West Highland White Terrier Parents
A few past and present parents! To many photos to post taken over the last 25 plus years! Some are with people who have adopted them when they were retired. I need to get photos of them in their new homes with professional hair cuts. We have super adorable Westies, even if my hair trimming job doesn't do them justice!
Very dirty Westie is Karmon. She was very happy with her version of beautification, (having rolled in the horse pasture with its "horse apples.") Her son Kaden is also shown with a dirty face after digging in the mud.
The back yard also had a big red "slide" only westies and a dachshund rescue mix dog would actually slide down on it. They usually stopped anytime I had the camera but I caught one in action by peeking around the corner as she was sliding down. They are SO funny!
CHIC, OFA and CERF certificates, for current parents, their parents, and eventually will have several generations all on here. They are not all here. I have many to upload. We believe in health testing and go every April to a clinic where all our stud dogs are seen by a certified ophthalmologist. We take moms in as we have space in appointments. Most of our moms do have a father, if not also a mother, and grandfathers who are all tested.
In addition we go to our veterinarian for patella exams and hip x-rays for OFA certification.
Genetics is fascinating, but often very misunderstood! On some things just because a parent is a carrier it does not mean a puppy can ever have the problem. Many issues require both parents to be carriers, or actually have the disease. The point of testing is not to eliminate all dogs who are not perfect, which would decrease the gene pool, adding its own set of problems. The point is to know which dogs to breed together for preventing diseases that are preventable in the puppies while having a large diverse gene pool.
Those who do no testing have no proof of anything. Just because someone may claim to not have a problem doesn't mean they won't next year, or they may never hear back from families who had puppies with problems, or they haven't been breeding for many years to have more then 1 or 2 dogs grow to old age. No dog is perfect.
If someone also said they have never had a problem with anything, well then that just is not possible unless they only had a very small number of litters. The laws of ratios with anything capable of carrying for 22 generations to pop up unexpectedly guarantee something will show up at some point no matter how hard any person tries to prevent it. Life is full of the unexpected, both good and bad! Health testing greatly improves the chances of good!
I am having a hard time with the slide show. I have not been able to update it for awhile.
The slide show has some current parents, many grandparents, great-grand parents, and aunts, uncles.... some photos are 30 years ago of our first Westies. (Which I really had no idea how to trim the coat to look like a westie for a really long time!)
This new gallery is going to be parents we have in 2023, including those retiring and retired and moving forward. I am awful at getting photos of the parents, so this will be slow going.
If a westie adult is available I will put "available" in the description.
If it does not have available they are our current partens, or have been retired and are already in their new home.
