In a nutshell, Australian Labradoodles are more allergy and asthma friendly, have calmer temperaments are more consistent in qualities and characteristics than other Labradoodles. You can read more about the differences by clicking here.
Australian Labradoodles have a 98% success rate with allergy and asthma sufferers because they have non-shedding fleece and wool coats. Other Labradoodles (Origin, Early Generation, British, American) tend to have hair coats which DO SHED to varying degrees and are therefore not suitable for allergy and asthma sufferers. You can read our resource article on non-shedding dogs to learn more.
There is no difference in temperament or personality between males and females. The Australian Labradoodle breed has a fairly consistent temperament and each dog has their own personality, regardless of gender. All of our pet puppies are speyed/neutered before going to their new homes too. This means that girls don’t have seasons, boys don’t have ‘the urge’ and there is a long list of health benefits. If you would like to know more about our speying/neutering process, feel free to send us an email, or ask us during an Introductory Session or Puppy Party.
Australian Labradoodles are bred to three sizes – miniature, medium and standard. At Lomond Hills we breed miniature, medium and standard size puppies. Find out more about Labradoodle sizes.
Australian Labradoodles have non-shedding coats so need clipped regularly. They also need to be brushed 2/3 times per week. They have hair which grows in their ear canals which needs removed too. You can find out more on our comprehensive grooming section.
Australian Labradoodles are a crossbreed and therefore cannot be registered with the Kennel Club.
There are some associations set up for the Australian Labradoodle breed. Some of these are quite credible, namely the ALA in Australia, the ALAA in America and the ALAEU in Europe. These are the associations that we respect the most. We were heavily involved with setting up the ALAEU in the early days – we were considered ‘founder members’ and indeed, Brenda was the president for the first couple of years. Brenda stepped down as president and we left the association as it began to take a direction that we were not comfortable with. Our goals and aspirations for the Australian Labradoodle were not aligned with those of the association as a whole, so it made sense for us to part ways. We still have a good relationship and work closely with many ALAEU breeder members.
Australian Labradoodles are generally very healthy dogs. The main thing to watch out for is ear infections; however, this can usually be prevented by plucking the hair out of the ear canal and ensuring that the ears are kept clean. We will explain this to you when you visit. Our breeding dogs are extensively health screened prior to being bred in efforts to make sure that our puppies will live long and healthy lives. However it is important to remember that although we do extensive health screening, our puppies are not immune to Mother Nature. No breeder can guarantee that a puppy will never get sick in their lifetime, but we are doing everything we can to produce healthy and happy puppies. Read more about our health screening policy.
Choosing the right breeder is really important. You should spend much more time choosing the right breeder than you did choosing the right breed! You can read more about this subject on our page dedicated to choosing the right breeder. We also have a page about puppy farms and how to spot them which you can read by clicking here.
Email – undoubtedly! The nature of our job means our hands are usually full and we struggle to get to the phone. We also find social media messages unreliable. Email is the very best way to get hold of us, so please submit a contact form to get a dialogue started.
Our breeding programme is run from home and we have a round-the-clock job with dogs and puppies. However, we do run strict office hours for communications.
Monday – Thursday: 10am – 5pm
Friday: 10am – 2pm
Weekends: Office Closed
Visitations are by appointment only.
We are located in the Fife countryside, about 40 miles north of Edinburgh. We will only provide details of our exact location to families who have made an appointment to visit.
We have built a good reputation for producing beautiful, healthy, happy puppies with great temperaments and as such, they tend to be reserved quite far in advance. Very rarely, we might have a puppy available that is a good match for you almost immediately, but usually the wait time will be anywhere from a few months to a year. The more flexible you are with regard to size, colour and other physical attributes, the shorter your wait will be.
It takes a long time to build and develop a great breeding programme and it is a constant challenge for us to bring in new bloodlines of excellent quality. We don’t take any shortcuts – every addition to our breeding programme is very thoroughly researched.
We are always at the mercy of nature which often has other plans. Whilst we do our very best to plan, have a ‘plan b’ and manage our clients’ expectations appropriately, sometimes a mother will not conceive, or will have a much smaller litter than expected and there is just nothing we can do about it.
We encourage you to be patient, as hard as it is, because the few months to a year that you will wait now will be well worthwhile and pay dividends over many years to come with your new family member! You can use the waiting time to educate yourself and your family and get everything organised and prepared for puppy’s arrival.
