All Hail the Great and Glorious Gryff!

Many wonderful things have happend to us at Kitaco over the years, but the privilige of collaborating with some of the top breeders in Australia has to be one of the highlights.

Last year we were able to bring Daryl (Caliya Wizard of Oz) to NZ. He comes from the fabulous Italian champion, Mads (AU CH, NL JCH, LU JCH Misty Meadow's Mad About You P-L). It was such an honour to be entrusted with this precious line. To be able to bring in this wonderful, healthy and fresh DNA from Europe will be a real boon to our breeding program.

Daryl is the sweetest dog, who has embraced his studly duties with great enthusiam and already given us some magnificent babies (more on that in another post)., We are so grateful to Caitlyn Bull of Caliya Kennels for allowing him to come to us.

Over the years, we have had many discussions with our Aussie breeder friends about breeding, bloodlines, health testing and particualry the limited DNA pool in NZ. We are geographically isolated with a small population (more people live in Sydney than all of NZ) and it's a huge, but necessary investment to regularly import new bloodlines.

We thought we'd hit the jackpot with Daryl, but then we were blown away by the most incredibly generous offer from Rick Carter of Adrahil Kennels. He offered to loan us an Australian Champion Smooth Coat to establish our Smooth Coat lines. The dog could come to us for 6 months, during which time we could breed from him and collect his semen for future litters, all in return for - hopefully - helping him achieve an NZ Champion title.

Of course, we said yes.

The dog they sent us wasn't just any old Smooth Coat he had wandering around the yard, either. It was Gryff (AUS CH Adrahil the Swindler), the top NSW Smooth Coat in 2024 co-owned with Jasmine Selby and descended from Champion US lines we have not had access to, before.

He arrived with Daryl in December. Jasmine assured us that he was a great dog who "would go to anyone". She wasn't kidding. In addition to being a stunning example of the breed, he has the confidence of Golden Retriever. He is affectionate, friendly, unfazed by anything and slotted into our pack as if he had been here all his life. Our guys loved him (well, not Ben, so much. His nose is a bit out of joint over this super-confident pretender, LOL).

Which brings us to today where we are thrilled to announce that not only has Gryff given us our first international Smooth Coat litter, but he has achieved his NZ Champion title with a Best Open in Show win in Oamaru earlier this month and shall now be known as AUS CH & NZ CH Adrahil the Swindler.

His first litter was born this week to Stellar (Kitaco Starglow) - 2 boys and a girl and they are breathtaking.

Words cannot express how grateful we are to Rick and Jasmine for such a generous act and after our specialty show at Easter, Gryff will be heading home, having conquered NZ.

What's even more amazing is that this is not the end of the story, and we have more amazing news about what's coming next. Stay tuned.