Above is my personal
"painting" of "Dashing
Blaze Bondhu,"
a pure Dashing Bondhu Llewellin Setter I
owned from a pup and trained. It is also
used (faded) in our background as a
dedication in her loving memory. That was her exact stance on
point and is just what she looked like in
her prime. We have been told by several
dozen people that our painting of her looks
just like their setter. Most don't mean anything
when they say she looked just like their
female Setter, but a few diehard FDSB people
have decided to take it a step further and,
whenever my name comes up, they attempt to
discredit us personally by saying we are
using a picture of someone else's dog on our
website.
The ironic thing is we lived
near the kennel owners for over nine
years. We knew their Setters very well and
were very good friends with their brother
Mark for nine years, who purchased a few
of my dogs. In fact, he asked me to train
bird dogs for his father and brother, but
I refused because I had no interest in the
bigger running-type English Setters.
I don't remember ever seeing
the picture before but agree my painting of Blaze does
look like the dog in the black and white
picture at first glance, but anyone without an agenda can
clearly see......
#1. It is clearly a color
painting and not at all a black &
white photo.
#2. It is a female in the painting and the
black & white picture is clearly of a
male. Or maybe they don't know how to tell
the difference?
#3. Blaze was slimmer, longer bodied, and
more refined like in the painting and like
most females. If the dog was a male in the
painting, then he is missing something
very important to a stud dog :)
#4. They both are in a field of grass, but
backgrounds are very different. Example:
The horizon is higher and there are no
woods or visible hedgerow in the color
painting, but the lower horizon and woods
can be seen clearly in the black &
white photo.
#5. We also have many eyewitnesses who
personally knew Blaze and know what she
looked like and every one of them
recognized the painting as Blaze!
I was tempted to show the
differences on my website and put them
side by side or even do an overlay to
prove them as the liars they are, but then
I would have to take and use the photo,
and they would accuse me of copyright
infringement.
Marie says I should take it
as a compliment that my painting looks
like a photo but the saddest part about it
is that someone would try to discredit us
over a painting of a loving, deceased dog
that was simply put on our website in her
memory. We never used her for profit, and
we surely could have had a website without
it, but I think it shows how
petty and low these people will stoop to
try to discredit someone they are simply
jealous of and cannot find anything else
to say about. I can say they have never
owned one of our great Setters and never
will, I can assure you that. The fact is,
they have to make up things because they
cannot find anything else to discredit us
with in over 50 years of us breeding gun
dogs.
Our good Lord knows the
truth, and I will leave it in His hands.
Now, about
Blaze. She was our first pure 100% Humphrey
Dashing Bondhu-bred Llewellin Setter we ever
owned, and she was the most natural bird dog
we had ever seen in over 35 years of owning,
breeding, and even professionally training a
vast number of different pointing breeds and
strains of bird dogs.
Blaze was an orange belton
but appeared almost completely white with
just a few light orange ticks. She started
very young and was naturally steady on
point and retrieving reliably at only four
months old. She was totally natural
without any force training necessary and
was so outstanding that she pointed and
retrieved over 200 native Kentucky
Bobwhite Quail and several Woodcock her
first season on her own.
Even as a pup, Blaze was so
superior over our great line of German
Short-haired Pointers we had bred for
eight generations that we completely ended
their long breeding program the following
year. Even though we had a long waiting
list for their pups, we could no long say
they were the best bird dogs. Blaze became
our main bird dog and aided in training
our other Llewellin Setters, some older
than she was at the time.
Believe it or not, no one who
hunted with her can remember Blaze ever
breaking a point, losing a downed bird,
missing a retrieve, dropping a bird on
retrieve, or not backing other dogs on
point. She continued year after year to
amaze everyone who hunted with her with
her extremely strong scenting ability,
all-day stamina, and beautiful high style,
always pointing confidently with an 11-12
o'clock tail and head held high.
She was so beautiful to watch
coursing and methodically working a field,
always keeping us in her line of sight. In open ground, she would be swinging wide but in thick cover, hunting close as any dog,
making her an expert at locating quail
coveys and then equally well at working
single birds one at a time, no matter how
thick the cover was. I regret that she was
never used for Ruffed Grouse but, take it
from a 30+ year Grouse hunter, she
would have been awesome on them and did
awesome on hunting fall woodcock in our
area.
She was extremely
intelligent, naturally knowing how to back
off of running birds and to swing around
them to get ahead, cut them off, and pin
them down between herself and the hunter.
Blaze was also the first bird
dog of any breed to achieve "Gun Dog
Certification" in 1996 and did it on
native wild birds to lead the way in IPDBA
for bird dogs.
Unfortunately, we waited too
long to try and get pure Dashing Bondhu
pups out of her, but she did prove herself
as an exceptional reproducer, even when
outcrossed twice on a very good King's
Bomber III-bred male that we had owned and
hunted with her at the time. Even though
all 21 of her pups from two litters
completely satisfied their owners, none
were kept by us for future breeding
because they were not out of the pure
Dashing Bondhu strain.
Fortunately, Blaze did have
many outstanding littermates like Dashing
Chess Bondhu and Dashing Humphrey Bondhu,
and her sire, Dashing Ringold Bondhu, had
produced hundreds of outstanding dogs
making it possible for us to preserve and
reproduce the same quality, pure Dashing
Bondhu bloodlines through several of
their offspring. It is our opinion that
Mr. Llewellin's and Mr. Humphrey's 100
years of combined breeding of their
personal Dashing Bondhus are, by far, the
most natural foot hunting gentlemen's bird
dogs ever developed and, using Humphrey's
quote, "perfected" and is the reason we
are dedicated to only breeding the purest
of these bloodlines found today.
Blaze passed on to the happy
hunting grounds in spring 2007, but will
always have a special place in our hearts
and with those who knew her at our home or
in the field. She blessed us and all the
many friends and family that hunted over
her for 11 awesome years on native wild
Kentucky and Georgia Bob-White Quail. Yes,
we made trips to Georgia to hunt native
Georgia quail with friends there, and she
always did a phenomenal job at locating,
pointing, and retrieving them day after
day, month after month, and year after
year.
Blaze will always be missed,
but we are so pleased to be able to see
her continue to live on through her same
quality pure Dashing Bondhu bloodlines we
have here at Mountain View Kennel today.
Just one look at any of our dogs'
pedigrees will show how much of her
breeding is maintained in them. You can
see in her pedigree below that she is
closely related to all the dogs we own
today and is of the purest 100% Humphrey
Dashing Bondhu bloodlines left in the
world.
It should be noted that Blaze
was out of one of the most awesome
Llewellin Setter litters we have ever
heard of in over 35 years of breeding gun
dogs. All her littermates were outstanding
naturals. Here are named just a few of her
famous littermates: Field Winner Dashing
Houdini Bondhu, Dashing Humphrey Bondhu,
Dashing Chess Bondhu (was bred to OLN's
Hank), and Dashing Chessy Bondhu (sold to
Russia). Her pedigree of all Dashing
Bondhus is a list of who's who of direct
descendants from Llewellin's and
Humphrey's personal kennels.
As you will see, we have
done an amazing job in preserving Blaze's
bloodlines through Irish Chess Bondhu and Hank's Ringo Bondhu, a daughter and son of Dashing Chess Bondhu (Blaze's litter mate) who
are in our dogs many times.
