How We Prepare Our Puppies For Success
The secret sauce on why our pups are different…
Health Tested Parents
Here at RockADal we know it’s important that our parent dogs are the best examples of what a Dalmatian should be in order to breed the best puppies. Our parents are loyal, playful, have wonderful temperaments, and each undergo not only genetic, but also physical health testing that is recommended for their breed by the OFA. (DNA, hips, BAER, eyes or thyroid testing)
PREGNANCY & WHELPING CARE
At RockADal our dams are well taken care of during pregnancy from prenatal vitamins, food that supports pregnancy, vet services if needed, and pampered like the queens they are! Once their due date approaches; Moms are integrated into their whelping area to create a natural den like comfort. At this point they receive daily monitoring from me with temperature checks, fetal heartbeat monitoring, and prenatal massages. During whelping our moms receive close monitoring & delivery assistance as needed.
ENS/ESI
Once puppies are born into the world at RockADal; we begin ENS (early neurological stimulation) and ESI (early scent introduction) at 3 days old! This is performed on days 3-16, including gentle handling and daily weights to closely monitor puppy health. ENS is known to improve cardiovascular performance, stronger heartbeats, stronger adrenal glands, more tolerance to stress, and greater resistance to disease. ESI improves nose awareness and confidence. Puppies that are naturally more scent focus vs human focus can make excellent diabetic alert, bomb, or hunting dogs.
10 Step Puppy Massage
At 3 weeks old we move into a more advanced curriculum with our puppies set forth by Jeanette Forrey. We begin a “10 step puppy massage” every day and increase pressure weekly until go home day! We use our 10 step handling exercises to ensure our puppies are exposed to various types of touch, handling and sensation. This includes eyes, nose, inside mouth, around collar, tummy, down back, pull/twist tail, tug on ears, and tapping nails. Our puppies leave us with amazingly high touch tolerance which is exactly what we want to create a compliant puppy for our families, especially if going into a home with young children around —as we all know they can’t resist to pull those wagging tails & floppy ears.
Service Dog Curriculum
At 3 weeks we also begin curriculum activities that involves socializing our puppies to different sounds, sights, textures, things to climb on, run through, smell and more for their enrichment. We focus on empowering over enabling our puppies. We set them up to conquer physical and mental challenges. By doing this we build our puppies nerve strength and confidence as well as problem solving skills. It is our goal is provide our puppies with a stable and enriching environment for the first weeks of their lives!
temperament testing
We conduct a puppy aptitude test on each individual puppy set forth by the Badass Breeder Program. During the test we focus on 12 important puppy temperament traits to help you pick the puppy that fits you, your lifestyle and your needs as well as honoring who the puppy is. Once temperament testing and vet checks are completed; families will be able to see scorecards of each puppy in order for them to make the right decision for their family.
Have Questions?
I can say hands down that Dalmatians make wonderful family pets for children of all ages! They are such a loving, loyal, intelligent breed with a sprinkle of goofiness in there. They strive to impress their owners and can be protective of those they call family in times of need. I’ve owned many breeds and have been around several breeds working at the vet and Dalmatian is the breed that stole my heart. They are Velcro dogs and love to be a part of the family.
What is special/different about my breeding pairs is I hand select each one for their temperament. I know what I want to create in my program and how to get it. Balance is important to me and why choosing dals that have a well rounded personality works best for us, especially since I have a focus on raising service dogs for families.
Aside from how we raise our pups, our parents wonderful temperaments, and the temperament testing we do on our puppies, we strive to keep our COI below 3% (inbred) Dalmatians should not have a COI above 5%. Each breeds’ COI has different standards. Knowing your puppies COI is important to keep healthy lines not closely related to each other. Our whole focus is health first!
Most Dalmatians carry a genetic condition (HUU) that makes them at risk of developing urate stones IF fed an improper diet of high purine foods (yeast, organ meat, bi-products, game meat, mackeral, sardines, peas, lenitals) they can not create the stones if fed low purine dog food. However, LUA dalmatians are able to consume purines and break them down like any other breed. I’ll recommend foods below. We DNA test our litters to know which need low purine. Our stud is LUA and passes the gene to 50%-75% of the litter.
