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Bolognese is a breed dating back to Roman times, and origins as the name suggests from the area around Bologna in Italy. It is a typical companion dog which is very devoted to it's owner and family. Bolognese was seen as a very valuable dog and was frequently handed over as a very appreciated gift among dignitaries from Roman times until the 1700s.
The bolognese is a small, square and robust dog that is often seen together with the fine ladies and then often on their arms your arm like a real companiondog, which gossip about a petite dog that the ladies would be able to carry around all day. The bolognese had its peak during the renaissance and can to day me found represented in paintings by including Titian, Goya and Breughel.
Several celebrities had bologneses, some of the most famous is Madame de Pompadour, Catherine the Great of Russia and Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria. The latter is said to have been so fond of her bolognese that she after its dead had it stuffed to be able to preserve her loveley dog.
The bolognese are many times talked about as a non-sheding breed because the coat it loses doesn't fall to the floor but remain in the coat and forms, if not removed, tangles. This means that a bolognese demands some grooming, the best way is to do a little bit every day since that will make the coat significantly easier to take care of. A reduced amount of tangles also promotes good coat quality since no more coat than necessary is removed. Since the coat requires daily care it is important train your puppy, as well as yourself, by combing and brushing daily from start.
The spring 2008 we were contacted by SVT when they needed an Italian dog to a TV recording. They had already been in touch with a friend of ours, who through her zoomarket provided budgies for the recording and when they found her Cane Corso was too large to fit into the film, she recommended our lagottos. It was decided quickly that one of our lagottos would be in the film but three days before the shooting, they called to tell me that the director had changed his mind and now wished for an even smaller Italian dog. Since we knew that the breeder of our lagottos also had bologneses we contacted her and decided that one of her bologneses, Gea, would be in the film..
It was a short serie in two parts of Selma Lagerlöf which was broadcast on SVT during the Christmas holidays 2008. And when the bitch Gea was mated it was obvious that the puppies should be named after characters from the film. We decided quite quickly that one of the puppies would have to move home to us and because the male was the one that looked most promising it was Carl Larsson who became our.
Larsson has served as a perfect mascot for our lagottos, he is a lot of dog in a small package and really believe that he is a lagotto. Larsson is showed a lot both in Sweden and in several European countries where he has CAC from every country he has competed in. As new in the breed we got in contact with several breeders at shows and winter of 2010/11 one of these breeders offered us to buy male puppy, Tore, from their breeding.
Since we had no bitches, we started our breeding by borrowed the sister of Larsson, Scheffelfältets Sophie Elkan, and mated her with our Tore and then received our first bolognese litter. Today we have a total of six Bolognese in our kennel, two males and four females.
Because we believe that it is important to keep us updated about how the breed is developing we often make trips where we participate in shows or at seminars around Europe. It is also an excellent opportunity to meet other breeders and people that are interested in the breed to exchange ideas and experiences, which we consider very important since bolognese is a relatively small breed.