About Us
(The Short Formal Version)
We’re Eric and Courtney Leffler, the husband-and-wife team behind Draggin Dobermans & Great Danes, an AKC Breeder of Merit in Houston, Texas.
Our program builds on a lifetime of involvement in purebred dogs. Eric grew up in a family that bred and showed Scottish Terriers, later learning from established Doberman breeders whose mentorship helped shape our foundation. We welcomed our first Doberman in 2006 and added Great Danes in 2012.
Since then, we have produced multiple champions and proudly share breeder credit for Sully—GCHP Mariah’s Absence of Malice Mi Casa, the 2021 DPCA National Specialty winner, that year’s number-one Doberman by breed points, and a Westminster Best of Opposite Sex winner.
Our breeding decisions combine health testing, extensive pedigree research, family longevity, temperament, and conformation. Courtney leads much of that research, drawing on generations of knowledge and longstanding relationships within the breeds.
Our puppies are raised in our home, and our commitment continues throughout their lives. Whether a dog becomes a show competitor or a beloved family companion, our goal remains the same: to produce dogs that represent their breeds well and build lasting relationships with the families who love them.
Our Story
(By Eric Leffler)
A childhood surrounded by dogs. A lifetime built around them.
We’re Eric and Courtney Leffler, the people behind Draggin Dobermans & Great Danes in Houston, Texas.
Our story starts long before our first litter, before we had a kennel name, and before I ever owned a Doberman.
I was pretty much born into dog breeding.
My mom had been raising Scottish Terriers since the 1960s. By the time I came along, having as many as ten or twelve Scotties around was just normal life. Her grooming room was—and still is—lined with AKC Championship certificates. Heck, I remember helping her make room for more of them.
As a kid, I didn’t understand what made one dog a champion and another a pet. They were my friends. I was an only child, and I spent a lot of time with them.
I remember Hunky, my dad’s favorite, and how devastated Dad was when he passed. Those relationships were part of my childhood, too. I learned early how much a dog could mean to someone.
When I was about nine, I somehow convinced my parents we needed a Golden Retriever named Trixie. Although, looking back, I think Dad wanted a Golden himself. I may have just been his way of getting one past Mom.
Trixie was a sweet girl, but a bit of a spook. She was the only dog we had who was terrified of thunder and fireworks. She would clear the books out from underneath my dad’s side table so she could squeeze herself into her hiding place.
Those are the things you remember. The personalities. The little habits. Where they belonged in the family.
Growing Up at Dog Shows
Mom took me to dog shows all the time, and every trip felt like an adventure.
I remember getting an ICEE from the corner store, climbing into our dark red 1990 Oldsmobile Silhouette—the bullet-nose minivan—and heading to Dallas or San Antonio. Sometimes we’d meet friends and work in a trip to Six Flags Fiesta Texas or SeaWorld.
The San Antonio show was at the convention center by the River Walk. We would stay at the Marriott across the street, where the dog show crowd was allowed to bring their dogs. We could walk them along the river, and restaurants welcomed us onto their outdoor patios.
Imagine visiting the River Walk and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by show dogs. Now imagine being the little kid who got to bring them.
It was a pretty great way to grow up.
Eventually, Mom put me to work.
At one Houston show, which I think was at Farm and Ranch, she needed someone to take one of her Scotties back into the breed ring. I had shown her dogs a few times, and apparently I was the available help, so she handed me a leash.
I went in with her class dog and won Best of Breed.
I can tell you she hadn’t anticipated me beating her.
I hadn’t anticipated it either. When the judge pointed at me, I thought I was getting thrown out. They actually had to stop me and pull me aside to give me the ribbon. Everyone started congratulating me, and it took a little while to understand what had happened.
After that, I found myself helping Mom show a little more often.
One Big, Sloppy Kiss
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I was walking through the dog show at Houston’s old Astrohall when this big, intimidating Doberman suddenly lunged toward me.
Before I could really react, he planted a big ole stupid boy kiss all the way from my chin to my temple.
That was my introduction to Dobermans.
It was also the beginning of my relationship with Tina Marshall of Mariah Dobermans, and eventually Mike Penny of Paradigm Dobermans and Luci Stubbs of von Koepsel.
At the time, I was just a kid who wanted to spend more time around their dogs. I didn’t understand how much those relationships would shape my life.
Mom wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about bringing a Doberman home, so for years I got my fix at dog shows. Tina would let me hold dogs and help out, and I took whatever opportunity I could get to be around them.
Tina, Mike, and Luci bred and showed dogs together. Being around them gave me the chance to watch people who knew the breed deeply, even before I understood enough to appreciate everything I was seeing.
