About us
About Royal Silk Shih Tzus
I’m Marie Silva. Royal Silk is our family’s small kennel in Sedona, Arizona: a house, a family, and a handful of small Shih Tzus who live in it with us.
We are a family kennel, and our puppies are raised in our home. They are born on the sofa, grow up in a pen in the living room, and are part of everything that happens in the house. This page is about us, and about how the puppies grow up with us.
Marie, and the family
I’m Marie. I live in Sedona with my family and our Shih Tzus, and Royal Silk is what we call the small number of litters we raise each year. It is not a business with staff and a facility. It is our home, and the dogs are part of the household before they are anything else.
The Shih Tzu is the breed I fell for and the only one we keep. Small, funny, devoted, and happiest on a lap. Ours are at the little end of the breed, about 8lb grown, and their puppies finish the same. I am the one who answers the messages, takes the photographs and hands the puppies over, so whoever you deal with here is the person who was in with them this morning.
Where the puppies are born
On the sofa, usually, with one of us sitting up. The mothers are our own dogs and they whelp in the house, where they are comfortable and where we can see them. The photograph of a mother with her newborns against her, below, was taken exactly there.
For the first weeks the litter stays with its mother in a bed in the living room. After that the puppies move into a pen in the same room, where they eat, sleep and play with the family life of the house going on around them: the television, the door, the children, the vacuum cleaner. By the time a puppy leaves at eight weeks it has been picked up and put down more times than I could count, and it is used to a carrier and started on house training.
Where we are
Sedona, in northern Arizona, at about 4,300 feet among the red rocks. It is two hours north of Phoenix and a good deal cooler than the Valley, which suits a flat-faced breed, and the puppies are out in the garden whenever the day is right for it.
We run a closed kennel to protect our puppies while their immune systems are developing, so we do not have visitors at the house. Arizona families meet us at a public place we agree on, and for everyone else we arrange ground transport or a flight nanny to your door. How that works.
The dogs
Purebred Shih Tzu, and small. Our grown dogs weigh about 8lb, which is under the 9lb floor of the show standard, and that is the size their puppies finish. I did not set out to breed under the standard; the dogs I fell for were small, and I breed for a small, sound, ordinary Shih Tzu rather than for the very smallest one possible. Why our dogs are the size they are.
There are two litters here at the moment, 6 puppies, all gold and white or brown and white parti. The puppies we have now.
How a puppy comes home with you
Simply, and personally. You write to us, we talk about your home and which puppy would suit you, and when you are ready your puppy comes home: handed to you at a meetup in Arizona, brought to your door by ground transport, or flown to you with a nanny. There is no application and no deposit, and our puppies go home from eight weeks old. How buying one works, and the questions we get asked.
We would love to hear from you
About a puppy, or about the breed and whether it is right for your family.