WOULD YOU BE AN AMAZING GUARDIAN OF OUR FREE LAB RETRIEVER?

Help with our Service Dog Donation Program

We have a puppy from an upcoming litter available to participate in our Guardian Program. Please Apply for more Information.

female chocolate lab puppy

In the interest of providing the best care for our females and in support of our free service dog program for Veterans we have developed a guardian program which allows you to adopt a chocolate Labrador puppy while you give back to these amazing people who sacrificed themselves for our country. The puppies are picked up at 8 weeks old and go to their forever family to be trained and live with you for life. When they are of proper breeding age and come into heat they are returned to us in order to breed for a few days, are returned to their family’s home, and then returned to us again to have and raise their puppies. Once puppies are weaned the female is then returned to their Guardian family.

We feel this will allow for the best care of the girls as they will be one on one with their forever families right from the get go instead of being replaced once they are retired from breeding. A Free puppy adopted through our breeder program is just that, a free lab retriever. In addition, there is compensation for travel to us to return her along with us paying for spaying after she has had her litters.

On occasion we run into someone objecting to this program and they recommend that people visit their local shelter to adopt a puppy for free. We are all for, let me qualify, we are 100% for those who would rather adopt a puppy from a local London shelter, Windsor shelter, or even closer to us in Chatham Kent. These puppies need rehoming and we would want to get them into a home as much as the next person. The need for breeding however is still there because not all free shelter dogs have the intelligence to act as a service dog. As well they don’t have a trackable background of their temperament and health. Something as simple as a shelter dog not being screened for a genetic heart or eye issue may result in a lot of wasted training. Also, guessing a shelter dog’s age could result in a shortened term for them to act as service dogs. If a dog lives for 10 to 12 years, and the shelter dog is 5 years old , training takes a year at least for suitable candidates, then the service can only work until about 8 to 10 years old until they begin to slow down. So, instead of the dog helping their handler for 8 or 9 years, all that training is put in to the dog for just a couple years. Normally this is a cost most people will not incur for such a short time. Read more on this here.
You must live within an hour and a half or so or be willing to make the drive to participate in this program. People from Essex county and Windsor, Chatham Kent, Sarnia, London and Elgin county are the best candidates to partner with us and adopt a puppy for free, but living in one of those locations is not mandatory. If you are interested in our free puppy adoption program please specify so when applying as outlined on our contact us page and we will interview you for more information. Space in this program is very limited but also very rewarding as you will be helping us place a Lab puppy into the hands of a veteran or first responder to help them with their daily duties.

Ownership is retained by Lucky Labs until the dog is finished breeding even though she will live with her guardian family. Around the age of three-four the mother is retired from breeding and we will pay to have the ownership transferred along with paying an agreed upon amount for the dog to be spayed.

  1. We make the first pick of a litter choosing the smartest female to mate in the future. Sometimes there may be two puppies that are equally intelligent, if so you can pick from the two. Either way you get the pick of the litter.
  2. You take your puppy home, administer veterinarian care as you would normally getting your Lab vaccinations at the proper times.
  3. You keep us informed of vaccinations and if your female comes into heat. Once she is old enough to breed we facilitate that. She is home with you for most of the year only being away to mate with our male for a few days, and to have her puppies.
  4. After the first mating we will evaluate the quality of the puppies she made. If they do not meet or are not above our standards to be trained as a service dog we may decide to spay her and sign her over to you. We may also try her with a different male if we feel the characteristics of the different male might make the puppies of a higher quality. In short, if her puppies are exceptional she may have up to 4 litters so we are able to donate the highest quality puppies available to our veterans and first responders. If her puppies are not we may instruct you to spay her and cover the cost.

If you feel you can provide an excellent home for one of our best girl puppies, and you would like to contribute to our veterans, police officers, nurses, fire fighters and medics while caring for one of the best breeds of dogs going, then please apply below. People looking for a puppy to adopt can get the highest quality Lab puppy available in Ontario. We appreciate your help and dedication to helping out.

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Think you would be an Amazing Guardian of one of our dogs?