GETAWAG the Dog

Get-A-Wag developed five toy sized companion dog breeds ideal for emotional therapy animals.

Get-A-Wag needs more people to help with their breeding program.

Q:  Why does Get-A-Wag need to raise more dogs? Aren’t there too many dogs already?

A:  Get-A-Wag usually places an emotional support dog when a puppy.  It grows up trained with the special child or adult with which they will spend the rest of their life.  This is the surest way to create the special sensitivity and bond that will partner them together.  There are too many requests for emotional support puppies to fill them all.  We need more people involved to raise puppies to better supply the growing demand for emotional support puppies.

Q:  But aren’t there enough established dog breeds already without making more?

A: After more than ten years of development, the stable temperament and good health of the Get-A-Wag dog breeds is being proven superior to many of the common AKC purebreds.  Many of those standard breeds are temperamental or have health defects and some are just too big as lap dogs.

Q:  Isn’t adopting a dog from the shelter the right thing to do?

A:  Health, size, temperament are unpredictable in a shelter dog.  A family with a special need child is dealing with so many complex needs for their child, they don’t need special issues with the emotional support puppy they adopted.  You know what you are getting in a Get-A-Wag puppy.

Q: Why does Get-A-Wag advertise for foster homes for their dogs?

A: We know that all dogs want  loved as pets.  We are taking action to give a good life for the parent dogs of Get-A-Wag puppies.  We aren’t waiting until they retire from breeding.  They need families that have time to make them a part of their home now.   A contented mother dog in a loving home will make the best mother and their puppies  socialized and handled often.

We are taking the Get-A-Wag breeding program totally out of the kennel and putting it right in your living room.

Hillary Clinton wrote a book to promote her belief that it takes a village to raise a child.
We can apply this same concept in creating small community breeding clubs.
It becomes the joint work of many people to make the ideal therapy puppy.

• We don’t expect you to set up a kennel in the backyard at your home.
• We do encourage the dogs live inside as your house pets.
• If you can’t find the space and time to take in a complete breeding group, which is commonly three or more dogs, then you should recruit friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family to help foster the dogs.
• If everyone is within easy driving distance then no one family need take in more than one or two dogs.
• There is always support available through the Get-A-Wag program.  Real people you may phone any hours of the day.
• You don’t need experience. We will train you and help place the dogs.
• You get financial compensation for puppies that usually covers your expenses.

We are taking applications now for foster homes.  We have puppies and adults to place. 

Please APPLY TO FOSTER DOGS. 

Jack is for fostering: He's a Bulliebear Toy Bulldog

Meet Penny: she's a Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagle

Take Kipper: he's a Toy Panda Dog

Natilie wants love: she's a Boxerbear Toy Boxer

Mystic is for foster: she's a Rottiebear Toy Rottweiler

Those are just a few examples of the variety in real dogs we have available to foster adopt in the Get-A-Wag breed foundation. 

There’s a dog that will appeal to you.

Eastern Tennessee’s Get-A-Wag club would like to place a FREE toy breed female dog in your home for Christmas.

We seek a permanent foster placement for her so you both can get attached.  You receive on-going education and support as the goal is to help others by raising a litter of puppies from her yearly.

 

These puppies are ideal as Get-A-Wag emotional support therapy dogs.  There are long lists of people who have applied for a puppy.  We need more people involved in the program so we can give more away.  We don’t want to keep our loving dogs in kennels so we are seeking to place them as house-pets within driving distance of Chattanooga.  The male stud dogs remain in the countryside at the Get-A-Wag Foundation rescue and adoption facility.

Our program is self-supporting. You receive compensation for your expense having the litter.  This means some puppies will be sold as pets.  Others will be donated to special need children and handicapped adults. 

The toy breed dogs available range in size from 5 lbs. to 20 lbs.  They are breeds specially developed over the last decade to make ideal tempered companion dogs without health defects.  Choose from beautiful Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagles, Rottiebear Toy Rottweilers, Boxerbear Toy Boxers, Bulliebear Toy Bulldogs, and Toy Panda Dogs. All need foster homes.  All are free to acquire.  You will be interviewed.  Must have reliable transportation, computer internet, digital camera, cellphone, and ability to feed a good dogfood at approximately $37 per bag. A fenced yard is a plus.

Families with children and other pets are welcome.  Your role is to socialize the puppies as well as keep them healthy. And you will have fun doing it because the dogs have so much love to give back.  Have fun and help people in need.
Apply here:  http://getawag.org/foster_application

These are instructions given to our team of breeders for Get-A-Wag puppies. The tips are good for anyone that tries to make their photos of puppies or children look outstanding.  We hope you enjoy the instruction and it helps you do Calendar Perfect photo shoots of your own!

