The Full Story
About Bucolick
At its heart, Bucolick is a hobby farm owned by a professional couple about an hour from Brisbane. We have teenage/adult children and we are both working in normal professional jobs. Both of us potter around the farm doing whatever sparks joy. For Ms Bucolick that is mostly gardening, cooking, reading, dogs and poultry. For Mr Bucolick it is the opportunity to use a few power tools and toys, play guitar, and just hang out in the ambience of the property.
Our Finnish Lapphunds
Bucolick Farm is a hobby but its also an obsessive ideal. Bucolick Finnish Lapphund puppies are bred with exquisite attention to genetic and behavioural detail here. I strive to produce Finnish Lapphund puppies to a standard that would be accepted and approved by the breeding committee of the Lapphund club of Finland. This means no inbreeding above a COI of 6.25%, careful attention to the health and temperament of multiple generations of ancestors and progeny when selecting breeding combinations, avoiding popular sires where possible, and avoiding breeding from dogs and bitches that are simply too young to adequately perform comprehensive health assessments. Whilst this is an ideal, it's also a challenge in Australia where most dogs are neutered when they are young. Frozen semen goes some of the way to compensating for the lack of unrelated older sires.
Lapphunds in Australia are a friendly, moderate size, moderate type longhaired pedigree dog descended from working stock from Northern Finland and Sweden. In the last century or so this working stock has been primarily used for herding, but before that they were primarily hunting dogs. The working dogs were consolidated into a registered breed from the mid 1960s. Modern Lapphunds should ideally maintain the characteristics of their original founder working stock. Today there are few, if any working reindeer herding dogs in Lappland but the Finnish Breed Club maintains an open breed register to allow new working dogs to be added. Working reindeer herding dogs closely related to Lapphunds persist in parts of Northern Russia in the Nenets and Yamal peninsulas. The photo to the right (or above on a mobile phone) is of a Nenets Laika, taken on the 2017 trip to the Yamal peninsula by the propietors of Starlapps, Orical and Tabanyaruu Kennels. Grateful thanks for the use of the photo here.
If you want a deep dive into the story of lapphunds, click here. Ill slowly add links for your reading pleasure!
