All of our boxers
have been raised as indoor house pets since we got them as puppies.
We have house-broken each of them using traditional methods as
advised by our veterinarian and personal research. Basically,
from day one, we practiced taking them out on a regular basis,
reinforcing the process of training by repetitively using the
phrases, "go out" and "do your business".
We then followed up with verbal praises and petting when they
did "their business" outside. We use a kennel to contain
them at night and whenever they have to be left alone in the house
and found our vet's advise that they will not dirty their bedding
area to be quite true for the most part. Eventually, they are
weaned from the kennel at night. Crusher and Daisie have both
been successfully weaned from the kennel completely. At this time
we are working on kennel training and housebreaking our newest
member of the Webster's Boxers family, BB. We hope our tried and
true methods will work with her as well, but if not we are always
open to learning new methods and treating each of our family pets
as unique individuals! We have a 10' X 20' fenced in area in the
backyard where all the dogs enjoy outdoor physical activity on
a daily basis. We also try to take them out to our land in the
country at least once a week, where they enjoy running free on
our 9 acre lot and frolicking in the pond.
Our Boxers have
always been fed on a simple, standard diet consisting of both
dry and
*canned food. As for brands
of food, we generally vary from name brands to generic brands.
We have never practiced any special dietary procedures with our
boxers, and they are all extremely healthy and fit. Crusher and
Daisie both weigh just slightly over the average for their sex
and breed, mostly consisting of muscle. We believe that our combination
of simple dietary means and regular exercise routines have allowed
us to raise very healthy boxers by AKC Boxer Standards.
We have provided
all of our Boxers with regular veterinarian care, maintaining
their shots and routine checkups, along with taking preventative
steps against fleas and worms. We have experienced very few instances
of illness with all of our dogs and have bred Crusher and Daisie a total of three
times now, producing three healthy litters of puppies. Sometime
in 2008 we plan on breeding our new brindle female, BB,
with Crusher in the hopes of producing a varied litter of fawn
and brindle puppies with an exceptional pedigree as both dogs
have a significant number of Champions in their pedigrees. Anyone
interested in purchasing a puppy from Webster's Boxers can use
the online form on our
Contact Us page for more information.
*Updated 4/25/07: In lieu of
the recent canned dog food and treat recalls over the past several
months we have since stopped feeding our dogs all canned food
and dog treats. We may or may not work these items back into our
feeding regiment in the future after further researching the benefits
of these items. At this time we are primarily feeding the dogs
dry dog/puppy food. We do still try to vary the brand from week
to week, which we believe to be a good policy for several reasons.
First, in the event that they end up recalling dry food as well
it is not as likely that all brands will be effected which means
if we have been switching out brands we may spare our dogs from
greater exposure to the contaminated food. Second, if you ever
need to change brands of dog food for whatever reason, we believe
it is better to train the dogs at an early age to adjust to different
types of foods to avoid the issue of finickiness. For example,
people who only fed their dogs one of the brands/type of canned
food that was recalled may have adjusted their dog to that one
kind of food and may have had problems switching them after the
recall to another kind of food, not to mention if that was all
their dog ate during the months prior to having knowledge of the
contamination those dogs had a greater chance of exposure to the
contaminated foods than our dogs which were switched out from
brand to brand each week. This is just a personal preference on
our part and we do not claim this information to be professional
advice in any way.
