Out of contact while hunting from 17 October through 4 November. Please hold inquiries during that period.
Deutsch-Drahthaar Puppies vom Altmoor
NEED A GUN DOG FOR THIS FALL?
Lightly started pup for sale at about puppy price, ready to hunt now. Available for pick up in South Jersey – no shipping. Petra V vom Altmoor, six months old on 10/6/24. To research her breeding check the P5 litter info on our Archive page. For many more details send an email to altmoor@comcast.net. Be sure to include your name, address, phone number and a little background about your dog experience, family situation, and hunting background.
The Deutsch-Drahthaar is our passion. Would you like to obtain your Drahthaar pup from one of the most experienced and knowledgeable Verein Deutsch-Drahthaar breeders in the world? Breeders who have handled Deutsch-Drahthaar’s more than 100 times in the German (JGHV) testing system and who were literally among the very first on the continent to be approved as judges (VR’s) by the German Versatile Hunting Dog Association. Breeders who were known for competence, integrity, and fairness over a combined more than four decades of law enforcement service, which has carried through to a continent-wide reputation for integrity and recognition for their efforts to improve the genetic health of the breed, with an emphasis on a cheerful temperament. Breeders whose “vom Altmoor” kennel name you’ll see going back seven generations on DD pedigrees from other breeders across the country. Breeders of great gun dogs since 1970 and VDD breeders since 1984. Breeders who quite literally “wrote the book” on the raising, training, and testing of the DD, The Drahthaar Puppy Manual, a book that a great many breeders give out with each pup they sell (http://altmoor.com/catalog/BookVideo.html). Breeders who won’t use you to experiment with what they’re producing by putting together dogs that they know next to nothing about. A husband-wife team who have received numerous awards, including the silver and gold Hegewald pins from the VDD in Germany, and served the Breed Club nationally in a wide variety of positions, including Business Manager, Vice-Chairman, Director of Testing, Director of Judge Development, and HD Coordinator, and who continue to support the breed through their service on a chapter level, and as breed and performance judges.
If you would like to reserve a pup, send us an email - altmoor@comcast.net - with your name, complete mailing/physical address, phone number, and a couple of sentences about your dog and hunting background, as well as your family situation, including the breed, age and sex of dogs currently in the household. If you do not provide the required basic information, you will not receive a reply. (Please be sure to read our Costs and Guarantees and Buyer Prerequisites first.) You should also purchase a copy of our Drahthaar Puppy Manual – it will help you to understand what the VDD system is all about and how we prefer to see our pups raised and trained. Our primary prerequisites in accepting reservations are that we believe the pup will be going to a home where hunting is a very high priority and that it will receive a lifetime of great affection and care. We will not place pups with commercial hunting operations where they might spend their lives in a kennel run with little or no family contact. We do not want our pups going to homes that believe in “positive only” training. Also understand that we and VDD have very strict policies against registering pups with registries other than VDD. While always appreciated, we do not require that buyers agree to put their pup through the German testing system. (The years have taught us that we cannot force buyers to properly train for and properly handle their pups in the tests, and that an unprepared dog does nothing but damage the reputation of the littermates and ancestors.)
After you're on our provisional/tentative reservation list, we'll notify you as soon as a breeding has taken place. Puppy price is $2200-$2,600. Pups must be picked up here and are subject to 6.625% sales tax. With the onset of COVID we stopped shipping and we do not allow our buyers to use commercial dog transport. When you reply to us requesting to be put on the reservation list for that litter, we’ll let you know the pricing on that litter if different, and you can certainly back off at that point if you would like. If you would like to confirm your reservation we will then ask you to send us a photocopy of your hunting license and a $300 non-refundable reservation fee, by means of personal check. (Any portions of final balance payments made by credit card are subject to a 4% surcharge.) We consider each parent, while very much a unique individual, to be equally valuable, and every pup we place to have equally terrific potential, regardless of litter pricing. (As a side note about price, on 12/4/20 we were talking to a local resident who related that on the coming weekend they were flying to Georgia and bringing home a Goldendoodle pup, the price of which was $2950 [plus their round-trip airfares]. Seems to us that DD's are quite the bargain considering all the hurdles one must go through before a DD can be used for breeding.)
