​The MDBA is not the breed club for the Australian Cobberdog - it’s a dog registry for all breeds of dogs located in Australia.  The CEO notified me that it will terminate any member who includes any breed of dog not registered with the MDBA on their website, as well as termination if i use the same kennel name for that other breed on a different website.    We thought it over, and decided we want only one website, one kennel name, and one program consistent with our beliefs on what makes a great therapy / emotional support dog.


We are breeders of therapy dogs first and foremost, and have been since before we joined the MDBA.  We joined with a small band of carefully selected Australian Labradoodles for their intuition, calm nature, and easy trainability.  Many Australian Labradoodle breeders from around the world registered their dogs with the MDBA back then and were warmly welcomed - we just wanted to preserve those traits and give the breed a legitimate name, since it not a “doodle” anymore and hasn’t been for 20 years. 


Within 18 months of joining, the MDBA announced, retroactively, that we could no longer use them (we should have had a date 1-2 years out so we could plan for such a change).  Then we were told we couldn’t even have them on our website anymore.  My Australian Labradoodles were then moved to a separate website under a different kennel name per their new rules.  Some of my clients thought that was my idea and jumped to the wrong conclusions.


  We believe breeders of a developing breed should know what breeds have been added to the foundation bloodlines and what improvements those additions bring to the breed as well as what diseases.  We believe in transparency.  I was embarrassed to answer my clients that i didn’t know what breeds went into this breed i was faithfully developing. They wouldn’t tell us.  It is unfair to expect us to import a breeding dog ( at tens of thousands of dollars each) from overseas when we don’t have a clue what we’re bringing in to our programs.  Find out the hard way is absurd when it’s my clients who would be finding out the hard way,  and reporting back to me angrily.  We simply could not continue that way.  For these reasons, we are no longer affiliated with the MDBA, and have joined the ACC, who’s breeding values are consistent with my own.  We have gone back to using only foundational dogs from the same founders, but with long histories of selective breeding out of disease, and  no unknown breed infusions.  We think it’s the better choice for our clients.

 They are very threatened by competing dog breeds, but no other registry cares if we put MDBA dogs on the same website (as long as they are clearly marked) because they trust the intelligent public. The MDBA demands we put them under a different kennel name on a separate website.  My clients thought i was being deceptive for doing that. I can see why they thought that, but the deception was from the MDBA to cancel our membership if we didn’t obey new rules we never agreed to when we joined.  When a breeder is financially heavily invested, they’re trapped with ever changing new rules.  It’s not about protecting the “breed”.  It’s about protecting the humans profiting from it.  Common sense. 

This part is important.  We really don’t want a war with Australian Cobberdog breeders.  We wish them well, and I say that knowing they don’t wish us well.  We love the idea behind the Australian Cobberdog breed, or we never would have joined the MDBA in the first place.  We just never signed on to all the changes they made to it after we joined.  The over the top marketing of promises about the breed was my final straw.  Not every puppy in a litter can live up to blanket statements of what a buyer will get, especially not this early in the breed’s formation.  It makes the breeder they bought their puppy from  look dishonest, instead of the people who made those claims.

​Midas was my first of the breed, and he came to me when he was six months old. His second or third day here, during our hectic dinner hour, he came up to me and sat looking up at my face. Calm and observing. I looked down at him and gazed back. I was thinking that the breeder must have trained him to do this because it's the first thing I train my dogs to do; look at my face and focus on the command. So I asked her and she said "No, I didn't train him. That's a trait born into him." Amazing! Midas and I shared so many of these eye-to-eye contact moments as he matured, but one was extra special. 

I had been in grad school at the time, and my life was one big hectic "hurry up and get on to the next thing".  One day, I was on a road trip with Midas, and noticed he was sitting next to me gazing at my face while I drove.  It FELT like he was reading my mind, searching for my thoughts, and it felt GOOD.  We traveled miles while he gazed only at me.  So I pulled over, and gazed back at him with curiosity what might happen.  His eyes never left mine.  This continued for five or ten minutes (amazing!) until a warm feeling of energy flushed over me.  I felt truly "seen" on a soul level, and LOVED.  I thought to him, "I love you too Midas". So with that he wagged his tail and began to look out the window (intuition /telepathy).  As I drove away, I felt "high", elated, my thoughts were sharp, and the endorphins were flowing through my brain. Euphoria.  No drugs, just a little curly fleece dog.  How long had it been since I had felt this way?  How amazing was it that a dog could bring about this state of bliss, simply by looking?  It was this experience that left me committed to this breed, to a deeper appreciation of it's importance in our current harried, social media world of disconnection.  Midas reminded me what divine unconditional  love FEELS like, and the art of relationship being one where no words are necessary.  Just be.

​He's my furry spiritual teacher.

​ Brandy is working with children learning to read! She is owned by Jae’s Australian Cobberdogs and was bred by us at Kettle Pond Farms.  She is the sister to our Heaven Leigh and Nauset.  She is a certified Therapy dog with amazing intuition and compassion for humans.  This is what Australian Cobberdogs are all about :-).