Carolina Shepherd Events & News

[taikunfoo]

Our Joint Agility Competition with Beaumont Collies is now up for you to take a look at! We will be opening for entries tomorrow around 12pm CS time/5pm pacific/8pm eastern, but wanted to give you a chance to look through the prizes and get any questions answered before the competitions begin Good luck!

[taikunfoo]

Happy second birthday to Carolina Shepherds - hard to believe how fast time flies! This year to celebrate we have some staff customs available for you and a new marking - Cloaked!

Over the past year we've had a lot of fun with our events - our birthday adopts, the summer hiking trip, Halloween, our winter search event, Valentine's Day, Easter, and now our joint agility competition with Beaumont Collies! We also introduced a lot of suggestions this year with achievements, customs, new bank items, and SAR trail clean-up! I'm looking forward to seeing what new suggestions you are interested in seeing in Carolina Shepherds for us to add over the next year We really value your feedback and we want to make sure the things we are adding are fun and interesting to folks.

I went back and looked at the number of dogs we have, and over the past two years we've designed 390 adopts, 289 puppies, and 225 lost/custom dogs for a total of 904 dogs, or ~2.5 dogs designed each day! Please give a round of applause to Julius525 and Vinson for their hard work as artists over the past few years (and an ice pack for our wrists & hands).

Also a quick reminder for folks - if participated in the joint agility competition you get one free common custom! If you've won any voucher or top ten prizes from the joint agility event please let me know what you'd like

[taikunfoo]

Our annual summer hiking trip will be starting this weekend! Looking forward to seeing you at the top of the mountain

[taikunfoo]

Our summer hiking trip is here! This year we will be hiking Thunderhead Mountain on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee!

[taikunfoo]

BIG UPDATE for everyone today! We’re implementing the pound, new genetic mutations and a new marking, bank customization items, V2 lines with some minor lineart updates, base layer touchups, a new page for customs and lost dogs, the new health genetics & health testing, and a new coat type - Crested!

The Pound
Folks may freely drop off unwanted dogs and take dogs from the pound. There are no limits to how many dogs you can drop off, however you are limited to taking home one dog a week. You get up to three entries a week though in case there’s more than one dog that catches your eye and/or the dog you want goes home with someone else! You also can get SAR points from dropping an undesigned lost dog off at the pound (to lighten artist workload a bit), however once a lost dog has been designed you will not get SAR points for dropping them off at the pound.
This first week from 10/7-10/14 we will be closed for adoptions to give folks time to drop off dogs they don’t want, however we will be opening adoptions on the 10/14!

New Mutations & Marking
We are adding melanism and leucism to Carolina Shepherds! These inherited mutations change the pigment of the dog’s coat in some interesting ways with melanism darkening everything to a near-black color, and leucism lightening everything to a cream color! We are also adding extended urajiro as a new marking, which increases the range of the light color on the dog's body. Existing dogs are assumed to not carry melanism or leucism.

Bank Customization Items
Allows you to add a little bit more personality to your dogs, however these are done at the artists’ discretion - reach out and ask the artist of your dog if they are comfortable making your intended changes before buying these items!

V2 Lines
There were a lot of small inconsistencies (funky lines, missing some base coat color in areas, etc) that have been bothering me with the lineart so I fixed them. The V2 lines will propagate these updates to the nursery as well. We also split out Customs and Lost Dogs onto their own page so they won’t be hiding with the adopts any more, plus it will be easier for you to keep an eye out for your custom dogs once they’ve been designed! You can go ahead and mark the new posts

I've also put together a new coat for you, Crested (fefh), based off of chinese crested dogs! Moving forward all fefh dogs will be Crested instead of Shorthaired.


New Genetics and Health Testing
As Carolina Shepherds have grown into a more popular breed over the past few years, the Blue Ridge Club has started seeing some health issues pop up. We’ve noticed a few cases of Degenerative Myelopathy, Dwarfism, Elbow Dysplasia, Hereditary Deafness, Hip Dysplasia, and Progressive Retinal Atrophy in the breed, so we are now offering genetic testing to help owners and breeders make informed breeding decisions. Existing dogs with the ID#s A-0001-A-0441, B-0001-B-0318, and C-0001-C-0267 can receive free health testing! Additionally, each Carolina Dog owner gets 10 free health tests. These may be used on new dogs AND new litters moving forward. The Blue Ridge Club is working closely with the local university genetics lab to keep costs down (and student happiness up), so each health test only costs 1 SAR point to test one adult dog OR one entire litter of puppies.

