OAK PARK AMERICAN BULLDOG KENNELS

My name is Steve Lamplough and together with my wife Maria and our two teenage boys we own and live on a deer farm in the higher rainfall area of South West Victoria. Our property is situated half way between Portland and Hamilton or Warrnambool and Mt Gambier, depending on which direction you are looking.

On our property we run Red Deer and Candian Elk. We run mainly stags, which are the male deer, for their velvet antler. The deer antler grows and drops off every year. In the farm situation we cut the antlers off under local anesthetic when it is half grown and in a cartilage form, covered in a hair which resembales velvet. This velvet antler grows incredibly fast as it is full of natural growth hormones. From nothing on their head until we harvest the velvet is about 60 days and big stags grow antlers well over 3 feet long with huge tines out the front, Our best stag has cut over 11.5 kg of velvet. Over the years we have won numerous awards for our velvet production.

Velvet is used in traditional chinese culture for a number of health related issues. Western medicine has shown velvet to have some very good benifits for a range of aliments, including arthritis, blood disorders, increased stamina and tissue repair in athletes and healing of ulcers in old people, just to name a few.

Recently a lot of research has been put into using velvet in the pet market and it has proven to be very beneficial for dogs with a range of aliments. I use deer velvet with my dogs and they love it and do well on it, especially our older dogs and most certainly our dogs that we are training/working at an elite level.

The following are some links on the benefits of deer velvet for both dogs and people. You can purchase deer velvet in a powder form for yourself or your dogs through friends of mine at Rainbow Deer Farm, they market it as K9 Magic.

 http://www.k9magic.com.au/

I am a licenced security officer and love to work our dogs in personal protection and security work. I train the dogs twice a week for this type of work as well as most other days in basic obedience. I am a qualified dog trainer through the National Dog Trainers Federation (NDTF) and will work with other peoples dogs in a range of training and behaviour issues.

My goal is to sell trained dogs to the security industry. I believe the American Bulldog is very underated in this area in Australia. In the USA they are often used for security and law enforcement work. The best part I find with the American Bulldog is you can take a well trained one anywhere and they are under complete control until called upon.

Many people have said to me at times "why would you train your dog to bite"..........well really it is just the opposite......ALL DOGS CAN BITE. My dogs will only bite on command or if I am being attacted, outside this they are very friendly, loyal, family loving dogs. I always say to people who make this comment "which dog would you prefer mine or a totally wild, untrained thing that will bite on it's own accord and nobody will be able to get it off you!!!!" The answer is simple and if all dogs were assessed properly for protection work and then correctly trained, there would be by far less dog bite and aggression problems around. The important part in this type of training is the dog assessment.......if the dog is not up to the work and this training you are asking for problems. This is where a strong nerved well balanced dog, such as what we strive to breed, are ideal for reliably undertaking this type of work. Our trained dogs can be "turned on" when they need to be, then just as importantly can be "turned off" and returned to being a lovable family dog.....all with a word.

We enter our dogs into the K9 Prosports competition. This is an internationally recognized, all breed sport to assess personal protection and security patrol dogs. Although we train regularly, K9 prosports is set up as a real life situation and varies from each competition. The aim is to see how the dog and handler would cope in a real life situation.

We recently entered our first competition and had dogs entered in all 3 sections; Training Division, Personal Protection Division and Patrol Dog Division. We were very excited with the results of our first competition with our girl Keryn winning the very competitive Personal Protection Division and Avalanche came second in the Training Division.

It is only early days for us but these wins reinfoced our belief of the capabilities of the American Bulldog being a well balanced dog, ideally suited for this type of work. It takes a lot of training and commitment to achieve these results but we have always believed the American Bulldog is the ultimate all round dog for every situation. They can be the most fantastic dog with kids but when called upon they can protect with all their heart.

 FBK's Keryn won 1st Place in the very competitive Personal Protection Division at the inagural Southern Region K9 Prosports Competition

Miami Vice Avalanche  won 2nd Place at he Southern Region Ingural K9 Prosports Competition in the Training Division