What are the ethical concerns around placing adult dogs with another family?
As anyone who knows us is aware, we have lived for and with our Chinese Shar-Pei for 23 years now. They are always close to us, if not underfoot, in the next room, and always in our hearts and minds. We have shown them, nursed them, cried over them and for them, spent money we surely didn't have, on them, and loved every one of them.

With a number of things that have happened recently, both suddenly like Mike's accident in March, and slowly like our advancing age, and Mike's interests in dogs turning from showing to training, we need to have fewer dogs.

I have written that I am working on a breeding program for smaller Shar-Pei. This horrifies the average show breeder, who believes that you must conform to the standard in every way, which states that Shar-Pei will be 18 to 20 inches measured at the dip behind the shoulders to the floor. And the reasons I like small ones are many, from being so tall myself, I have always liked small things, whether it be flowers or Shar-Pei, probably a hold over from wearing size 12 shoes at age 12! I like research, can I do this? And my mother, who lived with us when she got Alzheimer's, fell here, not over anything, just walking across the floor, but half of all people who fall and break a hip, as she did, are not alive a year later.

It is much easier to take care of a 20 to 30 pound dog than a 55 to 65 pound dog. Easier to lift, easier to bathe, easier to step over, easier to recover if you trip over one or one jumps on you, as these dogs with their senses of humour, are likely to do.

We have a number of quite old dogs. Many much older than the average life span of a Shar-Pei, which is still only 7 years. Of course we will keep all of these.

Then there are dogs who have a problem. They would need special homes, and if one is not forthcoming, they will stay. One example is a blue male, just now a year old, who has traumatic glaucoma. I noticed at 3 weeks old one of his eyes did not look right, a little cloudy. I watched it for 3 days, and on the 3rd day it was much worse, appeared almost bulging. I actually spent $19.95 to email one of those places on line where you can ask experts any question. I got, by accident, a Vet who was an eye specialist. He had me email him pictures, and told me what it was. This was on a Saturday afternoon, and Monday morning my vets verified what he said. It is not the inherited glaucoma, it is from a scratch apparently, possibly from anther puppy's nail, we don't know. That eye did appear bigger than the other one for several months. I had been told it was painful and would need to be removed at an age where anaesthesia is safe, 4 months at the earliest. By this age, either the eye had stopped growing and his face had grown to where it matched, or the eye had gone down some. It was no longer bulging, and he is in no pain at all, plays all the time. But that eye cannot see. It will not affect his other eye, his lifespan, and is not inherited. But unless I find a home that specifically wants him, he will stay.

But what about perfectly normal, healthy, standard sized, young to middle aged dogs?
In a situation like this, the owner must determine whether each specific dog would be happier in a group situation, here, or in a home of his or her own. Like people, some dogs take to change better than others. Some are more bonded to us or to their dog friends, and would be uncomfortable with a change, some would love the attention of having his or her own family and all the attention and love of those people.

It's also quite expensive to fly an adult dog, so any new owners would probably be from the south east so that they could easily drive here.

While each breed has certain personality characteristics that are consistent, each dog, like each person, is different and has his or her own needs. So this is what we are working on at this time.

Just something to think about. Susie

There are 3 height classifications in Shar-Pei, standard, miniature and toy. They are measured at the shoulder, in the dip of the top-line, as short as possible without pressing down on the dog. Standard height is 18-20 inches. This is the size that is shown in the AKC ring. Miniature height is 15-17inches. Toy height is anything 15 inches or below.

Everyone who raises any breed of dogs will get some that are not the height desired: some bigger, some smaller. In Shar-Pei, several of the first dogs who came over to this country were small, so in a limited gene pool, the small genes persist.

But why am I leaning toward smaller dogs?

1-I am getting older and they are easier to pick up, and bathe.

2-Mike [My husband, Michael Lauer,] is not showing now, he is working full time at Pet-Smart training dogs, so we don't many need full-sized dogs to take in the show ring. I will of course keep a small number. We have 23 breedings of frozen semen of Andrew's, so we will use them at some time.

3-My mother had a broken hip at an age not much older than I am now, and the smaller dogs are easier to step over and around with less likelihood of me tripping over one and falling. We have several males, Rush being the worst, who will come up behind me and throw their hands into my waist, almost putting me on the ground. And I swear he smiles when I look back!

4-They are adorable.

5-My mother told me when she was 80, that one of the benefits of being 80 was that you could do anything You wanted to. So I took it down to 60.

6-I have a gene for research. I just can't help it, just like being so tall, it's just part of me. I have invented 4 colors, have been quite successful at improving health, now it's time for another challenge. This of course is the main reason.

I started keeping some of our smaller puppies about 2 years ago. We had them accidentally all along. Sometimes I have kept a puppy thinking the puppy will grow up to full size and have the dog stop growing at a young age, ending up the size of a toy or a mini.

We had observed at that time in our show lines, that they gained 2 inches after 6 months old. If they were, for example, 14 inches at 6 months, we knew they would not be able to show.

We had our first litter of toys in August 2009. Instead of the 13-16 ounces that standard Shar-Pei weigh at birth, this litter of 6 weighed between 6 ounces and 7.8 ounces each. This scared me they were so tiny. But all did well and are now 10 months old.

