My name is Kara VanDenBerg and I, along with my family, have been breeding Golden Retrievers since 1996. I grew up with dogs all of my life but my parents only wanted smaller dogs. At 18 I bought a house with the main purpose of finally being able to get my dream dog, a Golden Retriever. I was fortunate enough to buy my first show dog from Ellen Manke of Amberac Golden Retrievers. We love Goldens of all types and colors and have been blessed to have amazing Goldens from the US and overseas. Over the years our breeding program has evolved and we are now breeding mostly English style Goldens. We also have a few dogs that are old American lines that we brought back using frozen semen.
I have my degree in animal behaviorism so temperament is of paramount importance to me. Any dog that is food aggressive, overly shy, or any extreme from the breed standard will not make it in our breeding program. Our dogs are 
our pets first and foremost and we consider them family. We have five daughters and the dogs live in our home with us, our kids and our cats. When you get a puppy from us you can be assured that it is very well socialized with kids, cats, and dogs. One of our cats actually sleeps in the whelping box with the puppies so they grow up thinking of cats as friends and siblings.
My very first pet Golden came from (now considered old American) and English lines. He lived to be 16 years old. Meanwhile my show lines were not seeing that kind of longevity. With incidences of cancer increasing and longevity not being where I wanted to see it I started looking closer at import pedigrees. (I’m not implying you can’t get longevity here) As both an adult whose dogs are like children and a mother of human children that are attached to their dogs the thought of having a dog 
drop dead at 6 from hemangiosarcoma or one of the other big cancer killers is terrifying to me. The facts are you love your dog no matter if it sees 6 years or 16 years and I for one want the most I can get out of my dogs. (Don’t we all) There is absolutely no such thing as a perfect dog or a flawless pedigree but we’ve spent countless hours studying pedigrees to do our due diligence on finding the healthiest lines we can. We are even fortunate enough to have half siblings to my original dog that lived to be 16 in our breeding program thanks to the amazing Marcia Schlehr who allowed us to use her Bandit.
After temperament and health/longevity we try to make them beautiful. We like to show our dogs. However, we realize that most puppies are going to pet homes and while everyone wants a pretty dog we realize it’s not everyone’s goal to compete in conformation. Conformation and balance is still of the utmost importance for your dogs function, health and purpose therefore, our dogs come from some of the top show lines worldwide.
Because temperament is one of our key priorities many of our dogs go on to be service dogs or therapy dogs. Bernie and Ben for example are both service dogs. We have several of our dogs that are therapy dogs. Many of our puppies go on to be either service or therapy dogs. We do keep some dogs and train them for this purpose. Others we offer as puppies specifically chosen with this temperament in mind. Of course not all puppies in every litter are meant for this work so we always have beloved pets who have amazing temperaments.
When our dogs aren’t in our house they get to be out on our beautiful property. 
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