Black and white photography is appealing when your subjects are this cute.

What we are looking for:
Ideally all the photos in our websites will be of the same high quality.  No one should lose a sale because the customer clicked away from your page because the photos were unappealing. If everyone keeps the following objectives in mind each breeder’s store web page will be consistently beautiful.  There are five main objectives:

1. Bright lighting
2. Clear focus
3. Uncluttered background
4. Eye level photography
5. Many views of animated puppies

1.  You must add light indoors or the pics will look grainy and dark.  Your camera’s flash is not enough. They will not appear focused when we enlarge for details. Shine light from the top and angled from each of two front sides.  Use three simple clamp reflector lights with 60 to 100 watt bulbs.   (Sold at Wal-Mart for $9). You may be able to turn on an overhead ceiling light or do your shoot in front of a bright window to eliminate one or more lights.  Do your photos during the day when possible.  If you do them at night they will likely be less detailed unless you have means of brightening up the room.

Look at the expression on this pup's face! Cute photo, but more light was needed from the right front to chase away the dark shadows that threaten to ruin a good photo

2.  If your camera doesn’t have high enough pixel quality the photos will be grainy and we can’t enlarge like we need to do. You can’t use a cell phone typically and get pictures that show the fine details. You must never zoom in or enlarge your photo as you are taking it.  Do not use the rapid shoot feature.  Send the photos in their original state. We need to have pics so clear we see the individual tiny hairs clearly.  Your puppies should be clean and dry.  Wet fur shows up poorly on camera. Pictures should look like they could be on a calendar.

Dramatic black background makes this puppy pop off the page. It feels close enough to kiss!

3.  The puppies should be on furniture in the house or a draped chair with a nice blanket or throw covering the entire background.  It is easiest to use a queen size blanket that can simply serve as a continuous backdrop, under and behind,….but some people put a fuzzy rug or animal fur throw down for the pups to stand on. Colors best to use are black, brown, white, vibrant red, or peacock blue.  Stay away from yellow, green, orange, pastel pink or blue, navy, or wine.  You can try them, but will have uncertain results. Spot wash a soiled throw with a damp cloth and plain water to clean up an accident at the time it happens.  If you wash your backdrops you shorten their life….they will look too faded and worn to use.  Use something associated with puppies for play toys….stuffed animals and new dog toys.  Better not to use fake flowers or electrical holiday lights that are not puppy safe playtoys.  We are models for what is appropriate for pet ownership. Additional outdoor photos taken in green grass, with natural plants and flowers as a backdrop are nice for a special slide show, but will not substitute for their regular indoor shoot.  If you want to illustrate how small your dogs are, you photo them with something people can identify with like a common dog toy or a child’s toy that people will recognize.  And take a photo on the floor, as they stand next to you, to show that their back doesn’t even reach your knee.

What a happy dog: Creative use of props can sell a puppy quickly. Truly a calendar photo!

4.  Get down on their level to take your photos.  Eye level photography allows the viewer to connect with the puppy, like they are with it.  When a customer see the moist little noses and shining clear eyes looking at them, they fall in love.  Top view can be done simply to document the pattern on the back but all other shots should be taken from their level. That means if you are taking them on the floor, you are down there with them.  Do not get too close.  Imagine a square frame around the subject of your photo.  If we can’t crop the image square without cutting off the nose and tail of the puppy, it means you needed to back up. I like to see background continuously all around the puppy. Most photos will be cropped square. Then when we zoom in, during the edit process, we have kept the highest photo resolution. That allows us to see those little hairs and wet noses.

Adorable puppy in every way! But wouldn't this photo have been better if it had included the tips of the toes? Back up just a bit!

5.  Each individual puppy should be photo’d about 2 or 3 dozen times for every shoot.  Only a third or less photos will often be usable.  Just snap away and take one after another.  Digital cameras have a delay between when you press the button and the shutter snaps.  You will miss some great poses but unexpectedly capture other good ones. Make funny noises to get the pup to look up.  Important to get front and side views standing whenever possible….but all positions are nice…even ones with puppies caught in odd positions.  It all adds interest for the customer.  Don’t stop taking pics until you get some good ones with the pup looking at you too. If you photo them long enough they begin to get hot under the lights and start to pant.  Get those open-mouthed shots because they look like they are happy and engaging. If the puppy will not cooperate by itself, and you have exhausted all other efforts place a litter mate with it to do the shoot.

Another precious photo that is a favorite of mine. What would have made it better? A professional would have draped the background to make it calendar perfect.