As existing dogs are healthy and have been shown in competitions and participate in SAR, they cannot express any health issues that would restrict their ability to participate in competitions and SAR. Existing dogs may carry up to a maximum of two of these health conditions, however we’re rolling for them at 85% unaffected and 15% carrier so it’s unlikely a dog will get more than one. Additionally, existing dogs will not receive poor elbow or hip scores.
Moving forward dogs must be health tested prior to being entered into competitions and SAR. Remember, existing dogs with ID#s A-0001-A-0441, B-0001-B-0318, and C-0001-C-0267 get free health tests, AND you get 10 free health tests to use on new dogs and litters. There is going to be a grace period of a couple of rounds to get your dogs health tested!

You are not required to health test dogs prior to breeding, however it is STRONGLY encouraged.

On the dog’s page we will be adding a health section. If a dog does not express any health conditions, this will be labeled simply as healthy, ie: Health: Healthy. If a dog has an expressed health condition, this text will change based on the condition and whether or not it has been health tested. For example, a blind dog that has not been health tested may read like this:
Health: This dog seems to bump into things often and might have vision problems. A blind dog that has been health tested may read like this: Health: This dog is bilaterally blind due to merle. OR Health: This dog is bilaterally blind due to Progressive Retinal Atrophy. The health genetics will be listed below these notes.



We know this is a lot of new things to throw at you, so please reach out on our discord or send me a message if you have any questions! We’re more than happy to clarify things and answer any questions you may have

We’re still working on revamping the achievements to make them a bit more worthwhile, but didn’t want to delay everything else just for those. Keep an eye out for our Halloween event which will be starting soon! This year's Halloween themes will be:
Angel
Anubis
Candycorn
Dia de los Muertos / Sugar Skull
'Haunted' Dog
Hellhound
Nighttime
Werewolf
Witches

[taikunfoo]

Happy Halloween folks! Our annual Halloween event is now up and will be running until the 31st!

[taikunfoo]

As folks couldn't decide how they wanted to change things up for our winter event in our Discord poll, we're going with both designing a dog & holiday gifts! Check out the event here!

[taikunfoo]

Happy February folks! This month we have a few different things planned for you. As you may be expecting we will have our regular Valentine’s day adopts with special amor markings which will be released on Valentine’s day!

In addition this year we will be adding four club dogs with amor markings which you can breed to once during the month of February. Keep your eyes peeled for these new dogs which we will release next week before opening breedings!

Finally we were planning on hosting a special show for Valentine’s Day, but someone let the dogs out and now we’re expecting some more surprises… Puppies! You can enter two dogs to participate in these mystery litters (only one will be chosen), and entries for these mystery litters close on February 4th at ~1700 Eastern // 2200 Chickensmoothie time.
Read more about the mystery litters here!

[taikunfoo]

Quick housekeeping announcement for folks - we really appreciated the feedback we got from our poll!
1) We've updated the genetics page with examples and short descriptions of the markings! Hopefully this helps with some of the confusion with genetics and as always feel free to reach out and ask any questions you have in the help channel!
2) We wanted to clarify a point about SAR competitions - they're being broken up by how many wins the dogs have to try to make it more fair for folks participating! Julius525 usually does one group with 0 wins and one group of 1-2 wins, however something new we're going to try is adding a third group and if there's less than three dogs in a group we'll throw a few club dogs in to bring it up to a minimum of 3 dogs participating.
3) You had some good suggestions for new markings to add, and we're currently discussing what ones to add that won't break our hands!

[taikunfoo]

Happy Easter! To celebrate we're hosting an Easter event where you can search for hidden eggs around the Carolina Shepherds pages to win some of our special rabbit-themed adopts! Read more about the event here.