Please also be aware that when the pups will be ready to go home can vary by a week or so, but you must be prepared to take possession of your pup when it is ready. We try our best to have the pups available as close to seven weeks of age as possible, however, quirks associated with all of the back and forths between the US and Germany can sometimes delay that a little bit. We typically cannot hold pups while you go on vacation, for example. In cases like that it would be best to switch to a different litter. As many breeders are doing these days, we determine which pup goes to which buyer, taking buyer preferences into account. We no longer use a pick order based on date of reservation. Except perhaps for the very last buyer in a litter, you will almost always have some options as to which pup you get. And, the fact is that, given our breeding experience, if you were to just close your eyes and grab one there’d be every possibility you’d be getting the “best” pup of the litter, if there is such a thing. We think that our breedings consistently produce pups that are uniform in potential, and much more depends on what you, the new owner, put into it.
If you think that driving to South Jersey is too much, we have a question for you. You would drive three-quarters of the way across the country for a special twelve-day hunt wouldn't you? Then why not drive that distance to pick up your new hunting buddy and best friend for the next twelve years? Give it some thought. If still up in the air, and you want to do the research BEFORE contacting us, and you can find a non-stop flight from PHL to an airport near you, we may consider doing an air shipment for an extra $260 for our crate, vet exam, and airport shuttle expenses. You might end up paying around $500 for shipping, so figure almost $800 extra. As far as we know only American Cargo and Alaska Airlines are accepting pet shipments. You must discuss your needs with an airline representative. For an eight week old puppy you can probably figure on a size 200 crate, and crate and pup total shipping weight of just under thirty pounds.
As you research our litters, note that in our summaries for each parent, on the third line under each dog's name, are the highest scores received in a VDD/JGHV test in the categories of Nose (N), Field Search (S), Pointing (P), Duck Track (D), and Cooperation (C). With certain exceptions, the highest score that can be obtained in these categories is 11 in the breed tests (where "very good" is scored 9-11). We've linked to additional photos of each dog next to their names in the litter announcement.
Pups are born in a whelping box in our bedroom and monitored continuously during the first three days. At about two weeks, the box is often moved to the living room under the TV for noise conditioning. At 3½ to 4 weeks, the pups are moved to outside kennel runs with, for summer, a misting system and thermostatically controlled fans, and, for winter, thermostatically controlled box heaters and heated water pans. Shortly after being moved outside we play a noise-conditioning CD about 5 days per week. If you'd like to see our 2018 puppy kennel set-up, you can watch this eight-minute video: https://altmoor.smugmug.com/Altmoor-Puppy-Kennel-Runs/n-SJpgKd/.
You might be curious as to why we have several breedable bitches. The answer is a little long-winded, but here goes. We each are nuts hunters and require that we each have at least two dogs of our own of prime hunting age – let’s say one and a spare. Like most folks, we like dogs out of our breedings best. Over our four decades of involvement with VDD we’ve seen several folks who were once active breeders get into their later years and they look around and suddenly realize that they no longer have anything that can produce their next pup. So, they have to get their next pup from someone else, most likely from a breeding that has no relationship to what they were doing for years. To try to prevent that from happening to us, we try to always keep a pup from a favorite bitch before she reaches the 8-year-old VDD breeding retirement age. And, we realize that even though we’re keeping one, something as minor as a missing tooth can prevent it from being bred in our system. A lot of the possible disqualifiers aren’t noticed until the pup is 13 to 18 months old. So, we tend to also keep a “spare” in case the first is a washout. But, by the time that we’ve determined that the first one is a keeper, we’re so attached to the second that we have to keep her, too. Thus, out of Nancy’s Wendy, we have first Quinta IV, then Tessa IV. Out of Roger’s Talei we have Cara IV, then Macie IV, and now that they are retired, we've kept Cara's daughter Della V, and her daughter Petra V. So, hopefully we’ll never be without a breeding dog out of our kennel, at the price of a whole lot of dog food and vet bills.