How to beat the competition:
Remember that we are competing with photos of thousands of other pups on the internet.  We have to work hard to make a prospective puppy buyer choose our puppy. This is why we take them looking like pampered inside pets. They can’t look like ordinary yard dogs.  Beagle puppies are so common in some parts of the country that they are advertised free. We have to lift them out of the ordinary into the imagination. People need to see them sitting on your draped sofa so they can imagine them looking cute like that in their own home.

You can try a special photo shoot with children holding them close to their faces and smiling at the camera.  Then have them turn to look at the puppy and make faces, smile , and react cutely to the pup.  Take one photo after another as fast as you are able to capture the action.  Do a video after the photo shoot. But you have to watch the background and those kind of shots are tricky.  You need the children to be dressed nicely, clean,  and hair groomed. But sometimes these type photos sell wonderfully well.  Outdoor shots like this are nice too  Plan ahead where you will photo. You might choose an area with plants in the background or on pretty lawn furniture or sitting on a blanket in front of a picket fence.  Watch what is on the ground as well as what is in the background. Again, think about the photo composition and ask yourself, ‘Would that would work on a calendar?’

Sometimes cropping off part of the subject in order to bring it in close makes for a memorable photo. These two beauties are a perfect example.

How we get your photos:
No emailing of photos.  It is too time consuming for staff to acquire them by email.  You are to put them in Picasa in individual folders. You send your videos to YouTube yourself.  Otherwise we will be spending a lot of time trying to sort through your puppies.  And if the lighting is not right we try to artificially correct color and focus, and that takes too much time.  Watch that you don’t have lint or hair on the pups or background because that too is tedious to edit out.  You will be instructed how to use Picasa if you can’t figure this out yourself.

Now go on and have some fun. Some people go all out and dress or decorate their pups.  If you do this…..first take some pics without clothing so we can see the puppy. The more creative you are, the better they will sell.  The pups benefit from frequent handling and photo shoots give them some discipline so its important to start early and take pics every ten days when you worm your pups.   Oh, and trim their nails first, before the photo shoot, please!

Free to get started!  Raise puppies for the Get-A-Wag Program to place puppies with children and adults. You will find this to be a great family bonding experience.  Enjoy the fun occupation working and playing with puppies.  Expect to be rewarded when the new puppy owners have YOU to thank for their darling pups! Good income will be made also from this part time position caring for and breeding the unique toy breed dogs especially suited to be therapy dogs in your home. We teach you how.

You will receive good natured healthy adult dogs.  They are great pets for you and we look for forever homes, so you can get attached to them.
Some breeds are as little as 5 lbs.  but none larger than 20 lbs. The breeds we are developing have natural attributes that make them especially agreeable to be therapy dogs. You will be trained in all aspects of their care and have on-going telephone and personal support by a team of professional breeders.

Individuals with experience breeding dogs, or other animal husbandry will be considered first. Medical professionals such as nurses are also excellent candidates to apply. But all sincerely interested people with a willingness to learn are also good candidates. You must complete an application process.  Recipients are selected by interview over the phone after you fill out an online application.

The Get-A-Wag Program places puppies and adult dogs with special needs children and adults.  Our breed foundation will place young adult dogs in your approved non-smoking home under breeder contract. You must have a fenced yard, and indoor home environment, or an approved outdoor heated kennel. I require one on one attention daily with any dog placed with you. They should all feel like house-pets. Check your local zoning and kennel ordinances to see how many un-neutered dogs your are allowed. You must have another source of income or job as this is a part-time income.

You will need a good internet connection, digital camera, and reliable source of transportation. Sales and marketing of the dogs in done by our breed foundation and every dog is advertised through a website you will furnish with photos of puppies. You will be a part of a rare breed dog foundation and have opportunity to communicate with other dog breeders locally and in other states like yourself. These dogs may also be shown if you are interested.

On average you will receive $400 for each puppy that is sold but this is simply an average. Higher priced puppies will allow you to earn twice that amount. If a puppy will not sell above $300, you get to keep the entire amount! But the real benefit of working for this organization is the knowledge that you have stepped out of the ordinary and are perpetuating the dog breeds developed to be therapy dogs for children and adults through the Get-A-Wag program.  Share our legacy, raising puppies for future generations.

