History of Briards in New Zealand written by Linda Shove Angevin Briards
In this series of articles, Linda Shove retraces the origins of Briards in New Zealand and reminds us of some of the important dogs that
have brought the breed from 1974 to the present day. These articles have been used in the very first French Letters but for the benefit of all the recent new owners they are worthy of repeating and updating.
The first Briard to come to New Zealand was a black bitch who arrived in late 1974 /early 1975. LULLINGSTONE TESS (known as ‘Tess’) was
born in England on December 29th 1973 from two black parents (sire: DESAMEE DOMINIQUE BEAR, dam:
CLONDERLAW ABEILLE. Breeder : Mrs S Chapman). Tess’s Welsh owner, Evie Oakes had married a New Zealander in Britain and they
brought her with them when they came to live in Wanganui.
At that time Briards were still quite rare in Britain (the first arrived in England in 1967) but Evie was still quite surprised to find that Tess was the first and only Briard in NZ. She wrote to Ruth Bumstead in England to find a suitable mate for Tess and before long BALDSLOW TOHU BOHU (known as Jacques) arrived in Wanganui. He was also black and also from two black parents (sire : Eng Ch VIR D’ PASTRE OF BALDSLOW (Imp France). dam : Eng Ch LULLINGSTONE MILLICENT OF BALDSLOW - Breeder : Mrs S Chapman) Lullingstone Millicent
was a half sister to ‘Tess’ both being out of Clonderlaw Abeille. February 26th 1976 was a momentous day for NZ Briards when ‘Tess’ whelped a litter of 11 black puppies. Unfortunately she became very ill and her milk dried up when the puppies were only 3 days old.
This meant that Evie had to hand rear all the puppies - a Mammoth task with such a big litter. By the time she fed them all, it was time to start at the beginning again with the next feed. ‘Tess’ recovered but unfortunately was never bred from again. Evie chose BALA as her kennel name very apt as it’s a place in Wales famous for its sheepdog trials. With Briards being completely unknown in NZ, Evie had
problems selling the puppies - the last didn’t go until they were nearly 6 months old. Three or four of the litter were shown a little, but
only ABIGAIL OF BALA was shown with any great consistency or success, and she was the only one to be bred from (more about her later). ‘Tess’ had lost so much coat with her litter that she was unable to be shown again, but ‘Jacques’ went on to become the first NZ Briard Champion when he gained his final C.C. at the National Dog Show in August 1976. From the first Briards in Wanganui, the
story now moves to Dunedin.
I had shared family dogs (mostly bitzers) while I was growing up in England, but circumstances had prevented me from
owning my own dogs until I emigrated to NZ with my husband David in 1972.owning my own dogs until I emigrated to
NZ with my husband David in 1972.
We acquired our first bitzer puppy within a fortnight of arriving in the country and had various successes and failures with an assortment of bitzers over the next 3 years. These culminated in a large black Lab/Kelpie cross who took to worrying sheep and had to be put down. Afterwards I sat in the vet’s carpark in floods of tears feeling criminal (he was such a young vital dog, it seemed such a waste.) Desperate
to shut me up (and in a weak moment I’m sure he lived to regret!) David said “You can have any dog you like to replace him!!”
I’d always had a weakness for hairy dogs so I decided on an Old English Sheepdog. They were very hard to come by back then, but eventually “Sophie” arrived in August 1975. By this time we had a house and section full of assorted animals, birds and fish most of which were breeding. So I knew we would want to breed from “Sophie” when she was older if she was good enough. The only way to find out if
she was up to standard for breeding was to take her to some dog-shows. I was certain I would hate showing, but bravely fronted up to our first show when “Sophie” was 3 months old. To my great astonishment I loved it and became totally and irrevocably hooked on the show scene! (I think it appeals to the suppressed gambler in me - you never know if the next show will be the one where your dog does really well!)
A few months later I was sheltering from the rain in a bookshop and idly looking for photos of O.E.S. in dog books. I turned a page and saw a photo of an O.E.S. with two big, black beautiful hairy dogs. It was a totally mind blowing moment which altered my life for good. Although “Sophie” was a lovely dog, I’d already been feeling that O.E.S. wasn’t quite the right breed for me. One look at that photo of these two glorious black Briards and I went weak at the knees and knew that I’d found exactly what I’d been subconsciously looking for.
