Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns. Unknown
Idea Transcript
Surfari Portuguese Water Dogs and Rhodesian Ridgebacks Home About Us Our Dogs Health Puppy and Dog Care Breeding Philosophy Litters Photos and Movies Blog Links Rescue
Welcome to Surfari Dogs! We are Mike and Lynn McCallum and we live just south of Sacramento in Elk Grove, California. We have been married 18 years and live with our sons and six dogs. Mike is a professor of chemistry at the University of the Pacific in Stockton and Lynn is a manager at a management-consulting firm in Sacramento. Our oldest of three sons is in the Army and is stationed in Texas. Our other two sons are in high school.
We have always owned and been involved with purebred dogs, including Doberman Pinchers and Labrador Retrievers in our younger years and Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Portuguese Water Dogs currently. Our dogs have always been a huge part of our family and are treated as family members. They are all inside dogs and race to claim their spots on the couches and beds or in the pool.
As our boys have gotten older, we have been able to incorporate other activities into our lives besides just soccer, baseball, and basketball! Now, when we aren’t going to our boys’ activities, we are participating in lots of activities with our dogs. In 2008, we began showing our dogs in AKC conformation events to have fun with our dogs and to try our hand at earning championships on the dog. We like to have fun showing our dogs as a family and have been lucky in having good success in doing so.
We also attend the annual national specialties of the Portuguese Water Dog Club of America and Rhodesian Ridgeback Club of the United States.
Mike and Lynn with Julie and Ty Rust at the 2012 PWDCA national specialty in WI.
In addition to conformation events, we have been practicing in performance venues as well, including obedience, agility, and water. These events take patience and practice so we are still working on getting some titles!
In 2011, we decided to breed our first litter of Portuguese Water Dogs with our friends, mentors, and co-breeders Julie and Ty Rust from Rustyco Portuguese Water Dogs. This litter was amazing and has produced two AKC champions and a third, who was the 2013 PWDCA national specialty winner’s bitch, is well on her way to becoming a champion. We will have future litters but we will always remain a very small hobby breeder that produces very few but high quality family dogs with excellent temperament, conformation, and breed type. Now that we have shared with you our interest and the types of activities we participate in, the most important piece of information you should take away with you from our “About Us” page is that we love our dogs and they are our family members first and foremost. We try to have fun and actively engage with our canine family members through lots of different types of events as well as just our day-to-day life of walks and swimming in the pool. It is important to us that individuals that we build a relationship through our dogs hold the same commitment to their dogs that we do with ours.