Yes, we provide a worldwide export service where the regulations allow. You can find out more about which countries we export to on our dedicated export page.
Please contact us for pricing information.
The price of our puppies reflects our knowledge, experience and reputation as breeders, as well as the quality of the puppies that we produce. We are absolutely confident in the quality of our puppies and the service that we provide – many of our clients return for their second and sometimes even third Lomond Hills puppy.
We have a lot invested in our breeding programme – financially and emotionally, not to mention the time and effort we dedicate 365 days per year. We go to great lengths to make our breeding programme the very best it can be. We search the globe for the very best breeding dogs which can cost up to £15,000. We only add the very best dogs to our breeding programme. If a puppy we have purchased for breeding doesn’t grow up to meet our high standards, we don’t use them in our breeding programme – they live out their lives as family pets. Our puppies are raised in the very best facilities which are kept in immaculate condition by our hard-working team. We work around the clock to ensure that our puppies thrive. We use a fantastic vet who provides the very best veterinary care. Our puppies are raised on a high quality, grain-free food. We spend hours and hours socialising our puppies and preparing them for their adventure in the big wide world. We truly work tirelessly to produce the very best puppies we can and indeed, to match our clients with the best puppy for them!
We provide a very high level of service to our clients during the purchase process and we are always here to support clients for the entire life of their Lomond Hills puppy. All questions are answered to the very best of our abilities, no matter how long ago you collected your puppy from us.
Our prices are reflective of everything we do. If you are looking to buy a puppy from an alternative breeder, please consider some of the points raised on our ‘Choosing A Breeder’ page to help you make an informed decision.
We view reservation fees as our clients’ commitment that they want to add a Lomond Hills puppy to their home and are willing to wait as long as it takes to do so. Non-refundable reservation fees also help people to decide whether adding a puppy to their family is a good decision prior to their name being added to our list. We run a very structured and well-organised breeding programme and this is very much aligned with that.
If your circumstances change and you need to put your reservation ‘on hold’ for a while, even if it is for a number of years, we are happy to honour your reservation fee in the future. If we have had a price increase by then however, your reservation fee will be applied towards that increased price.
Young puppies are very susceptible to bacterial infections, particularly prior to their first vaccination at 6 weeks old. A huge part of our job as breeders is protecting our puppies against infection, and we take it very seriously.
Our clients have three opportunities to visit Lomond Hills.
First of all, you might choose to attend an introductory session. This is an opportunity for you to come and meet us and some of our dogs, learn about the breed and us as breeders before you complete an application for one of our puppies.
Secondly, once your application has been accepted and the appropriate litter has been born, you will be invited to attend the puppy party. We run this ‘party’ to provide you with the opportunity to come along and meet the litter as a whole, and indeed meet the mother and father, if he is owned by us and lives on site. Please note that the puppies’ parents might not be available to be seen at other times since many of our dogs are placed with local families on our Family Care Home Programme. The puppy party will be scheduled on a weekend date when the puppies are approximately 6 weeks old. Please note that the visiting date will be fixed, and we are not able to accommodate individual visits from individual clients at other times.
Finally, you will come to Lomond Hills on collection day to pick up your puppy.
Our Labradoodle puppies are regularly wormed right up to collection day. Our puppies are given their first vaccination before they leave us, and the second vaccination is due when they turn 10 weeks old. You will receive full details of worming and vaccination prior to collecting your puppy.
Absolutely! We have a comprehensive and extensive socialisation protocol. We spend hours and hours socialising and interacting with our puppies, getting them exposed to different sights, sounds and objects to make sure that they are ready to make the transition to your home. Find out more about puppy development.
Most breeders allow their clients to select their puppy from the litter based on the order in which reservations were made and reservation fees were placed. Indeed, we did this too in years gone by, but we now have a superior method of allocating puppies to clients.
We always used to try and guide clients toward the puppy that we thought would be the best fit for their situation and circumstances, but more often than not, they would just choose the puppy that they thought was the cutest or ran over to them first. This is not a good way to choose a puppy that is going to live with you for 12-15 years. If you choose a puppy with your heart rather than your head, it is very easy to end up with a temperament mismatch – which is the last thing that we want and the last thing that you want!