Poor David didn’t really put up even a token resistance when I arrived home he knew when he was beaten! I was then faced with the fairly daunting task of finding myself a Briard puppy, a breed I’d never heard of and was fairly sure there were none in New Zealand.
I started by contacting NZKC to see if there were any Briards in N.Z. They replied with Evie Oakes address but, due to a typing error, indicated that “Tess” was 13 years old (instead of 3!!) and made no mention of “Jacques”. So I just assumed that “Tess” was an elderly “pet” and didn’t even bother contacting Evie at that stage. That avenue exhausted, I asked my mother in U.K. to make some enquiries for
me and heard back from a couple of U.K. Briard kennels who offered me an adult in pup bitch or a younger bitch but the cost was horrific when you added on the cost of freight. So next step was to try Australia. I was given a couple of addresses of people who had just imported Briards from U.K. and followed up with enquiries to them. One of these was to Sue Rodsted in Brisbane. A short time later the phone went at about 2am - it was Sue (she subtracted the time delay instead of adding it on !!) saying she’d recently imported an in-
whelp bitch from U.K. and had just had a cancellation for one of the puppies and did I want it? We worked out that the cost (including air freight) would be around $800 - (.... a lot of money in 1976!!!) She needed an answer straight away as the pups were just on 8 weeks old and due to be released from the quarantine kennels in the next day or two. So I poured a stiff glass of whisky, woke up my very tolerant
husband and made him drink it before saying I wanted to spend all this money on a puppy of a breed we’d never even seen!! I think he knew when he was beaten and put up very little resistance before giving in gracefully! So back to the phone to sort out details with Sue and within a couple of days “Michelle” (Bendelbah Manara Bear) was on her way to N.Z.
The first Briards arrive at Angevin. The excitement level increased to fever pitch by the day of Michelle’s expected arrival. Only to suffer a
BIG let-down when we got a phone call from Christchurch airport to say that the Ministry of Agriculture officials had rejected her and sent her back to Australia!!! It appeared that she’d been treated with the wrong strength insecticide powder and they couldn’t accept her. So the poor little thing had to be re-treated the next morning and put on yet another plane. The big problem with that was that her re-arranged flight arrived in Christchurch too late in the day for a connecting flight to Dunedin - so she had to spend the night at Christchurch airport. (If we’d waited till later in the week for a better timed flight, all her other vet treatments would have had to be repeated so there really was no option.) You can imagine how frantic I was at the thought of this little half-portion having to
fly 3 times across the Tasman in quick succession followed by a night, still in her crate, at an airport. By 6 o’clock next morning I could control myself no longer and phoned the airport to see if she was still alive! The guy who answered asked me “Do you mean this little puppy who’s running around our office chewing shoe laces and drinking milk from a saucer?” !!!!! It seems the airport staff had taken pity on her and she’d spent the night getting lots of attention and cuddles! She finally arrived at Dunedin airport later in the day and bounded out of her crate none the worse for all her travels! In retrospect, and with the experience of several of my own litters behind me, I realised that Michelle was way too small for her 8 weeks age. She only weighed 10lbs (4.54kg) - the average weight for an 8 week puppy would be nearly half as much again. She’d been born and raised in Sydney’s quarantine kennels (one of a litter of 12) and I think the staff just had no idea how much a Briard litter eats at that age.
Needless to say she started eating like a horse and her growth increased rapidly once she’d settled in. There were more worries over the next few weeks as her all important registration (plus Export Pedigree etc.) failed to arrive from Australia. Her breeder Sue Rodsted told me the cause was a delay in getting the Export Pedigree for Michelle’s mother from the English Kennel Club. (It didn’t help my peace of mind to hear a story that was doing the rounds at the time about a Beagle puppy that had been bought from Australia for a large amount of money but proved to be a Beagle cross-breed not even a pure-bred Beagle!!) Like a lot of new Briard owners, I’d expected that she would look much more like a miniature adult Briard on arrival not like a very small black Lab cross!!! The only thing that kept my sanity through these worrying early weeks was her lovely DOUBLE DEWCLAWS !! Anyway, her pedigree finally arrived of course and her show career commenced.
