About Us

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Birdsboro is a Pointer breeding program based in Olympia, Washington. The people of Birdsboro include Erin Horan DVM (a veterinarian), Kyle Turner (an ecologist turned carpenter/farmer), and our awesome kids. We live on our little hobby farm in the woods with our Kathadin Sheep and Miniature Donkeys. In addition to our Pointers, we have French Bulldogs (our Frenchie kennel name is Gaule French Bulldogs) and a few other random dogs… because around here we just LOVE dogs.

Birdsboro lines have a solid foundation on well-known dual-purpose (field and show) kennels, and over the last 20+ years, we have created our own line which we think embodies the best lines from around the world (particularly Scandinavia and Italy). Birdsboro is committed to producing dogs that are sound in health, temperament, and structure with the potential to succeed in conformation and the field, and, above all, be beloved companions. We have been involved in Pointers since 1999, and bred our first Pointer litter in 2003.  We also bred Italian Spinoni for 13 years (from 2005-2018), but are no longer breeding Spinoni in order to focus on our Pointers and Frenchies.

We are only a kennel in the sense that we have a breeding program; we consider our dogs to be family. Our female dogs are only bred one or two times. And sometimes, for various reasons, our girls (and boys) have not been bred at all (and we still love them just as much). Around here we recognize that a dog can be an amazing pet, and doesn’t necessarily meet our goals for our breeding program. After our girls are done in our breeding program, they are spayed and kept in our family. We spay all of our girls by age five due to potential health issues that increase with age. And of course the boys are here to stay too. It is unusual for us to place an adult dog because we are highly attached to them, and they are used to our lifestyle. We will place an occasional adult dog in an exceptional home, but this is pretty unusual.

For Pointers, it is very important that they have a lot of human interaction, as well as plenty of exercise. They are not a good choice for a kennel dog. Our dogs have a beautiful hilly area with mature trees that is over an acre to run and play in, that attaches via a dog door so they can come into their huge all seasons room throughout the day as they please. And the dogs take turns rotating in our house of course too. We are fortunate to live just twenty minutes away from a 5K+ acre hunting conservation area. We make weekly trips there to run and train dogs. The Pacific Northwest also allows us to hike with our dogs in the woods, take them to the ocean, and walk with them downtown. We spend a lot of time with our dogs, whether that is outside, in our home, or off on adventures with them. Our dogs are not only great with us (including all of our kids), but are also a very socially appropriate “pack”. We only separate our dogs when a girl is in heat, and then we rotate the girls in heat with our boys. At meals and overnight, they are all in individual crates. We couldn’t have this lifestyle if our dogs didn’t have such amazing temperaments.

Further, our dogs are simply a wonderful hobby – we do not profit financially from them. Trust me, if you heard what we spend annually on dog food and veterinary expenses, you would be astonished. And that doesn’t even take into account having one of us at home all of the time for the sake of our kids, dogs, and farm.  But, our dogs are worth it to us. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

It is important to note that pre-kids, we used to be very active in conformation (the show ring), hunt tests, and going to the national.  Our Pointers are very correct to standard and are great hunters, and did very well in these venues. Erin also has experience in obedience, tracking, and agility. We also ran a huge Pointer rescue program and placed over 700 dogs in a ten year period. However, due to also having kids, a farm, and Erin’s veterinary career, we are currently not showing our dogs in conformation or hunting events at this time. For our family, we believe at this time it is more important to focus our time and financial resources on raising our children – by having a stay at home parent (which the dogs also benefit hugely from), homeschooling our children, letting them spend time in nature climbing trees and swimming and being kids, teaching them about life on our farm, coaching their soccer teams, etc. We may restart competitive showing and hunting in the future, but for now we are content to just spend time with our beautiful dogs and enjoy hunting with them ourselves. For this reason, we are happy to place our top puppies in awesome performance and show homes that want to focus on those venues. We will never ask our families to commit to any activities or titles… what is most important to us is that they are beloved family members.