About BritishRetrieverTraining.com
This website is owned by Dennis and Janice Anderson.
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The farm and kennel of Janice and Dennis Anderson located
on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border near St. Paul, Minnesota. |
For nearly
20 years, the Andersons have imported and bred British Labradors.
The name of their kennel (and website) is BritishLabradors.com.
Dennis’ interest in
retrievers was developed early. Born in North Dakota, near the
heart of U.S. waterfowling traditions,
Dennis many times accompanied his father and his Labs into the
field in autumn.
This was in the 1950s, when migrations of mallards
and other ducks frequently blackened the sky.
Later, the Andersons
moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Dennis grew up.
He
attended college back in duck and pheasant country, at the University
of Minnesota at Morris, studying English.
Dennis also holds a Master’s
Degree in Journalism from the University of Minnesota.
In 1980, Dennis was appointed Outdoor Editor and Columnist of the St. Paul
Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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Dennis Anderson.
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In that capacity, he used
his column in 1982 to form the conservation group Pheasants Forever,
of which he was chairman during the organization’s
first five years.
In 1988, Dennis spent a year reporting on North
America’s
loss of ducks, which have declined by about half since the 1940s.
Learning during that year that poaching and over-harvest of waterfowl
were commonplace along the Gulf Coast, Dennis subsequently raised
more than $650,000 through his column to purchase a helicopter
for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agents.
Illegal hunting
on that scale no longer exists in the region, according to enforcement
officials.
In 1993, Dennis moved to the Minneapolis Star Tribune,
where he is Outdoor Columnist and Team Leader.
Dennis has been honored
many times for his writings. In 1989, he was one of three finalists
for the Pulitzer Prize in Specialized
Reporting. He also has been honored with the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s
Edward J. Meeman award for the Best Conservation Reporting in a
Major Newspaper.
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Janice Anderson.
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Though Janice Anderson has long been interested
in dogs, her formal training was in Equine Science, in which she
holds one college
degree, and Computer Science, in which she holds a bachelor’s
degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Janice has worked
as a professional horse trainer. Later, for many years, she was
a software engineer with Control Data Corp. of Minneapolis.
When
she and Dennis had their first child, Trevor, in 1993, she began
dedicating her time to their growing family and to BritishLabradors.com,
the Labrador breeding and importing business for which she and
Dennis share responsibility.
In that business, the Andersons breed
between six and 10 litters a year. They own or control the breeding
rights of all of their
breeding animals, and breed only from stock they have imported
or bred from dogs they have imported.
The Andersons might own the
only kennel, or one of the few, that offers puppy purchasers an
unconditional guarantee of satisfaction.
Customers of theirs include
President George H.W. Bush, for whom they imported a springer spaniel
to replace the famed “Mille,’’ and
Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, who own a Labrador
the Andersons bred and obedience trained.
Their most recent venture,
BritishRetrieverTraining.com, is an outgrowth, Janice says, of
customers’ demand over the years
for better and more accessible training methods — the kinds
of methods that have been used so successfully in Great Britain
for generations.
“
Our customers wanted it, we spent a lot of time developing it and
I think it will be a great thing,’’ Janice said.
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