Bronco: The Mountain Climbing Maltese

BY AMY FERNANDEZ

Possibly, it undermines the extravagant fantasies of a legion of aspirants. But the truth is—as every bona fide dog expert will freely admit…yes, sometimes even they find them- selves out of their depth in this unpredictable doggy universe.

Here’s an interesting example of how this sort of thing goes down. Our story takes place at a time when our expert knew her way around the dog biz-especially taking pride in her skillful presentation of coated breeds. Therefore, at the outset this seemed like a well-calculated plan.

“In the mid-1960s, my daughter had been doing well in Juniors showing our dogs, but when she was about 14 she decided that she needed her own dog to show. I was good with hair and I had a friend who raised Maltese. At the time she had a little pup that was as cute as a button and he had just won a five-point major. So I bought Bronco for my daughter and she did fairly well for awhile, but eventually she lost interest in showing him in Juniors.”

So far, this is a standard format scenario that most parents can relate to in some fashion. Still, little Bronco had a five-point major. He was just asking to be finished. And after all, mom was out there winning every weekend. Well, almost every weekend. The family also had another hobby.

“At that time, we were all mountain climbers. There are twenty-four 14,000 foot peaks in Colorado and everybody wants to climb ALL of them. So the whole family would drive up there on the weekends and we would climb them. I would bring Bronco because by then he just lived with us like a regular dog. I would stay at the camp and read a book.” Bronco, however, being no pansy dog “would do the 14,000 foot climb with the rest of my family. He absolutely loved it but all the weeds and scrub just wrecked his coat.”

Previously, this issue had not received much attention from our expert. She was a tried and true coat care magician, in addition to the fact that, “When he was young his puppy coat was really nice, silky and straight,” basically what you want to see on a potential champion Maltese.

Short URL: http://caninechronicle.com/?p=154737

Posted by Alex on Nov 13 2018. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.