Ready or not, here I go again.

A year ago, a long-time friend reached out to me to see if I still had Magnus semen in the bank.  Don’t freak out, he is a Tibetan Mastiff breeder who has been in the breed for over 20 years, and someone I coached in basketball when he was a teenager.  He wanted to negotiate a breeding, putting Magnus to one of his females; my compensation would be the pick of the litter.

I must admit that I hesitated.  Not because of him or his dogs, but because I questioned whether or not I was ready to jump back in.  L’acy had been gone for two years and I got used to a clean back lawn.  Poof!  The thought of a Magnus son brought me out of my haze.

When I first got involved in the breed, the size of Tibetan Mastiffs varied greatly.  Just look at my first two dogs: Blaze was a heavily coated 85-pound beauty queen and Magnus was a short coated 190-pound gargantuan.  That summed up the breed variety pretty well.  Here we are some 25 years later, and not much has changed.  Sure, the overall quality of the breed has probably advanced a bit; improved joint and movement quality with extra wrinkles and fur, but the dogs still range greatly in size.  Same old same old.  Perhaps, Magnus’s genes still had value.

I called the sperm bank and verified that I hadn’t paid for upkeep in many years.  I sheepishly inquired about restitution.  Turns out, I needed to break the piggy bank to get my account up to date and find out the status of my cache.  Fortunately, there were 8 well-kept vials ready to give my dream a chance.  Unfortunately, dog breeding is highly unpredictable. 

By the time my friend and I got our act together, the female my friend had in mind had gone out of heat.  This breeding was put on hold for a full year.  Fast forward to today; that year has passed, and that female is in her fall estrus once again.

Pictured above is 6-year-old, Rocky Mountain Charlotte, AKA Lottie.  Her color is Gold Sable, just like Sindred, but her gold color is a bit lighter.  Lottie is a tall drink of water that will bring rear structure and coat quality to the party.  Again, Magnus will provide gargantuousness and his polite temperament.  This breeding is considered an “outcross.”  There is almost no overlap in their pedigrees until you reach back 5 or so generations.  This may produce a wider variety of outcomes than a breeding where genes are more shared, but it is a worthy roll of the dice.

Of course, Lottie’s ancestors are not lightweights.  She descends down two lines from champions Queen of Eden and Loki.  For the record, Loki is the son of Darth, Nika’s brother, and his great grandparents include both Simba and Lady; Magnus’s parents.  There’s the overlap.

This is just the first step, and not the only breeding planned.  Stay tuned.