In those early days she was very much an oddity! No-one had even heard of Briards back then. (You have to keep in mind
that there had only been Briards in U.K. since 1967 and in Australia Once Michelle had settled in, I wrote to Evie Oakes in Wanganui to introduce myself as a fellow Briard owner. To my great astonishment she wrote back to say that her ‘Tess’ had produced a litter only 3 weeks after my Michelle had been born (this dispelled the picture I’d been given that ‘Tess’ was 13 years old!!). Further letters revealed that Evie was having a lot of trouble finding homes for her puppies (she’d been relying on word of mouth and hadn’t really done any advertising). By the time they were 4 months old she still had 6 of them left. David and I decided that if we were showing one Briard puppy - it might as well be two!!! (By this time of course Michelle had us totally suckered in and wrapped tightly round her little dewclaws !!) So ‘Abi’ (Abigail of Bala) duly arrived at Angevin to join Michelle in June 1976.
Linda falls for Fawns
Both our first two Briards were black this was partly because that was all that was available but mostly because the only colour photo I’d ever seen of a fawn was on the cover of a little American book called “How to Raise and Train a Briard”. He was a very unattractive colour very heavily shaded and with quite a light “flat” base-colour. This had the effect of making him quite a nondescript “pepper and salt” shade - not at all appealing. However, with the arrival of Michelle and Abi we started to expand our knowledge base and saw some photos of really lovely fawn Briards and very soon I WANTED A FAWN BRIARD almost as much as I’d wanted my first Briard! We’d known all along that we would eventually need to import a male to go with Abi and Michelle so it seemed obvi- ous that he should be a fawn. When the two girls were nearing their first birthday, I wrote to Nancy Tomlin in England. Nancy had started Briards in U.K. and had one of
the biggest and most successful kennels there. I’d been corresponding with her since Michelle’s arrival because she was (strictly speaking) Michelle’s breeder. (Michelle’s dam had been bred, owned and mated by Nancy before coming to Australia to whelp her puppies.)
One night there was another exciting phone call. This one was from Nancy to say there had been a litter from a bitch
she had bred - (DESAMEE MORAG BEAR) mated to Nancy’s recent import from Holland (but bred in France) DUTCH CH. VALENTIN DE LA PETITE SUISSE DU NORD AT DESAMEE. She was very pleased with one of the fawn males and thought he would suit me very well. So it was quite easy to make the decision for “Kaid” (BELLESME ALKAID) to come to N.Z. as the first fawn Briard in the country.
THE FIRST NEW ZEALAND CHAMPIONS
1976 was a history making year for Briards in New Zealand. At the National Dog Show in August, Evie Oakes’s “Jacques” (Baldslow Tohu Bohu) gained his 8th CC and became N.Z.’s FIRST CHAMPION BRIARD.
Towards the end of that year my black bitch “Michelle” (Bendelbah Manara Bear) became N.Z.‘s FIRST BITCH CHAMPION. Then in early 1977 my “Abi” (Abigail of Bala) became the FIRST N.Z. BRED CHAMPION.
FIRST FAWN BRIARD IN N.Z.
In June 1977 “Kaid” finally arrived in Christchurch from England to start 4 weeks in quarantine kennels. At his first show the day after he came out of quarantine, Kaid took Baby Puppy of Group (from a big line-up of breeds under top Australian judge Roy Burrell. This was the first Championship Show Group win for a Briard in N.Z. By the end of that year, Kaid had gained his title and was N.Z.’S FIRST FAWN BRIARD CHAMPION.
Kaid’s arrival on the show scene caused quite a stir. People had become accustomed to seeing black Briards, so Kaid’s beautiful fawn colouring was a real eye-opener.
FIRST ANGEVIN LITTERS
June 1978 was an exciting time with the arrival of the first two Angevin litters. Abi and Michelle had both been mated to
Kaid and were due to whelp on the same day. David and I had read up all we could find about dog-breeding and puppy-
rearing but still faced our first whelping with considerable trepidation - plus a lot of excitement!!
Michelle started first - at 2 in the morning (I have found over the years that this is a much-favoured time-spot!!!). By 8a.m.
she’d finished having her 7 black puppies no problems - all went to plan. I just had time for some breakfast before Abi made it
clear that she didn’t want to miss out and had her first (ENORMOUS) puppy at 10a.m. Briards usually pop puppies out as
easily as shelling peas but Abi had to really work for her first one. When it finally emerged I could see why - it was almost
twice the average birth weight for a Briard puppy!! This first puppy turned out to be the only fawn bitch from the two litters so
of course we had to keep her. She was “Nicki” (Angevin Badine Doree) who went on to become the FIRST ANGEVIN CHAMPION
. Later (when she was about 4 years old) she went to live with Greg Kerr (he already had a French Peugeot car and felt that a French Briard would go nicely with it!!) - and he and wife Viv have had at least one Briard ever since.
have brought the breed from 1974 to the present day. These articles have been used in the very first French Letters but for the benefit of all the recent new owners they are worthy of repeating and updating.