Call Rebecca 812-278-4174 Read about the dogs we place at  www.getawag.org

The Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagle has been advertised on the internet almost a decade.  But the Toy Rottweiler breed is new.  Although we have been raising this line of puppies for many generations we sold them under a different pet name.  That was Queen Elizabeth Pocket Bears.  Specifically as Rottiebear. Four separate breeds have developed from that bear line.  Bear mean pug.  They all share a common heritage in that a pug is a small mastiff and all the bears had pug in their early development.  Those little pocket bears made many people happy and we watched as they developed.  We have found them to be wonderful in temperament and they have no health issues.  So it was time to market them under their true breed name

So the Rottiebear became Toy Rottweiler.  And that made selling them harder. There is no straight forward path to market them right now. People aren’t searching on Google for what they don’t know exists.  I took the links to Pocket Bears off the Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagle website.  And classified ads have no category for a toy sized rottweiler. The puppy buyers can’t find us.

So if we don’t know how to market what we make, we can’t go on to achieve our ultimate goals.  It won’t matter how elevated our ideals might be,  or to what heights we plan to take the Get-A-Wag foundation.  It will all come to nothing if we can’t afford to keep our dogs.   We can’t keep the dogs if we don’t have the sales.

The Get-A-Wag program plans to expand until most of the puppies coming from our foundation breeding program will be donated to deserving children and adults with special needs. But meanwhile, as we take baby steps to achieve this goal, we have to operate as a dog breed foundation. And here lies the crux of the problem: we have several beautiful puppies on the ground and no efficient way to get them sold.

Now, this is when we ask for a little help to ask you to spread the word about our breed to anyone you know.  Share this in a dozen ways, and tell your friends and family about the great little dog breed you know about.

The proof is in the puppy.  

We want you to start by browsing  www.toyrottweiler.com  and then subscribe to this blog  to watch how we go about raising public awareness for the breed.  But that still takes too long.  We need something to happen now.   We need to place some puppies!  Some are  already 16 wks. old and they are greatly reduced in price.  But that hasn’t sold them yet, so we need your help.

Please support our dog breeds.  We need patrons…in the form of puppy buyers.  The pups are going to need homes now….you can buy a puppy or you can tell other people to buy a puppy. Call at 812-278-4174 to get more information.  Write Rebecca at www.queensbeagle.com  And tell your friends on Facebook!

Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagles was first only me.  But I soon realized I couldn’t make the dog breed by myself.  It was too big a project,   overwhelming to try to do on my own.  The responsibility for what I’d started weighed heavy on me. The numbers of dogs it took to maintain all the lines was intimidating. And the dogs needed more attention.  I felt bad for them because they all wanted to be house pets.  I was on a farm but even my neighbors were even mad at me.  The original beagles I’d used were full-blooded hunting dogs and they were howlers! But I kept going with it because the puppies I’d made were so happily received–their new guardians encouraged me to keep it going.  They loved their temperaments. It proved I was headed in the right direction to make a better breed of beagle to be a house pet instead of a hunting dog.

I loved what I’d started and wanted their bloodlines to endure.  But this was too big to do, impossible on my own.  So I began placing  mated groups of dogs with trusted families that would share my vision.  And that is how our breed foundation was born.  We became a support group to each other.  And the dogs continued to evolve and eventually branched into five different dog breeds. It has become more important than ever to have diversity in people working with them from separate home bases. It protects the bloodlines.  When we need to improve the lines and someone has something good, it is shared.  We plan together. It has been a cooperative effort to improve them. Through a decade of careful cross-breeding, within our many bloodlines, we strive for unity in what the dogs will become as they subtly change in looks with each new generation.  But our combined effort to make the breed recognizable also becomes a solitary endeavor.

Each breeder within our foundation must make it on their own.   And times are harder than ever to be able to survive by breeding dogs in this weak economy. We have to pay our bills.  We have to eat.   Hunger threatens to make us lean and mean.   It demands us to be competitive. We keep an eye on what  people outside our organization are selling on the net.  We watch how our co-workers are marketing their dogs within our own website.  And each breeder continually tries to improve our own bloodlines and take the best pictures so the customer will pick ‘our puppy’.  We need the sales to support our individual breeding programs.  We need the sale to support our family.

Self-promotion can be ugly.  It eats away at the supportive relationship we had with with our co-workers.  It makes us believe we are being undercut.  Or leads to resentment if we believe we work harder at what we do than another person.  It makes us think about striking out and doing it on our own. That’s a dangerous path of thought.  We start to forget why we need each other.

There are so many new breeds being made all over the world.  We are winding down in the designer dog craze.  There is a trend to go back to the basics when there is less spending.  So many of the simple cross-breeds and designer dogs are going to fade away.  Without organization the breed will meet its natural death.  It will die when our dogs die, and the years of effort we made to perpetuate them will go to dust too.  I know the people in our breed foundation don’t want this to happen.  It is not enough for us to simply have been making money from puppies.  We have a vision.  We are making a real dog breed. It has qualities and merits of its own that are too good to lose.  We want to see it through to be even closer to its ideal.  We care about the breed.   We can get recognition for our breeds if we stay unified. It’s become our legacy to the world.

