Since moving to Creekside Farm, following on Carmel Corn's final litter and her subsequent re-homing to Ferndale, there hasn't been a whole lot happening with the Rocketdog Kennel. There are a great deal of reasons for this. The Winter came and went since my last posting, so much has happened since we moved here and you can look at the whole period of time at the parent blog.
We have yet to build the new Farmhouse despite having the cash to do it. The County is dragging the process out, telling us the whole thing is going forward, for well over three years now. They insist on new studies, reports, and surveys, all of which are largely immaterial to our permit being issued. Our thinking was that we would re-start the kennel as soon as the house was built. But since we are in permit hell we have decided to begin making progress toward opening once again. So here is where we are as of today.
Clarke Bar, The Cinnamon Bear, and our newest girl Laffee Taffee, have all become farm dogs completely. They spend their days hunting around the Farm for something to do. The have taken to performing a choir practice howling session daily, usually triggered by the chickens all clucking loudly. Otherwise they pal around the place and are really quite happy. Occasionally they find a squirrel or some other rodent, once in a while they corner one of them and we find Cinnamon walking around with a dead animal in her mouth. She doesn't eat them, she simply wants to play with them and protect the catch from the other two. At dinner time Ann takes the dead animal and throws it out.
We have built enough of a doggy infrastructure to keep the females separated from males during the routine breeding season. Cinnamon has had two since moving to the Farm and these seem like they take a few months to come and go. Her actual receptive periods are fairly normal in length, but the prelude and epilogue are rather long. Laffee Taffee seems to be headed into her first season this week. Clarke hasn't shown any interest in her yet but this may be because Cinnamon Bear is in the early stages of her next season. Taffee will make a good mother and has the right stuff to make good puppies, but we're going to hold off all breeding until the new Kennel is built, along with it's whelping area. Same for Cinnamon Bear.
Another girl-puppy will soon come to the Farm. A farm family in Idaho had a litter this past week and we put down a deposit. The puppy won't come until mid-September. We still need to find another female to add to our tangle of hounds, but there is plenty of time. Our dreams, and the goals set on those dreams, seem to be following their own schedule. But acquiring new breeding stock and allowing them to grow to sufficient maturity to have offspring takes time. So we're moving ahead with bringing in the new blood in spite of not really having a great place for them to live. We are in the same boat, having no permanent home yet, but we are all quite comfortable.
We have been thinking about building a tiny home kennel for the dogs before Winter comes again. Time will tell if this will be necessary. If the permits come through we might just have a proper roof over everyone's head before the cold and rain sets in once more.
