About Us
Striving to produce healthy, sound, structurally balanced dogs with meaning and purpose. Breeding OFA & DNA tested dogs & competing in dog shows, sports & training since 1997.
I started showing Siberian Huskies back in 1997, Hence the name "NordicWoof" for our kennel name. It was quickly discovered I had a knack and talent for training, handling and presenting dogs to judges. Soon after I started to show my own dogs, I started having people approaching and asking me to show their dogs. This saw me move into handling many different breeds professionally within only a few years of showing dogs. I started breeding Siberian Huskies around 2002 or 2003. Since then I have bred, raised, shown & championed dogs from my own breeding programs or client dogs in AKC, UKC, ARBA and IABCA. I have assisted in evaluating countless litters for show potential puppies for clients to my own. Today I am an AKC judge for the ATT and FETCH tests, a CGC evaluator and I am working my way through AKCs canine college to become a breed judge.
In 2003 I also attended the Petsmart Groomers Academy and graduated from that within the same year. I had already been grooming show-quality grooms for many years prior, but I had no idea how to groom dogs as "pets." Back then the concept of shaving a Shih Tzu was like learning a new language. I worked for Petsmart as a groomer and continued to professionally show dogs until 2008. I was run over by a vehicle at the state fair, where I was a pedestrian walking down one of the food aisle fairways. Some people stole a fair vehicle that had the keys left inside it, and took it out on a joyride, maliciously running people over. I was one of those unlucky few who had been run over by these people and needed many years to recover. This saw an end to my current lifestyle. I had to send all the client dogs home and many of my co-owned show dogs went back to their breeders as I was then unable to continue campaigning them in shows.
Two years later, In 2010 I started my own professional mobile dog grooming business with my husband Josh, we called it Awesome Pawz Mobile Grooming. We operate under Awesome Pawz LLC. and provide mobile dog grooming services to our local areas. I also offer occasional private training, training classes, and very occasionally will offer board and train to certain dogs. I was unable to hold a solid job any longer due to my impairments from the accident and needed to turn to going into business for myself. This was fine for quite some years. Where I could take days off as needed to rest and recover, or take longer at a stop because I was having difficulties. During these years I was able to train my husband how to wash, trim and groom all breeds of dogs and all around handle the business as my helper.
My disabilities started to worsen in 2017 and I was advised by my doctors I had to stop working. My husband continued to pull the weight and groom dogs himself. To whom, I would probably not be here today without. Over the course of the next years my disabilities continued to increase in affecting my daily life greatly. During this period I changed my course of action as being a very active person and very skinny all my life to training my own service dog to assist me with things I now found extremely difficult. I was also now left alone daily for hours as my husband had to work the business alone. I have trained my own service dogs to assist me in directed retrieval, counter balance, cardiac response and seizure response. I have shape trained seizure alert and cardiac alert with dogs who presented me the alerts, that I then turned into trained reliable tasks.
Today, I focus on helping others with disabilities train their own service dogs. It was only very recently that I decided to get back into dog breeding as a hobby.
This decision has come more as a necessity to the service dog clients I have been helping. Dealing with countless breeders, while looking for prospect puppies for my disabled clients who need a service dog prospect, who is from healthy bloodlines but, who is also temperament tested, has been a growing frustration for years. I often dealt with breeders who don't entirely "get it." They get frustrated that you want to evaluate their litter rather then picking a puppy off photos they send you. Or a brief meeting at best.
I could vent on this issue for hours on end. The point was that, Going to find a puppy for a client was such an overwhelming chore. Breeders did not properly test puppies, or if they did, they never provided video footage of the testing. When they did, the video was clearly edited with any negative responses clipped out of the video. This made it increasingly difficult to fairly select puppies for clients that had true service dog potential. If you have done your research, then you too understand how truly vital this part of the process really is. It's best to be able to evaluate the litter in person with your own trusted trainer/behaviorist conducting the testing. But when the litter is a thousand miles away, such a cost is so extraordinary and mostly unreasonable for the buyer to do.
With my personal breeding program I want to strip all the guess work away. I want to truly provide prospect puppies who have been charted, and evaluated week by week with a proper temperament test for service dog potential occurring at 6 weeks of age, and structure evaluations occurring at 8 weeks of age for breeding potential dogs.
To do this, I chart the puppies weekly as any good breeder should do, weights, worming, etc., and make notes on their daily Puppy culture ENS/ESI endeavors. I take 1 video of each individual puppy weekly, during their ENS and weight charting period of the day. This video is posted RAW, meaning it is entirely unedited except for adding a text watermark to my footage to help stop scammers. This lets you see the good, bad and ugly. You can go back weekly and look at how the puppy has improved or worsened in their responses to stimulation and textures. This also serves as real solid proof your puppy is being handled, wormed, charted and weighed, vaccinated or what ever other things we must do with the babies that week. In this day and age puppy scams and back yard breeders are so prevalent, that you must do extra work to ensure what someone says to you, is in fact true. I cannot find any better way to provide proof of these important milestones then to offer real footage of the events unedited.
I welcome you, or your personal trainers/behaviorists to come and evaluate the litter or any puppy you may have an interest in. I am happy to FaceTime with the puppies and our dogs. My entire goal is to help provide real service dog prospect puppies, or started service dogs in training to persons in need.
I would be lost without my own service dogs who assist and help me daily get through the struggles of navigating my own disabilities. So I know the importance of these animals is priceless. I do my best to keep my prices for training or puppies (when we have them) as moderate and low as possible and still somehow pay the bills.
Thank you for reading about me and my passion, I would love to work with you or point you in the right direction if you need guidance on another breed or trainer in your area.
-Danielle
