Born: 1990 • Passed: 2024
Owned and loved by: Georgia Edwards & David Welton

Gandolf was our first Bouv, and what a fine representative of what the breed can and should be. He was loyal, protective, highly intelligent, and biddable – whatever you asked of him, he was capable and enthusiastic about doing. He titled in conformation, protection, and multiple performance events; his favorite was pulling the driving cart for 5 miles at 15 mph down the bike path in Santa Barbara. When he wasn’t competing, he worked as a therapy dog and was instrumental in detecting metastatic breast cancer in several of my patients. But he was also staunchly disobedient when he though what we were asking of him was not safe, either for him or for us. The one thing he could not tolerate was when a pager went off in the house and we failed to turn the beeping off. Gandolf would grab the pager, go out through the dog door, and drop the offending noisemaker into the swimming pool – he had great problem-solving abilities!  

He left big pawprints to fill