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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