Flipping through the galley of Mississippians, I gratefully acknowledged the bios and pictures of Mississippi greats so familiar from literature, racial reconciliation history, music, education and art in this comprehensive Hall of Fame.
Then I saw the dogs, dogs standing at attention next to a handsome, outdoorsy looking fellow named Mike Stewart, owner and trainer at Wildrose Kennels right up in old Oxpatch, 143 acres of field just for training and housing English labs whose genetic make up comes from dogs with such regal sounding homes as Queensbury Estate in Scotland and Arley Hall Estates in England.
Ranked by Forbes magazine (April 2009, complete with pictures of Mike and labs) as one of the best recession proof businesses in the USA, Wildrose Kennels specializes in training labs to do just about anything you can imagine and more. One of the newer programs is training in diabetic alert.
These dogs are taught to retrieve, to hunt, to play, to obey. They can even major in adventure. Lucky dogs. Rather expensive dogs, ($1,500 for a pup, $15,000 for a fully trained adult), Mike says the dogs don’t cost as much as a big fine car which you swap out every four years or so. These dogs are now living all over the world and people fly in from near and far to be a part of the training and purchasing of these fine working and companion dogs.
Mr. Stewart was Ole Miss Chief of Police from 1981-2000 and equates training dogs with keeping students well behaved at the University, quipping that dogs and college kids both need consistency and repetition to be good citizens.
Character wise, I will say this fella is way up there. Who, owning kennels in Oxford, Arkansas and Colorado, has time to call an admiring, blogging bookseller in Jackson, MS for an inteview over the phone? He does. And he’s prompt. He even invited me up to train any shelter puppy from my own copious list on www.sitstay.petfinder.com. Lucky me. Thanks, Neil White, for introducing me to this hospitable, gentlemanly entrepreneur whose passion for dogs equals my own and many others in this gone-to-the-dogs world.
-Pat
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