Operation Fritz has been completed as of 03/28/2023!

Thank you to all of our owners who have taken on one of our off-grid puppies! We will no longer be placing pups from off-grid litters and instead be focusing on our first generation of project pups.

*If you have a relative of Fritz and wish to contribute data to the project, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Who is Fritz?

Weaver’s Fritz is a special dog who represents the family on which this project is building it’s foundation.

Emily, the founder and driving force behind this project, has owned a relative of Fritz for nearly her entire life. The most special dog in her life, a black and tan girl named Tess, was a daughter of Fritz. Today, Emily owns Ridley (Princess Ridley), a female who is carefully linebred on Fritz. Others in the English Shepherd community have had dogs from this family and all speak highly of their exceptionally stable, good natured temperaments and uncanny intuition.

Fritz was owned by a Mennonite family on a dairy farm in Ohio. His pedigree goes back several times to Oney dogs, notably Oney’s Butch and Oney’s Amy. Mitchell Oney owned and bred black and tan dogs for years in Ohio, known for being larger, gentler dogs well suited to work with dairy cows. Fritz embodied these traits himself and threw them reliably to his offspring. Most of Fritz’s offspring have ended up ‘off grid’, having been bought and used as working dogs within the Mennonite community for generations. 

The Plan

Bring some of these dogs back ‘on grid’,
weave their solid temperaments into other families,
and preserve their intuitive abilities
is the goal behind Operation Fritz.

We’d like to share and track this family by placing the few known puppies who are direct descendants of Fritz into homes where they can be kept intact and evaluated.

We would like data on all of the dogs, and those who end up with good health and superb minds will ideally be bred. Specifically, we would like to see breeding candidates outcrossed to other ES who will compliment the traits we hold dear. Then collect data on that entire next generation, and so on. 

In essence, we are hoping to build a comprehensive family profile going forward, to be used as a resource for anyone interested. This is the kind of resource we and many others wish they had when making breeding, puppy buying, historical research and health related decisions.. So we want to provide that and set an example we hope might be followed by the rest of the breed.

Follow The Family

Check out the Fritz Family Updates to see the dogs of the Shadow Shepherd Project!