We allocate our puppies to our clients based, first and foremost, on temperament. After temperament follows physical attributes such as size and coat type, then we consider things like gender and colour. You can read all about our puppy matching service.
We assess and evaluate every Lomond Hills puppy’s temperament when they reach 7 weeks old. It is done at 7 weeks because this is when cognitive development is complete and we get the most accurate results.
Every puppy is placed into the same series of different scenarios and we gauge and record their reaction to each stimulus. This allows us to build a picture of how each puppy’s temperament will develop as they reach maturity. The temperament test we use is unique to Lomond Hills and has been developed by combining methods used in the Volhard and APET tests and adapting them to suit the Australian Labradoodle breed. The Volhard and APET tests were developed for generic use across all breeds and we have found our adaptation to be most accurate and reliable for the Australian Labradoodle breed.
Find out more about puppy matching.
Once temperament assessments are complete, we start the process of going through our clients’ applications and carefully making the matches based on suitability. Temperament is the most important factor and is always the first thing we look at. Then we move to size, coat type, gender and colour. We do our very best to allocate every client a puppy which has the best temperament for them as well as the physical attributes they are hoping for, but this is not always possible. In the rare situation that there is not a puppy with a suitable temperament for you, we will be honest and will tell you just that. Your reservation can be transferred onto an alternative litter. We expect our clients to have a degree of flexibility with regard to physical attributes, particularly those which are purely cosmetic in nature, such as colour. If you are super-focused on physical attributes such as gender and/or colour – we are probably not the right breeders for you. Our focus is producing great puppies with great temperaments and matching them with great owners!
When will the puppies be ready to go to their new homes?
Our puppies are typically ready for their new homes when they are 8 – 9 weeks old, but this can vary a little. Once the puppies are born, we will advise of their collection date.
All Lomond Hills puppies are reared on Lomond Hills Kitchen Scottish Salmon puppy food.
Over the years we have tried just about every dog food available and we even trialled feeding a raw diet, also known as BARF – biologically appropriate raw food. Having never been totally satisfied with what our dogs and puppies were eating, we set out to find a solution. Today, that solution is our very own brand of food called Lomond Hills Kitchen. The ethos behind LH Kitchen is that it combines many benefits of the raw/BARF diet – feeding the way nature intended, with the convenience and health benefits of feeding a complete dry food. LH Kitchen has a very high meat content and the remainder of the food is made up of nutritious vegetables and supplements – not bulking agents and fillers that many commercially produced dog food products contain.
You can learn all about Lomond Hills Kitchen on our dedicated page on feeding your labradoodle.
Our puppies come with a full pedigree, a 2-year genetic health guarantee, care guidelines and a lifetime of support. They are also speyed/neutered, microchipped, fully wormed and have had their first vaccination.
Many reasons! Primarily because the Australian Labradoodle is still a developing breed and it needs protection. It is very important to us that entire puppies don’t get into the wrong hands as this could be detrimental to the future of the breed as a whole. Puppies also bounce back very quickly from the procedure (usually bouncing around again within 30 mins of coming round!) whereas mature dogs tend to be pretty miserable for about seven days when speyed/neutered. Speying and neutering also prevents unwanted litters, and the last thing we want is for any of our beloved Australian Labradoodles to end up in a shelter. If you are at all concerned about the speying/neutering, we would be pleased to discuss it with you.
Once you have done your research and decided that you want to add an Australian Labradoodle to your family you will need to complete an application. Please contact us for instructions to complete an application. If you are not ready to submit an application for a puppy just yet, you might like to attend one of our upcoming Introductory Sessions. Please contact us for details.
Yes – absolutely – provided you are going about it in the right way. Crates are a very useful training tool. Your puppy should sleep in his crate overnight and it can be used for short bursts throughout the day. You cannot leave your puppy in a crate while you go to work. If crate training is new to you, we will be happy to discuss it with you when you visit us.
We always recommend pet insurance. Regardless of how well health screened your puppies’ parents are, illness and accidents can and still do happen. We suggest you take out a ‘lifetime’ policy with a well-known provider such as PetPlan.
© Copyright of Lomond Hills Labradoodles
Lomond Hills Labradoodles is a trading name of LHL Limited, a company registered in Scotland. Licence No. FC26
© Copyright of Lomond Hills Labradoodles
Lomond Hills Labradoodles is a trading name of LHL Limited, a company registered in Scotland. Licence No. FC26