Through them, I also met Terri Galle, who let me hold my very first Great Dane. At the time, I was just excited to have another dog’s leash in my hand. I had no idea she would eventually become our primary professional handler, putting the majority of the points on our dogs.
One thing that stayed with me was the way Mike connected with dogs. He earned their trust, and Terri had that same ability. Watching them taught me that showing a dog involved a whole lot more than getting it to stand still and trot around a ring. There was a relationship behind it.
And then there was Hero.
Hero was one of their most successful dogs. He won Best of Breed from the puppy classes and went on to become a Top 20 Doberman. I was there for his puppy win. Tina still remembers the day vividly.
What I remember most clearly is playing with him ringside, with everyone around him stressed and unbelievably happy all at once.
Just like Mom’s Scotties, I knew the dog before I understood the significance of his accomplishments. Years later, Hero would become part of our own breeding program, and those childhood memories would take on a whole new meaning.
First Came Courtney
Courtney and I met in February 2003, during our first year of college. It was cars that brought us together.
I was drag racing, and my friend Travis was at my house working on my 1972 Camaro Super Street car when his cell phone rang. He went outside to take the call, but every thirty seconds or so, he would stick his head back in with another question.
“Hey Eric, how big is that engine?”
“468.”
A little while later: “That’s a 454 bored .060 over, right?”
“Yeah.”
When he finally came back inside, I asked who he had been talking to. He told me it was this chick named Courtney, a friend of a girl he’d been talking to.
Apparently, she knew enough about engines to keep him coming back for answers.
A few weeks later, we were loading my race car onto the trailer when a miscommunication ended with Travis driving it on and scratching my brand-new Maaco $500-special paint job.
I didn’t care much, but he felt terrible. He kept asking how he could make it up to me.
Finally, I told him, “Get me that chick’s number you were talking to.”
The next day, he called and practically blurted out her number before anything else. She had called him that morning, and he’d told her about me.
I called her that afternoon.
By November, we were engaged.
Diamond Chose Us
In 2006, Courtney and I were planning to move into an apartment together. The time had finally come to get my own Doberman, so I called Tina.
She had two litters available and offered me a deal: a pick puppy for $500 and a puppy back from a future litter.
After all those years of letting me hang around her dogs, Tina was giving me the opportunity to start with a puppy she believed in.
Courtney, Mom, and I went to her house to meet them. From the second we walked in, there was this little black girl in an orange collar who absolutely adored me.
We practically spent the entire day evaluating puppies, and she was the one we kept coming back to. When we still couldn’t quite make up our minds, we loaded them up and drove over to Mike Penny’s house so he could evaluate them, too.
He came to the same conclusion.
There were two really nice females, but the little girl who had already picked me kept coming out on top.
My one hesitation was her size. She was the smallest puppy in the litter, and in my mind, Dobermans had always been big. That image had been set when I was a little kid standing next to them at dog shows.
But she kept winning the evaluations, and she certainly wasn’t having any second thoughts about me.
By the end of the day, there really wasn’t much of a decision left to make.
We came home with Mariah’s Diamond Paradigm, or Diamond.
Diamond became our foundation girl. Before any of that, though, she was our dog—the one who finally brought the breed I had loved from the sidelines into our everyday life.
The Dog Behind the Name
A few months later, we went to San Antonio to get help posting Diamond’s ears because we were having trouble getting them to stand. Tina had brought a few puppies, and while we were getting them out and working with them, Courtney met a red male.
Courtney has always had a soft spot for red Dobermans, and this boy apparently knew exactly how to use that to his advantage.
After figuring out whether our apartment could accommodate two Dobermans, we brought him home.
We named him Mariah’s Red Draggin v Koepsel.
The name started with the movie Monster-in-Law and my wanting to call my first male Doberman Dragon. Tina suggested working my drag racing background into the spelling, and “Draggin” stuck.
Mom wasn’t particularly impressed with his appearance during that awkward four-month-old stage.
If you’ve raised a Doberman puppy, you probably know the look. Their proportions are all out of whack. They seem to grow an extra inch overnight, their legs look too long, and their rear end may suddenly be higher than their front.
Mike had already taught me to evaluate them at eight weeks, then try to ignore the awkward stages until they were about six months old.
Draggin might have been a little ugly that day, but his personality won Mom over anyway.
To this day, he is probably still the best-tempered male we’ve ever had, with a fantastic balance of protective and sweet.
He turned out to be quite the ugly duckling story, becoming CH Mariah’s Red Draggin v Koepsel, our first champion and the dog whose name became our kennel name.
Terri finished his championship. The person who had let me hold my first Great Dane was now the person we trusted to guide our own dogs through their show careers.
