46 Saber Tails Winter 2016

Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen Club of America

Meet Our Members

W

ith each quarterly edition of Saber Tails, we want to introduce members of our club.  We have prepared a set of ques-

tions for each person to answer to help members get to know other PBGV Lovers.  Our membership is comprised of 

such unique people from all over the world with a wide variety of experiences.  But we all have one thing in common - We 

LOVE Our PBGVs.  This month, meet

Laura Liscum & Jerry Faust

Tell us about yourself...

Laura Liscum and Jerry Faust live in Quincy, 

Massachusetts, just south of Boston. They are 

both retired after 30 years each on the physi-

ology faculty at Tufts University School of 

Medicine.  

How did you find out 

about PBGVs?

We decided to get a dog in 1999 and set about 

finding the right breed for us. Jerry grew up 

with hounds, but I had never had a dog. Be-

ing scientists, we did extensive research on 

various dog breeds. We read books, looked at 

websites, and took ‘dog breed selector’ quiz-

zes on the internet. The one breed that kept 

popping up on both of our quiz results was 

the PBGV. So we focused our research on this 

‘happy breed’. 

When did you get your 

first PBGV?

We saw our first actual PBGV at the Bay Col-

ony Cluster Dog Show in Boston, where we 

met Helen Ingher and hugged her Charlen 

Kennel hounds. Almost a year passed before 

we decided that the time was right. We con-

tacted several New England breeders and one 

who responded was Helen (who lived in NY 

at the time). She happened to have a litter of 

puppies, who had been born in early January. We went over – just to take a look. Well you can’t “just take a look” at PBGV 

puppies. One of male tricolor puppies trampled his female lemony litter mates, put his paws up on the X-pen, and locked 

eyes with Jerry. In a puppy-induced trance, Jerry said “we will take that one”. And so it was, a few weeks later, we drove back 

to the Ingher’s and brought home Charlen’s Thibodeaux, or Tibby.  Tibby grew up to be a dominant, outspoken dog who 

chewed everything and swallowed many inedible objects, leading to our close relationship with the veterinary emergency 

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