This weekend, I encountered Newfoundland dogs for the first time in the flesh, and, oh, boy, is there a lot flesh!
A friend is considering adopting one of these giant dogs (as a merely-huge puppy), so I went with him to visit a breeder south of Ithaca.
I have never seen a dog this big! I have also never seen a friendly large-breed dog as mellow as these dogs. While kisses abounded, and petting was definitely a must, my friend, the breeder, and I were in a small room with four grown dogs and a puppy and it never got to the uncomfortable jumping-all-over-everyone stage.
This breeder’s male dogs range easily up to a hundred and fifty pounds; the females are a little bit smaller, staying around one-twenty. They can get even bigger than that, I’m told, up to around 170 pounds for the males and 150 for the females.
Newfies are originally bred as working dogs; the breeder casually told us that we could hook them up to a cart when they had reached eighteen months. Just what I need for my back yard: a bear-like pony to haul around yard waste!
Tempting. So very, very tempting. But my kitties look at me and remind me that we’re a kitty family.
And, besides, we’ve got to rip out 3/4 of the house this summer. We can wait for a puppy until after that.
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I have a *wonderful* Newfoundland mix dog, 118 lbs. He is not as mellow as many of the purebreds (he gets particularly excited about strange people and strange DOGS! NEW FRIENDS! LET’S GO SEE THEM!), but is just a great companion dog and very much wants to be good and help out. Lots of fur, lots of love. He has no IDEA how big and strong he is, which is sometimes problematic, but he’s also very train-able. It only took him a matter of days to pick up on complex rules of the house when we changed them, and he will heel off-leash with very little work… as long as there aren’t NEW FRIENDS to go see… and even then if he’s reminded constantly and they aren’t, you know, taunting him. (Sadly, the purebreds tend to have bad hips, which is hard on really big dogs.)
The hips were one thing the breeder talked about a lot. And pet insurance.
Could a puppy be declared a giant ktten and therefore you would remain a kitty family?
heh. 😀
I have found that very large dogs tend to have mellow temperaments (probably something bred in to keep them manageable). St. Bernards are also so relaxed as to be near dormant at times. A work dog would be useful! And I bet your kittens would terrorize it, since they’d be cats when you got a puppy.
The 2-month-old puppy already outmassed them. We are probably not ever going to get a dog that big. It’s just… too big.