Kyleigh's Cockers

Thanks for visiting!

Here at Kyleigh's Cockers we pride ourselves in making the best possible companion for you. We will do everything we can to meet your expectations. All our adults as well as our pups are CKC registered.

With a variety of different colors and parti mixes to choose from, we're sure you'll be happy looking for your new baby right here with us. Look around our website and if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to contact us.

We hope to see you again! Check back later for upcoming litters. There's much more to come!

ABOUT US

There are quite a few things that set us apart from your ordinary Cocker breeders. Most notably, we are trying to make dogs that have the potential to win dog shows as well as those that make loving companions.... And our goal is NOT to breed as many pups as possible in order to make a ton of money. On the contrary... it's all about making a few great family dogs or high quality show dogs. We raise our dogs in a family environment. We don't have chain link fences and little individual cages to confine our dogs. We think Cockers ought to be treated a lot nicer than that. We keep only a small number of dogs and have very infrequent litters. If we were trying to crank out a constant stream of puppies, we just would not be able to give each dog the attention it deserves.Cockers love people and crave human companionship. It just breaks my heart to go in to a pet store and see a Cocker behind glass, or to visit another Cocker breeder and see the dogs locked up in cages. It makes them crazy. Cockers want to be with people... right by your side, at your feet, or sometimes even on your lap. That's just the way they are.

The biggest thing we focus on with our pups is properly socializing them. We believe that during the 6 to 8 weeks the pup's are with us, it's crucial for the pup to be handled by people.Many breeders keep their puppies away from people in the belief that strangers might bring parvo or other diseases. We look at it completely differently. We go to great lengths to expose our puppies to many different people so that they get used to being handled and learn to love it.At our house, socializing puppies starts literally on day one! Early on they're handled by members of our family, and within a few days they are introduced to the neighbors and sometimes even to their new owners. (Most of our pups have homes waiting for them before they are even born.) Once the pups are old enough to walk around a bit and confident enough to be taken outside without getting scared, we make it a priority to take them out in to our front yard almost every afternoon. When the neighbors see us out on our front lawn with the puppies, they know that means they have an open invitation to come over and help us play with the pups. The neighbors get a kick out of it, and it's great for the pups to be handled by so many different people. By the time the pups are old enough to go off to their new homes, these puppies have spent countless hours with dozens of different people of all ages... and are truly people-lovers.In the book "Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog", authors John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller explain the developmental stages of puppies. They say that from 4 to 6 weeks, it's important for puppies to become socialized to other dogs... and that from 6 to 12 weeks it's important for puppies to become socialized to people. When you understand this, you can see why we've been able to create such well socialized puppies here: they learn to get along with their littermates, their mother, and our other adult Cockers during the animal socialization period... and they learn to love people by being handled by our family, friends, neighbors, and their new owners during the human socialization period.I mentioned earlier that (once our pups get to a certain age) we like to take them out in to our front yard to play with the neighbors. We set up a big portable fence around our front yard, and to spend an hour or two out there with the puppies each day. The sight of an entire litter of Cocker puppies on our lawn attracts many of the neighbors... including almost daily visits from a few of the neighbor kids. We like to have the kids and puppies play together, because it gets the puppies used to quick moves, loud noises, and not-so-gentle handling.Many breeders would NEVER do this, out of fear of exposing the puppies to parvo or other diseases... but we feel the benefits from socializing the dogs far outweigh any risks. In talking to other breeders, I've found quite a few that NEVER let their puppies get handled by strangers until there's money on the table and a sale is about to be closed. I just can't agree with that kind of thinking.Having our pups get handled by as many people as possible is one of the tricks we use to make sure that, by the time the pups get to their new owners, they are at ease with people of all ages.

We take very seriously our responsibility to make healthy puppies. Being a responsible breeder means being willing to do the right thing, not the easy thing. Linebreeding is where you breed two dogs who share some common relatives. For example, you take the grandson of a famous show dog and you breed him to the daughter of that same show dog by a different mother. This is linebreeding. Some show breeders like to do this in order to produce puppies with qualities similar to that one dog. Inbreeding is where two very closely related dogs are bred... say a father to a daughter. You sometimes see this in puppy mill pedigrees, or from truly careless or ignorant breeders. Besides the moral issues, there are medical reasons that human fathers shouldn't breed with their daughters. The same holds true in the canine world. Yet this stuff still goes on today. Here at the Kyleigh's Cockers , we are totally opposed to inbreeding and linebreeding. We believe in breeding across lines, not within them. Another thing we really place a lot of importance on is finding good homes for our puppies.

We do not sell our pups on a first come, first served basis! It's all about making a good match between the puppy and his new family. Also, if at ANY point in the lifetime of one of our dogs the owners decide that they can no longer keep him, we will help them find a new home for that dog. We don't ever want to find out that one of our dogs had to be taken to a shelter because it was unwanted. Another thing we want you to know about is the way we lay the ground work for potty training. We have heard many times from the new owners of our puppies that they were easy to potty train compared to their other dogs. We think we have something to do with that. Many dog breeders just keep puppies in cages with wire bottoms... and the puppies can pee and poop anywhere in the cage. This teaches the dog it's OK to just squat and go anywhere they want to. That's easy for the breeder, but very bad for the new owners. We take a very different strategy... very carefully setting up the living arrangements in ways that encourage good potty habits. A puppy has a natural inclination to not want to pee or poop in her own bed. We encourage that, by placing newspapers right next to the bed... and our puppies very quickly learn to get out of bed and go on the paper.