A Portuguese Water Dog Puppy that is a Pet used to cost $1800. With the Obama’s dog Bo coming to the White House we have not seen any for sale at less than $2900. We expect that the price will go to $3500 and even $6000 . Breeders of this dog are most choosey of who they sell to. The breeding is a complicated science.

Show quality dogs should be $5000 to $14000.  If it is a “champion” the price should be over $25,000.

The maintenance of this breed is a significant cost. They need to be groomed as puppies every 4 weeks, and as adults every 7 weeks.  This costs $89 up per visit.

They require high protein food such as frozen raw meat patties. My dog isn’t trained with treats], in fact I have not met any PWD’s that are food crazy. But that just means you needsuperior food. I recently gave Goji a can of Evanger’s dog food. It is high quality, human grade meat, and it’s even Kosher? Yet Goji rejected it, I do not know what he was thinking. Yes he cares about dried Kangaroo meat. Now that’s expensive food, about $35/pound. He also likes dried bison.

A trip to PetSmart can easily cost $100. I listed a typical shopping trip for Portugese Water Dog in another post. They do not like regular tennis balls much, they like fancy assorted colored PetSmart tennis balls (recommended). They like high quality treats such as dried liver wrapped in bacon, “blue” biscuits, and anything liver. If you feed them too much protein they get Tiny wild|hyperactive], if tooTiny they get obviously too sleepy, 20% protein content is best.

Since this breed is designed to be a crew member on a fishing boat, he needs constant human companionship. As such, it isn’t good to leave him for more than 3 or 4 hours. And that doesn’t mean somebody can show up for ten minutes and leave, it means they must be around humans pretty much all the time. Also, they want to be around other dogs, and preferably other PWD’s. So what does this mean about cost? It means  play-dates with other Portugus Water Dogs, and lacking that constant trips to dog parks, walks, runs, outings, adventures, play, swimming, fetching, fighting, and mouthing. The cost part comes in Doggie Day Care. They play so hard at Day Care that the bonus is he is tired at night, and slower the next day. Figure $20 to $28/day.

Goji has been very healthy, but the vet maintenance should cost at least $300/year.

Here’s an update. We have recently learnged that a trained portuguese water dog, chocolate brown, sold for $7000. This was not a puppy but an adult male. 12-10-2009