Our foundation of breeders keeps everyone heading in the same direction. In creating the small dog breeds we selectively bred for good health, easy going temperament, and loving devotion.  We wanted them to be kid safe dogs.  In the process we discovered we’d created good natured small dog breeds that make ideal emotional support animals.  Our foundation’s purpose is now reinvented through the Get-A-Wag program.

We donate therapy dogs to children and adults with special needs.  We are more than dog breeders.  The Get-A-Wag program becomes our main focus. We are serving others and showing through free donations that our breeds are well suited to be therapy dogs.  It validates the sacrifice of time, energy, and effort we sometimes take away from our own families in our devotion to our breeds. It keeps everything in perspective and gives us a greater life purpose.    But we will have to remain team players. We can’t develop the unique dog breeds and take them to the height of service through the Get-A-Wag program on our own.  We share a common bond.  Our family of breeders remain our supporters, our allies, and we need each other to succeed.

I’ve had this happen before.  A task that is so difficult to accomplish initially, just seems to work itself out overnight.  Isn’t that the mystery of the human brain?  God designed us in amazing ways.  Like a computer that reboots and works better, I needed to ‘sleep on it’ a couple of nights.

Suddenly the blog is starts to come together.  True.  It’s built on compromise.  What I couldn’t fix, I minimized for a simple format.  And it’s made such a relief.  It’s working and I’m not stressed any more!

This makes me realize I probably need to rethink other aspects of my life. Maybe I just need to go for a cleaner theme there too. Less frills mean less work.

Now this isn’t to say that a person shouldn’t reach for the stars.  High aspirations are exciting and challenge us.  They make life worth living.  But if the main reason we were striving is to get more money its probably the wrong motive. We’ve got to watch out for becoming greedy. We have to question, is this high standard that we are killing ourselves to reach really what is good for us?  Or if we conceded to live a little simpler, and have a little less,would we actually be happier in life?

Sometimes our dreams and goals prove more grandiose than practical.  We fume and fuss and are unhappy in the process of trying to squeeze too many things into our life.  But, maybe the solution is to simplify.  Maybe that means giving up some money.  Maybe we give up some praise.  But maybe we gain some space for personal reflection, time with our families, and suddenly we are a better person.  Our life is working and we find we aren’t as stressed anymore.

This is my husband.  I get mad at him because he isn’t driven like me to work on the Foundation business all the time.  I scold him that he should be on the computer making ads.  But he looks so peaceful, doesn’t he?

How often have you started a project, then gotten so overwhelmed that you had to set it aside?  I am feeling a bit overwhelmed with reading about blogging, rather than blogging.  Now sleepy and empty headed [at 3:30 am] I am determined to write a short post.

I can’t get my page components to show up.  I can’t figure it all out.  Maybe its the theme that’s lacking.  But I know at heart…its me.  So time to get back to basics.  When all else fails do what works.  I can write the blog.

Is this inspiring to anyone?

Well, at least to me it proves I don’t have writer’s block.

That said, I’m going to bed. I’m dog tired.

Get-A-Wag has a website at www.getawag.org that tells about the children who receive puppies to become their therapy dogs.  But you may ask, where did these dogs come from? The foundation is new and they aren’t breeds you’ve heard of before.

I am Rebecca VanMeter, creator of the Get-A-Wag Foundation.  I began this blog to share my point of view and sometimes colorful experience in managing our breed team, placing puppies, and promoting awareness of new toy breed dogs that are ideal as therapy dogs.  You will get ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories from me, as well as our dog breeders.  Our people are motivated, having devoted years of time and energy in developing these new breeds.   We live in different states, but we share a common challenge to improve the breeds we designed to fit the needs of handicapped and emotionally disabled children and adults.

Its taken a decade of groundwork to get here.  Now watch as the fun begins!  We will prove our breeds and promote Get-A-Wag in a number of creative ways online. But I’m not a programming guru or social media mogul so there lies the challenge:  how to compete with the big boys and come out on top.

Subscribe to readership and see if it doesn’t entertain and educate as you catch a glimpse into my organizational trials, tribulations, and triumphs of running this foundation. And its a testimony too….I’ve always said, “This dog breed was built on prayer.”

We demonstrate our higher purpose now.  Read about the Get-A-Wag children that received puppies to be their therapy dogs at www.getawag.org