The first Briard to come to New Zealand was a black bitch who arrived in late 1974 /early 1975. LULLINGSTONE TESS (known as ‘Tess’) was
born in England on December 29th 1973 from two black parents (sire: DESAMEE DOMINIQUE BEAR, dam:
CLONDERLAW ABEILLE. Breeder : Mrs S Chapman). Tess’s Welsh owner, Evie Oakes had married a New Zealander in Britain and they
brought her with them when they came to live in Wanganui.
At that time Briards were still quite rare in Britain (the first arrived in England in 1967) but Evie was still quite surprised to find that Tess was the first and only Briard in NZ. She wrote to Ruth Bumstead in England to find a suitable mate for Tess and before long BALDSLOW TOHU BOHU (known as Jacques) arrived in Wanganui. He was also black and also from two black parents (sire : Eng Ch VIR D’ PASTRE OF BALDSLOW (Imp France). dam : Eng Ch LULLINGSTONE MILLICENT OF BALDSLOW - Breeder : Mrs S Chapman) Lullingstone Millicent
was a half sister to ‘Tess’ both being out of Clonderlaw Abeille. February 26th 1976 was a momentous day for NZ Briards when ‘Tess’ whelped a litter of 11 black puppies. Unfortunately she became very ill and her milk dried up when the puppies were only 3 days old.
This meant that Evie had to hand rear all the puppies - a Mammoth task with such a big litter. By the time she fed them all, it was time to start at the beginning again with the next feed. ‘Tess’ recovered but unfortunately was never bred from again. Evie chose BALA as her kennel name very apt as it’s a place in Wales famous for its sheepdog trials. With Briards being completely unknown in NZ, Evie had
problems selling the puppies - the last didn’t go until they were nearly 6 months old. Three or four of the litter were shown a little, but
only ABIGAIL OF BALA was shown with any great consistency or success, and she was the only one to be bred from (more about her later). ‘Tess’ had lost so much coat with her litter that she was unable to be shown again, but ‘Jacques’ went on to become the first NZ Briard Champion when he gained his final C.C. at the National Dog Show in August 1976. From the first Briards in Wanganui, the
story now moves to Dunedin.
I had shared family dogs (mostly bitzers) while I was growing up in England, but circumstances had prevented me from
owning my own dogs until I emigrated to NZ with my husband David in 1972.owning my own dogs until I emigrated to
NZ with my husband David in 1972.
We acquired our first bitzer puppy within a fortnight of arriving in the country and had various successes and failures with an assortment of bitzers over the next 3 years. These culminated in a large black Lab/Kelpie cross who took to worrying sheep and had to be put down. Afterwards I sat in the vet’s carpark in floods of tears feeling criminal (he was such a young vital dog, it seemed such a waste.) Desperate
to shut me up (and in a weak moment I’m sure he lived to regret!) David said “You can have any dog you like to replace him!!”
I’d always had a weakness for hairy dogs so I decided on an Old English Sheepdog. They were very hard to come by back then, but eventually “Sophie” arrived in August 1975. By this time we had a house and section full of assorted animals, birds and fish most of which were breeding. So I knew we would want to breed from “Sophie” when she was older if she was good enough. The only way to find out if
she was up to standard for breeding was to take her to some dog-shows. I was certain I would hate showing, but bravely fronted up to our first show when “Sophie” was 3 months old. To my great astonishment I loved it and became totally and irrevocably hooked on the show scene! (I think it appeals to the suppressed gambler in me - you never know if the next show will be the one where your dog does really well!)
A few months later I was sheltering from the rain in a bookshop and idly looking for photos of O.E.S. in dog books. I turned a page and saw a photo of an O.E.S. with two big, black beautiful hairy dogs. It was a totally mind blowing moment which altered my life for good. Although “Sophie” was a lovely dog, I’d already been feeling that O.E.S. wasn’t quite the right breed for me. One look at that photo of these two glorious black Briards and I went weak at the knees and knew that I’d found exactly what I’d been subconsciously looking for.
Poor David didn’t really put up even a token resistance when I arrived home he knew when he was beaten! I was then faced with the fairly daunting task of finding myself a Briard puppy, a breed I’d never heard of and was fairly sure there were none in New Zealand.
