School For The Dogs' clients Samantha Schwartz and Ben Ment wanted to find a mixed-breed Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, figuring that it'd be less prone to health issues than a purebred Bernese. When Samantha's email inquiries to breeders got posted to social media, she ended up being cyber bullied by hardcore breed enthusiasts/purists around the world. Samantha tells Annie about how this unexpected and bizarre turn of events led her and Ben to Basket, a puppy from the Bernese Mountain Dog Vitality Project, which is run by breeders and geneticists who are working to help modify the breed for the better over time.



Link to Show Notes - Bernese Mountain Dog Vitality Project - Basket's Instagram

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

I'm here with our clients. I should say clients, plural. I am here with our human client, Samantha Schwartz, and her dog are the canine client of this team. Oh, who's giving her a big hug right now. Who’s name is Basket and he is this huge, deliciously, lovely black and furry. Just big galoot of a dog who I wish I had a life-sized stuffed animal of that I could just snuggle and cuddle all day long.

He looks like a Bernese Mountain Dog. He is not totally a Burmese mountain dog, which we're going to talk about in a moment. And when I first met Samantha and her partner, Ben, they started to tell me about how Basket came into their lives. And I was fascinated.

**music**

Samantha:

I had always wanted a Bernese Mountain dog. I had grown up with labs and retrievers

and Ben grew up with a Norwegian Elkhound and a Chinook. We were kind of like, I was just dead set on having a Bernese Mountain Dog.

We were living out in Cape Cod, getting his family's house together last spring, just temporarily. And we were like, well, let's get the dog ‘ause it'll be easy to train the dog while we're out here. We have some time. So last year, we started more seriously looking at Berneses again, and he thought that it would be better if we maybe looked at getting a mixed breed. We were looking at all the rescues, there’s  a lot of Bernese rescue organizations. And then we were, we were looking at just different options. And finally we ended up saying, why don't we see about getting a mixed breed, something that is part Bernese.

Annie:

You were said you were worried about the health issues.

Samantha:

So Bernese Mountain Dogs have, being one of the giant... they're one of the giant breed dogs, um, similar to great Danes and Saint Bernard's. So they can be up to 150 pounds, females on average weigh between I think 90 and 110, and then the males can weigh much more than that. Because they're a giant breed they have some joint issues and things like that because of their bones, but they also have a particular type of cancer that is really, really prevalent in their breed. They are dying really young. They're very... purebred dogs in general are very inbred. They have what's called closed studbooks and the close studbooks mean that they kind of all ended up being cousins with each other. And because of that, their genetic diversity is leading to many health problems...

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts

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