About Hollow Oak Goldens

We're the family at the end of the gravel drive: Annie, Caleb and our three kids, on fourteen acres outside Franklin with a creek along the back fence and a white oak in the front pasture that lightning hollowed out long before we got here. The tree is still standing. It gave the place its name.

Our first Golden, Honey, came home in the spring of 2012 as a family dog and nothing more. She was the kind of dog who made strangers in the hardware store ask where she came from, and she is the reason we learned what a hip rating and an eye exam were in the first place. We whelped our first litter in the fall of 2014 with a mentor from our Golden club on speed dial, and we have kept it small ever since: two or three litters a year, every one of them born in the room off our kitchen.

Our dogs live in the house. They ride along to ball games, sleep on the kids' bedroom floors and spend most warm afternoons standing in the creek. We don't have a kennel building and we don't want one. When a litter is here the puppies hear the dishwasher, the vacuum, piano practice and three kids coming through the back door at 3:30, and that is the whole idea.

Every dog we breed has OFA hips and elbows, a heart clearance from a board-certified cardiologist, an eye exam within the last twelve months and a full DNA panel. Every result is posted on the OFA website under the dog's registered name, where you can look it up without taking our word for it. We follow the Golden Retriever Club of America's Code of Ethics, which means no dog here is bred before two years old and no clearance gets skipped because a dog seems fine.

About a third of our puppies go on to therapy and facility work: school reading programs, hospital visits, one courthouse dog in Middle Tennessee we are especially proud of. The rest are doing the most important job a Golden has, which is being somebody's dog.