Welcome to Ashlan Cotons!
Updated April 2010.We live in Lafayette, Colorado and have been part of the CTCA since 2002. There are no new litters planned for this year, but my girl Petra is retiring from breeding and to stay in compliance with the city ordinances, I need to find her a new home. If you want a wonderful companion and are interested in a Coton, but don't want to go through the puppy training stage, please give me a call at (303) 604 6569. Further information on Petra follows.
Petra is a really good person and gets along very well with everyone - dogs, cats, children, babies, elderly people, anyone or anything. She has a genuinely sweet disposition and defers to everyone around her. No crankiness or dominance issues here.
She is my only dog who loves to visit the vet. She starts whining to get out of the car as soon as we park. She's just nuts about meeting new people and other dogs. She is cautious about strangers only if they come to my house. However, if we're out, she is a meet-and-greet fanatic. Wants to make friends with everyone at Home Depot and Petsmart. It's rather embarrassing. Even if she has to stay in the car, she is still thrilled just to go along for the ride.
Though a greeter, she is not a constant cuddle-bug. Only for brief periods in the day will she slow down and want some lovies. She's very "busy" all the time, and quite independent and active compared to most Cotons. She's not hyper, but she's “always got business". She loves to explore. She climbed out of the litter box about 2 weeks before her littermates - very capable and athletic. She loves the backyard and all outdoors, chasing squirrels, birds, and bugs. If she can be in the backyard, she doesn't care if you're gone all day. Petra does get lovey in the evenings though, when it starts to get dark. After everyone else has had their belly rubs and petting, she comes and spends the last hours of the evening by my side.
If Petra doesn't finish her dinner, she will hide her food from the rest of the dogs by stuffing a rag or a one of my kitchen tea towels (ugh!) into her food bowl, carefully tucking the cloth around the edges of the food so everything is well hidden. I believe this trait of hiding food is described somewhere in the CTCA Coton manual on CD. Some Cotons just do this.
She's very fastidious and eats any spilled food on the floor before eating whats in her bowl.
Also, if I dump her food in a bowl and it piles up in a hill, she flattens it out with her nose until it's level in the dish. Then she eats it. She prefers a platter to a bowl because it's difficult to flatten kibble in a bowl. You push down on one side and it squishes up on the other side. She spends a lot less time arranging her food if it's on a platter, so she gets a platter. My other dogs eat out of bowls.
As you can gather, she has a thing about food. Strange, because she eats less than everyone else.
She "talks" a bit. This is kind of a soft guttural song that starts on a high pitch and kind of winds downward. It sounds kind of like "rrrrrahr - rrrrrahr - rrrrrahr- rrrrrahr". Kind of like bow-wow-wow, but made up of lots of r's. It’s just to let me know that she's very happy. She uses this greeting first thing in the morning to say hello, when I first get home and while I'm getting their dinner ready in the evenings. Before you put her bowl of food down on the floor, she jumps up and down in the air, really high - almost getting her nose in the bowl!
TO SEE MORE PHOTOS of Petra, please click on her photo below.
To visit the Coton de Tulear Club of America's web site for authoritative information on all things Coton de Tulear, please click on CTCA.
Thanks for visiting Ashlan Cotons!
