ABOUT PREMIER

Lorene Staats and Champion Dexter

I fell in love with Poms when I was a child. It was a dream of mine to adopt one someday, but I was 41 years old before my dream came true. I was lucky to receive sweet Shelby Lickie Lickie for a birthday present, and she became very special to me. I loved her so much that I searched everywhere to find a suitable mate for her. Four years later we found Dexter, but he was only 10 weeks old at the time, so we had to wait until he was mature enough to breed him with Shelby. When we were finally able to get the two of them together, unfortunate circumstances arose, and we lost that litter of 5 puppies. Then the ultimate tragedy, my Shelby was diagnosed with kidney failure and we lost her too!

We made another trip to the kennel where we found Dexter, because we all missed Shelby so much, especially Dex, but we didn't find a suitable mate for him for another 2 years. In the meantime we all learned about showing. We didn't even know Dexter was show quality until a friend recognized it and suggested that we show him.

Best of Winners, St. Petersburg, Florida

I took a few classes to learn what needed to be done in the show ring, and Dex did the rest. He pulled me around the ring at our first show in Zolfo Springs, in May of 1998. Then miraculously, he achieved his championship title after competing in just seven shows, "finishing" in September of 1998 . Talk about beginner's luck! Since then, Dexter has retired from the show ring, but he loves his new job of siring puppies.

Best of Breed, West Palm Beach, Florida

Dexter has an open pedigree with the Emcee bloodline on his Sire's side and the Millamor bloodline on his Dam's side. We made the mistake of breeding him with a total out cross (nothing similar in the pedigree) and they produced a 20 pound Pom.

Wow, we learned fast what not to do. The standard for Pomeranians is 3 to 7 pounds. Since Poms have been "bred-down" from sled pulling dogs, you have to study the pedigree and continue what the breeders before you worked hard to perfect, otherwise, you can get into trouble fast. We read books on genealogy and started looking at old issues of "The Pom Reader" to see what each generation looked like. We used that as a guide when we studied the breed and selected dogs for our pedigree. Our goal was to see if we could achieve a desirable look and temperament that would become a hallmark of our kennel.

This is when Dexter became champion, in September 1998

Breeding for quality is a science, and even with all the knowledge in the world, we have learned there's never a perfect dog, but we can still set our sites high and try to come close.