3 of the 6 are really tiny, averaging 20 pounds now. 3 of the 6 are larger, close to 30 pounds; it looks like those 3 are mini's.

Ours are actually a different style from the small ones bred by most mini and toy breeders. Others seem to prefer an extremely wrinkled dog, very large head, looking like a perpetual puppy. Those dogs tend to be long in the back and short legged and have an arc tail.

The ones we are getting are proportioned exactly like standard Shar-Pei, only smaller. Our dogs have always been quite wrinkled, so I don't need to worry about our lines losing wrinkles as they grow up.

I did not buy any dogs to develop this program. I weighed my puppies every 12 hours and watch the weights go up. If a dog is gaining slowly but constantly, and is considerably smaller than the siblings, that's the one to watch. And keep a look out for some very small Shenanigans dogs!

It’s been way too cold here to bathe any of the dogs. We have an elevated tub in the kennel building-it is really a cow waterer but works great-when it’s 70 degrees or higher outside. You can bathe small puppies in the kitchen sink, but anybody bigger-nope. I had considered putting down a lot of towels in the kitchen and putting a few inches of water in one of those big plastic storage containers that are all over Wal-Mart, standing a dog in one of them, but did not get around to trying it.

Some time around Christmas I had a black male I was co/owning with the man who usually checks us in at Delta when we fly puppies. There were 3 tiny black males in that litter, I sold one, I have one here, and one was going to live with Anthony. It may not sound smart to keep for available breeding, two litter brothers, but their mother is apricot out of cream to cream, their father is brown out of blue to red isabella, and they may easily each carry different colors or traits.

I realized when I was about due to be at Anthony’s house, that this boy had never had a bath! It isn’t true what you hear about Shar-Pei needing so many baths, the wrinkles powdered, and all of that. But a black does get dull looking, loses some of the shine of a healthy coat if he has never had a bath!

All 3 of those boys, and their fawn sister, are very docile and sweet. I just took that boy in the shower with me, had no worry that he might freak out. What ever I used on me, I used on him. He was fine with it, he doesn’t mind anything.

This is the first time I can remember our weather not hitting 70 in a whole month, and I have lived here at least 50 years of my total 63. And I don’t like cold weather! We got 7 inches of snow the other day, a record.

Miss Pea –formally Shenanigans Princess Pea-turned 6 months old on the 9th and I realized she had never had a bath. Now this is the sweetest puppy ever, but she is spicy! I have contemplated now for a couple of days taking her in the bathtub with me.
I have bathed grown dogs in the bathtub many, many times, but you put a leash on them and tie it to the bar over the soap dish. Somehow they can squiggle lose, they pull down every bottle, razor, Buff Puff, anything in the area, and have been known to try to climb my chest.

I have had a lot of puppy buyers over the years whose dogs bathed with them. Some have told me the dog got in the tub on its own. Some have taken the dog into the shower and just done it until the dog got used to it, and then liked it. If you have a shower curtain, this would be a lot harder, but we have the flexi-glass doors that slide.
Miss Pea is starting to show those little spots that the nicest horsecoat puppies seem always to get, so I got together the 10% hydroxyl peroxide soap and some medicated shampoo.

I used the Dremel on her for the first time, too, while the bathroom heater was on. Some dogs, the majority I would say, have a fit at this, they don’t like the noise. But they get used to it. Miss Pea just sat in my lap and looked at each toe as I did it, seemed quite philosophical about it.

The peroxide shampoo I had bought in a bar, it was much cheaper than the lotion shampoo, for the same stuff. Wrong decision-it did not lather up for the longest time.
All I kept thinking about was how cold we would both be if I used up all the hot water between bathing two of us. Pea just looked at me like something very strange was happening. The hot water didn’t run out.

If you are ever bathing a Shar-Pei, there is one thing not to forget. If you do not dry the area from where the tail joins the back, to the middle of the back, frequently the tail will hang down for up to two weeks. This happened to Andrew once, and we had never seen it happen before. We were nearly hysterical, he had just won First Award of Merit at Westminster at eleven months old and had a week’s straight showing coming up in Raleigh. I called the vet, made an appointment with the Neurology Department at N.C. State Vet School, which the appointment they gave us was six weeks later, since the problem was cosmetic, rather than a medical problem. Then a friend of mine called and we told her the problem. She laughed and laughed and told me that was called Golden Tail since it happens a lot to Golden Retrievers; it would be back up in ten days or two weeks. And it was!

After I put little Pea down on the bathroom floor, half dried off, I remembered this and took a hand towel to that area. She again looked at me wondering what new experiences we were having today.

She’s the best bed-dog we have had since Andrew, too. Mike almost took pictures a couple of mornings ago, he told me. Both of us were under the covers, side by side, each had her hands near our left cheeks. She runs right to the bed to be lifted up in it, and gets under the covers and never moves.

Now for Michael Lauer to be in love with a Toy Shar-Pei who is a chocolate horsecoat is really saying something!

I hope you all get to meet Miss Pea.

And come visit me, Susan Lauer, or Shenanigans Shar-Pei, on Facebook! Susie