You also might be wondering what sort of person patronizes vom Altmoor. First off, we weed out those looking for a cute puppy by verifying that the potential buyer is a serious hunter, often requesting a copy of their hunting license for verification. When we’ve established that, we ask for background information, such as info about family situation, prior dog experience, and what they’re looking for – a gun dog, a potential breeding animal, etc. If all of that works out they go onto our “to be notified” list for future litters. When a breeding takes place, they’re asked for a deposit. Our K5 litter out of Tess and Cletus shows a good cross section of our buyers, who travelled here from GA, TN, OH, NC, MD, PA and NJ. (We no longer ship.) For one buyer (age 78), and these days mostly an upland hunter, this was his 6th DD from vom Altmoor, going back to 1989. Another was a veterinarian who has owned 3 or 4 DD’s from all around the country, going back to the‘80’s. One was a former VDD field judge who has owned DD’s for years, and this would make his 3rd vom Altmoor dog. One has owned GSP’s, now has a 2 year old DD, and is a VDD/GNA member. One used to hunt over his labs and now has two non-hunting pets. One is mostly an upland hunter who hasn’t owned a dog for years because of life’s demands, but now has time, and was convinced the DD was the way to go by his vet tech daughter. Another is a falconer whose wife is a veterinarian and has owned both GWP’s and an Altmoor DD. Most interestingly, after looking at many photos of the litter, and watching a number of videos, when asked at six weeks to tell us their first through third choices, each of the seven had a different first choice, and that’s the pup they took home. To us, that speaks highly of all the pups in the litter. Perhaps most interesting of all is that our “assignment” process asks folks to tell us their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd preferences of the pups based on the photos and videos we’ve sent out since birth. Usually this results in no one getting worse than their second favorite. In this case EVERY buyer got their first choice pup.
Finally, and absolutely least importantly, we’ll touch on “motherline.” This isn’t the place to take the time to explain it, but many breeders put great stock in the motherline of their dog. In our judgment, motherline is an anachronism - something that lost its importance many years ago. But, as a matter of trivia, all of our females are Grenzschutz-Löwenberg-Auenheim PP, and, to the best of our knowledge, we are the only breeders on this continent with females of that motherline, and starting with Della's L5 litter in 2022, the Altmoor kennel name was added to her motherline.
All of our girls are homozygous for furnishings/beard (F/F), meaning that even if they were to be bred to a beardless sire all the pups will have beards.
Details on our past breedings can be found in the “Litter Archive” section and you might also want to check our "Altmoor Outings" section.
If you are seriously interested in obtaining a vom Altmoor pup within the next year, please send us an email requesting to be on our “Notification List”. We will let you know the moment a breeding has taken place and you can decide then whether to reserve or wait. In order to get on “The List” You must let us know your name, complete address, phone, a little about yourself, your hunting and dog background, and if you have a specific time frame for getting your pup. We’ll get back to you within three days of getting your email. If it goes longer than that please check your spam folder or try again from a different address. Once on The List you’ll be among the first to be notified of our next breeding – well before we publish on this site or the VDD/GNA site.
Before sending us an email, please add both outdoors@altmoor.com and altmoor@comcast.net to your "trusted senders" or address book. We have been encountering many correspondents, especially those with gmail, who have not received our replies. Except during October, if you don't receive a reply within 36 hours, try again to the other address.
We are now taking reservations for our Q5 and R5 litters in early 2025. The moms of these litter are Tess and Della, stud dogs to be determined. We will not be having any additional litters for the balance of 2024.
Our girls' pedigrees are a vom Altmoor history lesson, with the dogs on them going back 8 generations to our foundation bitches in 1984. To the best of our knowledge, no breeder in North America can claim that sort of background or in-depth personal knowledge of the individuals that led up to what they’re producing now.