

Oh, and with these Weaten Bu's ...  Don't expect to ever where logs of black or other dark colors several weeks out of the year.  They go 'poof' and blow fur all over the place twice a year.

Q: So, why do you call it G-Litter?
A: One rather important feature of pure breed dogs is their lineage.  This is why their official names are all long and have their kennel name in it (e.g Jotunn Bella Binna or Tolgens Jaeren Kaare).   Similarly, it's important to know what litter the puppies are from.  I'm not sure how others do it, but several other dog breeders we know all label their litters A,B,C, and so forth.  Anika had the F litter 3 weeks ago, so this is our seventh litter, hence the G. 

Now the real crazy breeders like to give dogs names based on not only their heritage, but also based on the litter name.  Our very first litter we had one dog (Anya).  In our second litter, we had 5 (Baron, Beowulf, Binna, Bergitta, and Briet).  This makes it easy to identify their brothers and sisters.  When the puppies moved on to other homes, their names got changed, but we'll always remember them by those original names.

The C-litter was a problem - there are almost no names in either Norwegian or Old Norse that begin with the letter C (look it up, I dare you!).    I started calling the little black boy Chewie, because he looked like a Wookie. 

There weren't too many Norwegian names starting with D, so many of the litter had more american'ized names.  To of the more noteable ones are Razzle Dazzle, who's doing very well in the show ring, and Deja Bu, who has seen it all before.

The E litter is still pretty new. We have Enja.  Need to ask Vali about where all the others have gone.

The F-Litter won't be too much of a problem.  There are lots of Norwegian names starting with the letter F.     Vali wants to call little blue 'Ferrari', altough after all the shedding of the big-bu's this past week, I'm tempted to call him Furrari.

As for the G litter.  There seem to be lots of real Norse names starting with G.  For Norse-like names I generated late one night with a crazy computer program I wrote, see: http://vali.org/buhunds/markov

Q: Why the current colorful names?
A: First of all, they need some sort of name so we can talk about them, but we don't want to give them real names until much later if at all. You get too attached to them that way.  But the main reason is that we can then coordinate their names with their collars (velcro is a wonderful invention!).  This way can tell who they are in the photographs months from now when they're all grown up, which is actually hard.

Unfortunatly, there are only 5 colors in the set of velcro straps I'm using. Luckilly White has a built in collar, so no velcro for her.

 

 

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