When we brought Diamond and Draggin home, I couldn’t have understood how much of our lives would grow from those two dogs.
When the Generations Come Together
Our apartment eventually changed its breed rules, and we moved. As it turned out, Hero lived just a few miles down the street from our new home.
Our first litter came from breeding Diamond to Hero.
The kid who had grown up playing with dogs at the shows was now raising puppies from one of those same dogs.
That litter produced Picasso, Ruffy, and Macey. Macey went on to become our first homebred champion.
Later, Picasso’s grandson, Boss, was bred to Mara, a girl we had produced from Draggin and Torq who became part of Tina’s program.
That breeding produced Sully.
Many people know him as MBIS MBISS GCHP Mariah’s Absence of Malice Mi Casa. In 2021, Sully won the DPCA National Specialty and finished the year as the number-one Doberman by breed points. He also earned Best of Opposite Sex at Westminster.
We share his breeder credit with Mariah Dobermans. His primary owner, Mark Bigham, and the people behind his campaign deserve recognition for everything they put into those accomplishments.
For us, seeing Sully succeed carried something personal beyond the wins.
His pedigree brought together our first dogs, our first litter, the people who had taught us, and dogs I had known since childhood.
I wish I could explain that to the little kid holding a leash outside Tina’s ring.
He would probably just ask if he could play with the dog.
Wynn and Our Introduction to Great Danes
We added Great Danes to our family in 2012, years after Terri first handed me a Dane’s leash.
Terri put in a good word for us with Lorraine Rainwater of VZ Top, who agreed to sell us her pick female from her current litter. We drove to Alabama to meet Lorraine and bring our girl home.
We named her Wynn, after the Wynn Las Vegas. I’ve always loved the bright lights and sounds of Vegas, and the name fit.
Wynn also brought us our first experience with the kind of veterinary decision that can turn your finances—and your life—upside down.
One day, we were moving dogs through the house when her feet started slipping on the vinyl hallway floor. I noticed one of her rear legs slide underneath our Husky toolbox, but in the commotion, I didn’t think much of it.
Then we turned on the living room lights.
There was blood everywhere.
A piece of sheet metal was sticking straight down from underneath the toolbox. When her leg slid beneath it, the metal severed the tendon at the back of her leg.
Our vet sent us to Gulf Coast because repairing it would require a specialist.
Dr. Caleb Hudson explained our options. One was to fuse the joint, leaving her with permanent limitations in that rear leg. The other was to reattach the tendon and install an external fixator to protect the repair while it healed. That option would require a tremendous amount of care and caution, especially around the other dogs.
At the time, Wynn had eleven championship points, including both of her majors. She needed just four more points to finish.
We chose the tendon repair and fixator.
For eight weeks, we cleaned and cared for her wounds every night. Then we took her back to Gulf Coast to have the fixator removed.
The recovery still had a long way to go. She couldn’t bear weight on that leg for more than a month, and there was a huge knot where the tendon had been repaired.
We wondered whether she would ever walk normally again.
Almost a year later, we took her back to Terri.
Wynn was a little unsure on her first day back, but over two weekends, she earned all four of her remaining points and finished her championship.
After everything that had happened, watching her finish meant a whole lot more than we could have imagined when we first started showing her.
Keeping Our Word
After everything Wynn had been through, watching her finish meant a whole lot more than we could have imagined when we first started showing her.
It also meant we had fulfilled a commitment.
When breeders like Tina and Lorraine entrusted us with their puppies, they were sharing generations of their own work. They gave us opportunities to start with dogs they believed in, with the understanding that we would do our part to prove them and carry those lines forward.
We took that seriously.
Life doesn’t always cooperate with the plans you make for a puppy. There are injuries, financial setbacks, and plenty of things you never see coming. Wynn certainly taught us that. But the commitment still mattered when fulfilling it became difficult.
That experience also shapes what we ask of people entering a breeding or show agreement with us. Those arrangements depend on both sides following through. Behind the puppy in front of you are people who spent years building something and trusted someone else to help continue it.
Over the years, we have produced champions and continued the bloodlines that were entrusted to us. In 2025, frozen semen allowed us to welcome another litter of Hero puppies into our lives.
Thirty years after playing with him ringside, I was getting to know a new generation of his puppies in our own home.
That is a pretty incredible thing to experience.
When Life Changes in Minutes
In December 2025, we had a house fire.
We fought it and managed to extinguish it about six minutes before the fire department arrived. In a matter of minutes, the home we shared with our dogs became the scene of an emergency, followed by months of disruption and rebuilding.