I started by contacting NZKC to see if there were any Briards in N.Z. They replied with Evie Oakes address but, due to a typing error, indicated that “Tess” was 13 years old (instead of 3!!) and made no mention of “Jacques”. So I just assumed that “Tess” was an elderly “pet” and didn’t even bother contacting Evie at that stage. That avenue exhausted, I asked my mother in U.K. to make some enquiries for
me and heard back from a couple of U.K. Briard kennels who offered me an adult in pup bitch or a younger bitch but the cost was horrific when you added on the cost of freight. So next step was to try Australia. I was given a couple of addresses of people who had just imported Briards from U.K. and followed up with enquiries to them. One of these was to Sue Rodsted in Brisbane. A short time later the phone went at about 2am - it was Sue (she subtracted the time delay instead of adding it on !!) saying she’d recently imported an in-
whelp bitch from U.K. and had just had a cancellation for one of the puppies and did I want it? We worked out that the cost (including air freight) would be around $800 - (.... a lot of money in 1976!!!) She needed an answer straight away as the pups were just on 8 weeks old and due to be released from the quarantine kennels in the next day or two. So I poured a stiff glass of whisky, woke up my very tolerant
husband and made him drink it before saying I wanted to spend all this money on a puppy of a breed we’d never even seen!! I think he knew when he was beaten and put up very little resistance before giving in gracefully! So back to the phone to sort out details with Sue and within a couple of days “Michelle” (Bendelbah Manara Bear) was on her way to N.Z.
The first Briards arrive at Angevin. The excitement level increased to fever pitch by the day of Michelle’s expected arrival. Only to suffer a
BIG let-down when we got a phone call from Christchurch airport to say that the Ministry of Agriculture officials had rejected her and sent her back to Australia!!! It appeared that she’d been treated with the wrong strength insecticide powder and they couldn’t accept her. So the poor little thing had to be re-treated the next morning and put on yet another plane. The big problem with that was that her re-arranged flight arrived in Christchurch too late in the day for a connecting flight to Dunedin - so she had to spend the night at Christchurch airport. (If we’d waited till later in the week for a better timed flight, all her other vet treatments would have had to be repeated so there really was no option.) You can imagine how frantic I was at the thought of this little half-portion having to
fly 3 times across the Tasman in quick succession followed by a night, still in her crate, at an airport. By 6 o’clock next morning I could control myself no longer and phoned the airport to see if she was still alive! The guy who answered asked me “Do you mean this little puppy who’s running around our office chewing shoe laces and drinking milk from a saucer?” !!!!! It seems the airport staff had taken pity on her and she’d spent the night getting lots of attention and cuddles! She finally arrived at Dunedin airport later in the day and bounded out of her crate none the worse for all her travels! In retrospect, and with the experience of several of my own litters behind me, I realised that Michelle was way too small for her 8 weeks age. She only weighed 10lbs (4.54kg) - the average weight for an 8 week puppy would be nearly half as much again. She’d been born and raised in Sydney’s quarantine kennels (one of a litter of 12) and I think the staff just had no idea how much a Briard litter eats at that age.
Needless to say she started eating like a horse and her growth increased rapidly once she’d settled in. There were more worries over the next few weeks as her all important registration (plus Export Pedigree etc.) failed to arrive from Australia. Her breeder Sue Rodsted told me the cause was a delay in getting the Export Pedigree for Michelle’s mother from the English Kennel Club. (It didn’t help my peace of mind to hear a story that was doing the rounds at the time about a Beagle puppy that had been bought from Australia for a large amount of money but proved to be a Beagle cross-breed not even a pure-bred Beagle!!) Like a lot of new Briard owners, I’d expected that she would look much more like a miniature adult Briard on arrival not like a very small black Lab cross!!! The only thing that kept my sanity through these worrying early weeks was her lovely DOUBLE DEWCLAWS !! Anyway, her pedigree finally arrived of course and her show career commenced.
In those early days she was very much an oddity! No-one had even heard of Briards back then. (You have to keep in mind
that there had only been Briards in U.K. since 1967 and in Australia Once Michelle had settled in, I wrote to Evie Oakes in Wanganui to introduce myself as a fellow Briard owner. To my great astonishment she wrote back to say that her ‘Tess’ had produced a litter only 3 weeks after my Michelle had been born (this dispelled the picture I’d been given that ‘Tess’ was 13 years old!!). Further letters revealed that Evie was having a lot of trouble finding homes for her puppies (she’d been relying on word of mouth and hadn’t really done any advertising). By the time they were 4 months old she still had 6 of them left. David and I decided that if we were showing one Briard puppy - it might as well be two!!! (By this time of course Michelle had us totally suckered in and wrapped tightly round her little dewclaws !!) So ‘Abi’ (Abigail of Bala) duly arrived at Angevin to join Michelle in June 1976.