Yes, we offer different options. By a flight nanny (the puppy is a carry on in the main cabin with a trusted nanny) or you can fly in to my local airport (Chattanooga Airport) and I meet you at the arrivals department for you to take your puppy back as a carry-on yourself! We NEVER ship our puppies in cargo — responsible breeders do not use cargo, beware any that do! I will never let my puppies undergo that amount of stress & it is the same price as a flight nanny anyways which is much safer with little to no stress and they get snack/potty breaks!
Our pricing reflects all of the health testing we do, assisted labor & deliveries, curriculum, daily handling exercises, careful daily monitoring of weights, early potty training, crate training, Curriculum advances as they reach new developmental benchmarks, temperament testing, early socialization, imprint of the life saving recall, their empowerment word of “yes!” Puppies undergo a vet clearance, HUU testing, & BAER testing prior to puppy picks, their first vaccines, dewormed biweekly since birth, and microchipped. A genetic health guarantee, and unlimited lifetime support from a Veterinary Nurse. Each pup goes home with a RockADal tote bag filled with goodies for an even easier transition into your home. Our puppies are $2,500.
Our main focus is not coat color— temperament & health is our number one. We breed the standard black & white short coats mostly. After getting our dals embark DNA we found out some of our females are liver carrier, tri carrier, lemon carrier, and long coat carrier & our male is a Tri-color carrier. We had our very first tri-color litter in 2025 and was in “awe” getting to experience a historic litter. If you didn’t know, tri-color was the first Dalmatians. While standard black spotted is my personal favorite, I honestly enjoy raising these unique babies as it added some ✨color✨ in to our life!
LUA can have any of the below brands & I believe these are top quality foods for their price vs expensive food brands with the same ingredients.
For Puppies:
- Canidae Goodness
- Natures Recipe
- Nutro Natural Balance
- 4Health puppy (safe for LUA only)
For Adults (12m+)
- All the above +
- 4Health Strive- red or blue bag is HUA safe. LUA can have any 4heath recipe, but I prefer high protein options that Strive gives.
Tri-color Dalmatians were some of the first Dalmatians. We know this because of historical painting of a Dalmatian named “Captain” from the 1800s. AKC tried to eradicate them and almost succeeded as not many carry the historic color anymore. Tri-color gene is recessive; meaning it only can be produced if both parents are carrying the color gene. A Tri-color is a black & white Dalmatian with tan color spots in places where you would see brown markings in a Doberman ( legs, chest, face) They are rare to come across and we are excited to produce them! I’ll post pictures of our tri-color puppies below for those that may not know what a well-bred tri-color should look like. Dalmatians naturally carry 10 different recessive colors. Only two colors are recognized by AKC though as they only like those two colors.
Absolutely not. With our focus on temperament and health by producing LUA we don’t stand a chance in a beauty pageant. To put it bluntly -AKC judges are not about health and will pick looks every time even though LUA Dalmatians are no longer at risk of urate stones. LUA spotting looks different than HUA spotting and for that reason they are not in a position to compete in a beauty pageant (yet!). Although we do produce stunning LUA, our Stud has an ear patch -for a great reason as it’s proven to lessen the chances of deafness in offspring, but the ear patch automatically disqualifies him from show. Patches are naturally occurring in the breed, AKC judges simply don’t care because it’s looks first. See the patterns? It’s no secret they are the cause of many health issues in several breeds today. Next, most show breeders breed high COI, breed unilateral deaf dals, dals with autoimmune thyroid disease, and can win shows without health testing results. If AKC cared about health they would require each show dog to have passing health results before entering. It’s unethical for AKC judges to have the power to change the health in the breed and not push the health standards. Of course we want our Dalmatians to look like Dalmatians, but compromising heath should not be an option for that. I much rather participate in AKC sports (and we plan to do but have to work around heat cycles) but at the end of the day-my focus is creating YOU a healthy, loving, wonderfully tempered PET that brings joy into your home! If you are focused on looks, please find a show breeder.
About 8% of Dalmatians are born fully deaf. Deafness in the breed is linked to the white coat color. We know pigment (melanin) is crucial for proper hearing and unfortunately sometimes in utero not enough melanin reaches their inner ear, causing deafness. We are VERY selective when adding to our program to lower our chances of producing deaf puppies to the best of our abilities and I have had great success with my program with keeping deafness at bay in our litters by implementing what we know.