There are parts of living with and raising dogs that never make it into a litter announcement or a championship photo. The emergencies. The sleepless nights. The decisions that change your finances and rearrange your life.
We’ve lived those parts, too.
Our dogs depend on us through all of it, and we go to extraordinary lengths to keep that commitment.
The Work Behind Our Pedigrees
Today, both breeds are woven into our lives, and Courtney has become the backbone of our breeding decisions.
She spends countless hours studying pedigrees, finding out what happened to dogs, tracking ages and causes of death, and applying for longevity certificates. Sometimes she knows more about a dog’s family than the person who owns it.
I get to watch her pull generations together from memory—who produced whom, which dogs lived well into their teens, where health concerns appeared, and what we still need to find out.
A recent disagreement over a breeding reminded me just how valuable that work is. A few genetic results in an image had become the basis for judging an entire pedigree. Courtney went back through the actual dogs behind it, pointing out the ones she knew, how long they had lived, and where documented heart disease appeared.
She then applied that same scrutiny to the pedigree being offered as an alternative.
It reinforced something we’ve learned over the years: you have to be willing to look closely at your own dogs and your own decisions. That takes research, honest conversations, and relationships with people who know the history.
Health testing contributes valuable information. So does knowing the dogs behind the results. We want as much of that information as we can get, including the parts that are uncomfortable or incomplete.
The relationships that began when I was a little boy have given us access to generations of knowledge. Courtney’s work helps us put that knowledge to use.
We’re proud of the lines we have been able to build from that foundation. Our goal is to keep balancing health, longevity, temperament, and the qualities that make these dogs outstanding representatives of their breeds.
There is always more to learn, and we intend to keep doing the work.
A World Worth Bringing People Into
When I was a kid, I remember Doberman entries topping a hundred at the big Texas circuit shows. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi were part of the dog show world I grew up in.
Those trips meant packed rings, familiar faces, serious competition, and a whole lot of dogs.
The Corpus show is much smaller now and is no longer part of that circuit. Looking at how things have changed, I worry about how much of that world another generation will get to experience.
We have been fortunate to see some of the highest levels of winning. We know how exciting it can be to watch a dog you believe in succeed, and we want other people to experience that feeling.
We also understand why many never get started—or decide they can’t keep going. The cost of showing has become a substantial obstacle. Entry fees, travel, hotels, time away from work, and professional handling can put a competitive campaign beyond what many families can justify.
I worry that if we don’t bring new people in, the dog show world I grew up loving could become a relic of history.
We want to help bring people back into the fold.
We want people to enjoy the competition, learn how to evaluate their dogs, build friendships, and feel that they belong there. We want newcomers to have someone they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed about what they don’t know.
Somebody handed me a leash. Somebody let me help. Somebody took the time to explain what I was looking at.
Those small invitations shaped the next thirty years of my life.
We would love to give someone else that beginning.
The Life We’ve Built
Courtney and I have built this program together, through the excitement of new litters, the work of raising puppies, the pride of watching dogs succeed, and the heartbreak that comes with loving them.
Our puppies grow up in our home, with everyday household life happening around them. We get to know their personalities as they develop, and we use those observations to help match them with their families.
We care about beautiful dogs that represent their breeds well. We also care deeply about the dog someone lives with after the pictures are taken and the ribbons are put away.
Temperament matters. Health matters. Longevity matters.
We use health testing, pedigree knowledge, and what we learn about our dogs and their relatives to guide our decisions. We’re honest about the challenges these breeds face, and we keep learning because there is always more to understand.
Our commitment also stays with the dogs who helped build our program. We do not routinely place our breeding dogs when their breeding careers are over. We feel a loyalty to them, and placing one is something we consider only in special circumstances.
They have shared their lives with us. That relationship matters.
Becoming Part of Our Story
When you bring home a Draggin puppy, we want you to feel comfortable calling us.
Send the pictures. Ask the questions. Tell us about the accomplishments, the funny habits, and the things you’re struggling with. Our commitment to a puppy continues long after the day that puppy leaves our home.
And if you’re curious about showing, tell us. You don’t need to arrive knowing everything. None of us did.
We hope the dogs we raise become part of your family’s stories.
The dog your children grow up beside. The one who has a favorite spot next to your chair. The one whose ridiculous habits you’ll still be talking about twenty years later.
Because when I think back over a lifetime with dogs, that’s what stays with me.
Hunky and my dad. Trixie underneath the side table. Road trips with Mom. Hero wanting to play.
And one big Doberman kiss that helped start it all.
Contact Information:
- Email: info@draggin.net
- Phone: 832-477-0033
- Location: Houston, TX
Currently accepting applications for our waitlist.