Howl'en Acres

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Parkland, AB
Howl'en Acres

Howl'en Acres authorized distributor of Courtlyn Custom Dog Food.

06/20/2024

Final Blow Out on all remaining in-stock items. Watch your email for the list. If it's in there it's 15% off

Address

7, 53111 Range Road 21
Parkland, AB
T7Y2G9

Website

http://www.howlenacres.com/

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Our Story

Our puppy story started almost 10 years ago when we got married and soon after added our first rescue pup Nikki, a young border collie found running in Northern Alberta. A very short time later we moved our little family south to Lethbridge. Nikki was, up till that time, the most timid dog we had ever worked with, having both grown up with dogs. Ashley soon discovered an agility group and started working with Nikki, building confidence and bonding together.

Since then we have found that things seems to work out when the time is right! That’s exactly what happened as we met our next best friend, Caliber. An older Karelain Bear Dog who chose us from the SPCA in Cranbrook, BC. He jumped in the back seat of our pick up truck while we were meeting him and never left. As timid as Nikki was, Caliber was confident and head strong. He gave us a run for our money quite a few times! Nikki and Caliber both suffered from different food problems and we researched and worked with our vets to try and get issues under control. They both also came with very different training issues and we both began developing and learning about different training methods and options. Nikki was now competing in agility and Caliber tried his hand tracking and Rally Obedience. We moved back to the Edmonton a few years later and decided soon after that it was time to start succession planning for agility.

Bring on dog number three, Kade, our first non-rescue pup. So off we went to pick a puppy from a litter of border collies outside of a small town in the middle of Alberta. That was the longest three hour drive with a crying puppy ever!! Kade started us on what would later become an epic training crusade and in the end a total mind shift in our training. She suffers through a painful lack of confidence and dog fear aggression, however, with thousands of hours of training and work she has become a great dog and a solid little agility partner.

Puppy number four was somewhat unexpected; Kody our second Karelian Bear Dog pup is also a rescue. His entry into our lives was absolutely a story of a dog who everyone else had written off finding his forever family. Just before Christmas in 2014 our man Caliber passed and although we said we would take a break and pick a puppy when we were ready, off we go on our next adventure to Kettle Falls to pick our next best friend! We found a little kennel literally in the middle of nowhere on a mountain side in Montana. We packed up the collies in the SUV and started our thousand km trip south. Storms the whole way south made for quite the harrowing trek, followed by meeting the new most timid, un-socialized dog we ever worked with. Kody had been returned to the breeder as a pup for being “too soft” from a single mom family with lots of young kids. He had a huge fear bubble and couldn’t be caught, hated being touched, had brutal collar fear and to top it off no house training. He was living away from the other dogs to make sure he didn’t breed and due to some fighting with the other males. We just had to have him in our lives, so not unlike Caliber he was hastily loaded up into the vehicle and away we went. Another thousand km north, and a kennel full of puke but we made it home. Quite the 3 day trip!!! It took some understanding and a softer training approach but 3 weeks later Kody decided to accept us and came to cuddle for the first time. There is no feeling in training like finally gaining the trust of a dog like Kody. As with all our pups he taught us more than we taught him and again we shifted our view on how dogs should be handled. We finally thought we had found a place where we had enough dogs and could sit back, train and enjoy our furry family.

Or not, by this time we had moved again and bought a fixer upper in St. Albert. We hadn’t been in our house long but had met some of our neighbors. In July of 2015 our neighbor's kid decided he wanted a puppy. Not long after he realized that puppies are work and they mentioned to us they were planning to surrender the young Black Lab. Enter Jessie!!! We decided to help out, foster the pup and try and find her a nice family... didn’t take us long to realize that she was already very much apart of our lives! Jessie started working to become a gun dog for bird hunting and we learned that the world of gundogs is about 30 years behind with their training methods. So began the search for a positive gun dog training program. She has amazing drive and loves to work!

Now with four hungry dogs to feed we started to again question our feeding. Plus you can imagine the poo-mageddon in a small city yard every spring. This was when we found raw and it changed our pups lives. Better coats, better bowls, better energy, and better clean-up!

So that must be it right how could they need more dog’s then these 4!

Wrong! We moved out to a small acreage north of Stony Plain due to change in work positions. Best move we had made yet! 3 beautifully treed acres for the dogs to exercise in with lots of room for big gardens and agility courses. Kade had turned 4 the year we moved in, so the search was now on to look for the next agility pup. It was a fairly short search for a pup, and enter Jackson, our third Border collie.

Since moving to the county and starting Howl’en Acres little Jackson hasn’t been the only addition. We added chickens and ducks to our farm family. We rescued a cat that keeps an eye on things and helps with pest control. He was very afraid of people in the beginning but with some positive reinforcement and has warmed up to us. He is a very happy and has made a few cat friends. In the fall of 2017 we finally decided to distribute for Courtlyn Raw Dogfood. We had both wanted to do that for a while and we finally had the space to do so! We are always very busy between selling eggs, raw food, working full time and training our canine partners. Our goal moving forward is to keep building our business and build into behavioral training and working with reactive dogs. We absolutely love our life on our little piece of paradise!