We are Alison & Steve & our daughter Rachel, we are from Manchester in the UK. This site is dedicated to our dogs past and present, who helped makes our lives a little bit more perfect than it would be otherwise. These pages are about our involvement with these two magnificent breeds, Old English Mastiffs & Bullmastiffs. We have only just come into the Bullmastiff breed in 1998, after spending many agonising years in the Mastiff breed. It was after losing Jack our last home bred Mastiff at the young age of three years, that we decided that we wouldn't try again in the same breed. After a year or so had past we felt the time was right for us to start our search for another breed of dog, we knew what breed of dogs we wanted, something connected with the English Mastiff, we didn't want to completely give up on the Mastiff breed so the Bullmastiff was our choice.
Our dogs have always lived in the house with us as part of OUR family, it does have it's draw backs thou, for example, once the fire goes on we can't get anywhere near it! or trying to dodge the dogs when trying not to get hairs on your clothes when going out for the evening, but we wouldn't change anything. We are now at the stage were we are planning hopefully, to breed from our bullmastiff bitch (Misha), I firmly believe in knowing the hip-score of any bitches I am thinking to breed from. All the pups that leave from here have to be hip-scored, as we believe only then would we see a truer hip status from that breeding, & this is a condition of purchase & to which, I will refund the cost of the hip-score back to each puppy owner. Bullmastiffs & Mastiffs along with all large breeds, have their share of problems, but first we need breeders to be more open about them before we can say "we haven't any problems here.'' Right I'll get off my soap-box now! & back to telling you about this site. This is our first attempted at creating a web-site, so it maybe a little bland, but one thing, like dogs, there's always room for improvement!
I first wrote of our plans to breed from Misha some 18 months ago, but we decided not to as soon as we got the results of her hip-score back, with the results being 28-29. In the last few weeks Misha has started to show signs of lameness & pain on rising something we had hoped we wouldn't see for some years on, we hope the medication Misha is on now relieves the discomfort so that she enjoys the quality of life she has had & she goes on enjoying into the future.
I must say something on the breeders question, no breeder start's out to breed a cripple but unless you know what the hip statues is in your line you could be!! As to misha's breeders, Anne Bowman (Bournevalley) once I informed her that Misha had a structurally problem surprise surprise we never heard from her again !!!! so much for breed ethic's !
On a sad note we lost our Ted just before Christmas, we noticed a change in him i.e. not wanting to finish his food, drinking a lot and weeing many times in one period. We took him to our vets to get their opinion, they took blood test but we had to wait 24 hours before we would get the results. The next day we had to bring Ted back to the vets so if needed they could do more test if the first lot of test revealed nothing. What we where told was something we never thought we would hear and that Ted's results shown that Teds kidneys where failing, the vet tried to explain but to be honest a lot what the vet said we never took in as we where in shock, one test that I remember the vet saying was a score under 90 was good, Ted's score was in the 800s !! so we had to do one of the hardest thing any genuine dog lovers has to do and that is to say good by for the last time.
I have put some pictures of our dogs on our web-site for you to see, just click on any of the photo's on the left to see each dogs own page & Pedigree.
Before you leave, don't forget to sign our guest book!
See you again maybe?
