Sivas Kangal

OK Tina.. whats this I hear you asking.. well its a dog, a particlarly special type of dog that has been bred in Turkey formany many years and has only just started to appear in the UK. Its the kind of dog that Fikret and I would love to buy but at the moment the selling price here is close to £1000 and in Turkey at the moment we dont have the type of accomodation to be fair to keep one. However in the hopefully near future we will buy one.

Now Ive added a link for a great site I found when we were looking for information on Kangals http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/kangaldog.htm

Although this dog was originally bred and used as a shepard dog in the Sivas region of Turkey, a lot of Turks consider this amazing dog to be the National dog of Turkey.

Fikrets family come from the sentral of Turkey originally and many have stories relating to the bravery and amazing intelligence of these dogs. One being the story of a family who had three of these dogs, it was during the winter and they were rounding herds of animals up and when they returned home they released they were an animal missing and most importantly a kangal. Now the goat or sheep although it was "cash" wasnt so important, however the kangal was incredibly important both to the livihood of its owner and that it was important to the family. A search was launched for this dog and as it was winter the snow could well have been up to a metre deep in places. It took the family a couple of days to find this missing dog. The dog had discovered a goat that had become incapacitated in some way, injury or it was stuck somewhere Im not sure, but it couldnt move. The dog had stayed by the side of the goat and had seemingly been eating grass to stay alive while someone found it and the goat.

I met a kangal once and it was the biggest dog I have ever seen but it had a small child riding round on its back and seemed so gentle, but its owner informed me that had someone unknown approached him or his family then that would have been a different matter. Now I know in this day and age there are many breds who have a bad reputation for being vicious but I firmly believe there are no bad dogs just bad owners.

One day we will buy a kangal, it will be trained properly and it will live outside our house as it should be, not a soft house dog, but a keen guard dog, an intellegent companion and a deterent for all the cats that visit to use my garden as a toilet..!

If anyone knows a Uk breeder of Kangals then I would be pleased to hear from you. If I stay in the Uk the I would like to consider breeding these animals to encourage the growth of their popularity in this country and to help maintain their pedigree.

http://images.google.co.uk/images?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4SUNA_enGB264GB264&q=sivas+kangal&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title