Kennel Profile: Lajosmegyi Komondorok

At night when the dogs are fed they are locked in right away so they will settle down. We feed Eukanuba and Iams products and add canned meat. Anna does most of the outside work now with the help of Patricias grandson, Nicholas Jacobson. We have it down to a snap with only five outside dogs now. We have always done the daily care of our animals ourselves. Patricias husband Budd is now retired, and at 73 cannot do as much as he did before, but he still cares for the dogs when we are away we both work eight hours a day in home health care and most weekends are spent going to shows. If we are specialing a dog we use a treadmill to keep him in condition.

One thing we decided years ago was to let the young ones be puppies. We do not restrict them because of their unique coat. We believe that letting them be puppies enables them to successfully mature both mentally and physically. With the new flea prevention products we do not have to worry so much about damage to the coat, and we can always get them clean later.

The most difficult time to own a Komondor is while the cords are forming. It takes months to get them formed. One thing that we do here is cut the coat off after they are no longer being shown. That makes the grooming so much easier. We currently have one 2-year-old in coat.

In the beginning, Patricia and Anna just wanted to own and show a full-coated Komondor, but as their interest in pedigrees developed, they started looking at different lines and thinking about how they could improve what they had started with. Patricias first bitch never had a litter, so our first breeding did not happen until 1976. We bred to a dog in California, Ch. Brienwoods Bartok Herczeg, and from that litter one finished. Our next litter was out of the same bitch bred to our Tiger.

We kept one from that litter, Ch. Lajosmegyi Fustos Felho, who later went on to be the foundation male for the very successful Springwater kennel on the East Coast of John Landis and his former wife Lois; John later continued in the breed as the Gillian Kennel. This dog was the sire of many of their first litters and also the sire of Dahus dam, Ch. Springwater Bit of Honey.

We sold Fustos Felho after we kept two puppies from the next breeding. We have repeated breedings many times. All of our first breedings were outcrosses. In the early days of Komondorok in this country most breedings were outcrosses. This was because there were so few dogs left in the world after WWII. We all worked to create more lines; then we began to do some linebreeding. As time progressed, Patricia and I slowly created our own line, focusing on producing dogs that were sound both in mind and body. We wanted a dog that could cover ground easily and do the job it was meant to do. The Komondorok were bred to live with large flocks of sheep in Hungary and had to constantly be on the move with them. The terrain in some cases could be very rough, so they had to be very agile. They had to protect flocks from among many types of predators, including bears. They needed to be able to cover ground with the least amount of effort. We first developed a very sound animal, then went on to produce and maintain breed type.

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