A dog has long been the desire of my children and as a child I myself grew up with dogs. But for me was just a big dog acceptable, and my wife had too much respect for those dogs. That changed when our circle of friends extended around a pair that possessed a Beautiful Collie bitch named Lady and they wanted to get it fertilized once. They searched buyers for their future puppies quickly and my wife was on fire. Unfortunately, the bitch got ill and could not get puppies. But we walked in mind already with Lassie by the Schmölderpark, so we searched the newspaper for relevant ads and were successful. In Amern a Hobby-breeder had two puppies from the first litter of his breeding pair and sold one of them. The second he kept.

So we came to Astor, our first dog.

Since we knew of Astors disease was for my wife observed: "There is no new dog". At breakfast the morning after Astor's death it was said by her: "You want a new dog I see it in you, you want to ...!?!." And then we got invited by my sister to a weekend in the Eifel to get away from home. Happened to be on a neighboring farm there were eight week old Bernise bouvier-puppies.  But then suddenly a naughty pipsqueak was so ahead of me and looked me in the eye. When my wife stated then: "It looks like a teddy bear." the dog had a name and we new dog.

For a Bernese bouvier Teddy was quite old. For a month yet, and it would have celebrated its 12th birthday. But its hips did not end up using, so we had to release it. And once again my wife was sure: "There is no new dog". This time it lasted from May to July and my children gave much trouble to convince my wife that a house without a dog can be no home. Then we saw a post on WDR the shelter Heinsberg in which a quail bitch named Ronda was presented. The bitch liked it, but the director of the shelter had with us "feel bad". So we looked around further and found at the breeder Cornelia Grabe a young retreiver named Dexter. Dexter found itself very quickly in our way around and is  an indispensable part of our lives.