I have always known what I wanted to do even as a child and that was to work with animals. My father came home from work one day when I was 10 years old to discover that I had "rescued" every loose dog I could find in the neighborhood. After returning each one to its owner, he made a statement "Colleen, I'm certain beyond a doubt that when you grow up you will be surrounded by many animals". He was right, I have always had several animals in my life ever since and I never forgot what he said that day. I started my serious breeding program in 1985. I have been in the AKC show ring and handled dogs as well. Later I fell in love with the beautiful yellow Labrador Retriever as my breed of choice.
Over time my growing concern with the breed was the allergic reaction so many people and children were having to Lab fur, dander and salivia. It was heart breaking for a family to bring a beloved pet back for re-homing and permanent separation.
After studying the Labradoodle breed in depth, I knew this was the direction I had to go. My first litters were standards. Although they were adorable at 8 weeks, by 6 months they were starting to outgrow many families. I knew I had to breed a much smaller Labradoodle to meet the needs of future adoptive families. Now I specialize only in very small toy/mini's ranging in size from approximately 9 to 19 pounds when full grown.
The Labradoodle breed was started as a hybrid mix of Labrador and Poodle. The mix of the two breeds created a wonderful, intelligent dog. Here,at Labradoodles of Oregon, we strongly believe that to dilute this mix by breeding a poodle back to a Labradoodle(F1B) dramatically changes the breed as the puppies will be 3/4 poodle and only 1/4 Labrador, thus breeding out many of the wonderful qualities of the Labrador. For this reason, all of our puppies are first generation, combining the wonderful traits of both breeds, equally, as the original Labradoodles in Austrilia were first bred.
Our toy/mini's are extremley small and perfect in every way. The excitement of this smaller size was summed up, in one statement, by one of our adoptive families, who live in a condo. "Our Mini-Labradoodle is a little dog with a BIG dog's personality, heartiness and intelligence".