Linda falls for Fawns
Both our first two Briards were black this was partly because that was all that was available but mostly because the only colour photo I’d ever seen of a fawn was on the cover of a little American book called “How to Raise and Train a Briard”. He was a very unattractive colour very heavily shaded and with quite a light “flat” base-colour. This had the effect of making him quite a nondescript “pepper and salt” shade - not at all appealing. However, with the arrival of Michelle and Abi we started to expand our knowledge base and saw some photos of really lovely fawn Briards and very soon I WANTED A FAWN BRIARD almost as much as I’d wanted my first Briard! We’d known all along that we would eventually need to import a male to go with Abi and Michelle so it seemed obvi- ous that he should be a fawn. When the two girls were nearing their first birthday, I wrote to Nancy Tomlin in England. Nancy had started Briards in U.K. and had one of
the biggest and most successful kennels there. I’d been corresponding with her since Michelle’s arrival because she was (strictly speaking) Michelle’s breeder. (Michelle’s dam had been bred, owned and mated by Nancy before coming to Australia to whelp her puppies.)
One night there was another exciting phone call. This one was from Nancy to say there had been a litter from a bitch
she had bred - (DESAMEE MORAG BEAR) mated to Nancy’s recent import from Holland (but bred in France) DUTCH CH. VALENTIN DE LA PETITE SUISSE DU NORD AT DESAMEE. She was very pleased with one of the fawn males and thought he would suit me very well. So it was quite easy to make the decision for “Kaid” (BELLESME ALKAID) to come to N.Z. as the first fawn Briard in the country.
THE FIRST NEW ZEALAND CHAMPIONS
1976 was a history making year for Briards in New Zealand. At the National Dog Show in August, Evie Oakes’s “Jacques” (Baldslow Tohu Bohu) gained his 8th CC and became N.Z.’s FIRST CHAMPION BRIARD.
Towards the end of that year my black bitch “Michelle” (Bendelbah Manara Bear) became N.Z.‘s FIRST BITCH CHAMPION. Then in early 1977 my “Abi” (Abigail of Bala) became the FIRST N.Z. BRED CHAMPION.
FIRST FAWN BRIARD IN N.Z.
In June 1977 “Kaid” finally arrived in Christchurch from England to start 4 weeks in quarantine kennels. At his first show the day after he came out of quarantine, Kaid took Baby Puppy of Group (from a big line-up of breeds under top Australian judge Roy Burrell. This was the first Championship Show Group win for a Briard in N.Z. By the end of that year, Kaid had gained his title and was N.Z.’S FIRST FAWN BRIARD CHAMPION.
Kaid’s arrival on the show scene caused quite a stir. People had become accustomed to seeing black Briards, so Kaid’s beautiful fawn colouring was a real eye-opener.
FIRST ANGEVIN LITTERS
June 1978 was an exciting time with the arrival of the first two Angevin litters. Abi and Michelle had both been mated to
Kaid and were due to whelp on the same day. David and I had read up all we could find about dog-breeding and puppy-
rearing but still faced our first whelping with considerable trepidation - plus a lot of excitement!!
Michelle started first - at 2 in the morning (I have found over the years that this is a much-favoured time-spot!!!). By 8a.m.
she’d finished having her 7 black puppies no problems - all went to plan. I just had time for some breakfast before Abi made it
clear that she didn’t want to miss out and had her first (ENORMOUS) puppy at 10a.m. Briards usually pop puppies out as
easily as shelling peas but Abi had to really work for her first one. When it finally emerged I could see why - it was almost
twice the average birth weight for a Briard puppy!! This first puppy turned out to be the only fawn bitch from the two litters so
of course we had to keep her. She was “Nicki” (Angevin Badine Doree) who went on to become the FIRST ANGEVIN CHAMPION
. Later (when she was about 4 years old) she went to live with Greg Kerr (he already had a French Peugeot car and felt that a French Briard would go nicely with it!!) - and he and wife Viv have had at least one Briard ever since.