Breeding philosophy

Our breeding philosophy is very simple: we are a small hobby breeder that produces very few but high quality family dogs with excellent temperament, conformation, and breed type.

Our dogs are our family members first and foremost. As such, our dogs live with us in our home – we do NOT have kennel dogs!! We do NOT breed our dogs to make money—in fact, careful planning to breed healthy and sound puppies that are raised inside our home generally costs far more than the amount of money charged for a puppy. Protecting the wonderful pedigrees that the breeders we received our foundation dogs from have entrusted to us is very important and something we take extremely seriously. It is important to us that individuals that we build a relationship with through our dogs hold the same commitment to their dogs that we do with ours.

Breeding Processes and Practices

All of our dogs are fully health tested. Additionally, we only consider breeding partners for our dogs that are fully health tested. Breeding only with health-tested parents is just one part of our breeding practices. Another important aspect involves careful planning to match breeding partners together that can produce puppies that exhibit each parent’s best qualities and minimize introducing undesirable traits, including health issues. The planning phase of a careful breeding process involves in-depth pedigree research and long strategic discussions with experienced and knowledgeable breeders regarding the pros and cons associated with a specific proposed breeding, including those related to temperament, conformation, and health. This process can take months and even years and require searching the country or world to find the best sire to compliment a dam.
When breeding, the goal is to produce a next generation that is better than the parents and one that closely aligns with the "breed standard". A breed standard is a set of guidelines that are adopted by a breed’s parent club that describe in words specific observable qualities (breed type) that the breed should exhibit, including qualities related to appearance, movement, and temperament.

Raising Artaxs Puppies

Once the breeding has taken place and the puppies whelped, the puppies are raised inside our home and socialized from the very beginning. Puppies stay at our home with their mom until they are at least 7-8 weeks old – they never leave earlier than that because it is important that the puppies learn appropriate dog behavior from their mother and siblings.
From the first day they are born and throughout the months we are raising the puppies, we take many pictures and movies that are posted on our Facebook page and our website.

Since breeding is only a hobby and we have a limited number of litters per year (usually one, sometimes two) of ours we might not have a pup ready for you tomorrow, so reserving one of our dogs might require time and patience.

During the breeding planning phase and while we are raising our puppies, we carefully screen all potential puppy owners. We do not take this process lightly!! Our puppies are placed into ONLY the best homes possible thus we will need for some informations regarding your lifestyle. When contacting us please tell us a bit about yourselves, where you live, prior dog experience, family members, if there are children in the household please provide us with ages, your home and the environment you will provide for your new companion. We want to hear why you are interested in Standard Schnauzers. If you have an interest in Showing a dog to it's Championship let us know.

Matching Puppies with Potential Puppy Owners

First and foremost, it is most important to make sure that the right puppy has the right personality for the type of home that it is going to. Some puppies have high drive and are into everything while other puppies are more laid back. We will want to carefully understand the type of home environment and lifestyle of the puppy owners to ensure a good match is made. For example, it would never be good to place a high drive puppy in the home of a minimally active retired couple. Similarly, it would never be good to place a very laid back puppy with a very active couple that is looking for a dog that can compete in high-level performance events.
Once the temperament and personality match is made, then aspects of gender and appearance can be considered. Typically, we ask interested puppy owners to provide us with their top three puppy picks and we do our very best to fulfill the wishes while ensuring the puppies go to the homes that best suit them.

We reserve the right to select a couple of puppies that exhibit potential show qualities from a litter to either keep ourselves or be placed with homes that are interested in showing the dogs to an Championship. Show quality puppies are available to APPROVED show/breedings homes only.

Artax's Lifelong Commitment to our Puppies

We remain in regular contact with all of our puppy owners to provide life long support so it is important to us that we can work together and be able to form a relationship. We work with all of the owners of our puppies on any issues no matter how big or small – whether it is related to training, health, eating, etc.

Artax's Angels will take back any dog we have bred at any time during its life – ANYTIME! We are committed to the well-being of every dog we breed for its life. We require that if for some reason a puppy buyer cannot continue to care for their dog they received from Artax's Angels, the dog must be returned back to us.