Hi Jos, Veronique and team,

Firstly sorry for not doing this sooner. As I am at the asiel on Sundays I keep forgetting to actually do a proper mail update to you guys about how Kaiya is getting on.

The past seven months have gone so quickly and Kaiya has become the whole world. She is the most sweet, affectionate and sociable girl. We spend all day together and she likes to be part of everything that is going on, especially. We do big daily forest walks, training, play and lots of cuddles- she’s a cuddle monster. When I’m working, she naps with me and will generally gravitate around the house to where the activity is happening.
At the start, we had to work hard on her learning that relaxing or taking a nap is ok, but now she is totally laid back and even naps in the room with me when I’m writing music.
She’s already been on a few long car trips over to the UK, which she loves. In the UK she gets to run off-lead in the fields and spend a lot of time with my mum’s dachshunds. They play like crazy and then all the dogs crash out and cuddle up to each other.

Training has been a really fun journey so far. It took a lot of work to build her food motivation around training and we’ve had to be creative. Depending on her mood, sniffing and toys are often more important to her than treats, so that also works well on walks and she’s making lots of progress. She doesn’t really like to eat her meals out of a bowl so I do a lot of hand feeding, enrichment games, and training with her food. Funnily enough, if she’s with other dogs and they are happily accepting treats or eating out of their bowls, she will copy!
She’s responded very well to clicker training and is naturally amazing at following a hand target. I’ve never worked with a dog before that will look where you are pointing instead of look at your finger, so that shows how incredibly smart she is. She has learned many commands, but I noticed early on that she responded amazingly to hand gestures, so we now have a whole series of Kaiya sign-language, which she can follow without any verbal commands.

In our daily forest walks, Kaiya walks on a 10m long lead. She loves to sniff every trail she finds but has an excellent recall. Walking on a short lead is more of a work in progress. She likes to be in front of the group at all times (typical border collie) but the pulling is slowly improving with patience. She loves to do a little bit of “forest agility” on the route by putting her paws up on objects or jumping over or under fallen trees.

We’ve just started group obedience classes and had our first class yesterday. She was super excited but did really well and it’s going to be good to get her used to working and focusing when other dogs/people are around. Once we have made some progress, the plan is to try her out in an agility class to see if she likes it (I have a feeling she might!) but also maybe something with scent work.

She’s grown so much and is around 17.5kg now, with amazing fur and a big fluffy neck. But she definitely still has part-puppy brain and makes us laugh every day with her hilarious antics. Especially sneaking around trying to steal socks, flower pots, and toilet roll tubes. She has particularly expressive ears and I can always read her mood based on her chosen ear-style of the day!
And the cuddles. You won’t believe how much she loves to be cuddled. She will lay on her back in the evenings and poke me with her front paws until she gets pets and cuddles, and in the mornings, she can be quite lazy always trying to persuade me to give her a lie-in with cuddles! I recently had to have wisdom teeth surgery and my whole recovery time she was by my side with her head on my chest.

I cannot really express how fortunate we feel to have her in our life. Following my Grandfather and Mum, I am the third generation of rescue border-collie owners in my family and one of our family dogs when I was growing up was my “once-in-a-lifetime dog”: A rescued Border Collie X Spaniel called Coco. Coco and I shared a really special bond and she lived an awesome long life, passing away in my teens. Now, after seven months with Kaiya I’ve realised I am lucky enough to have a second “once-in-a-lifetime” dog.

I hope the rest of her littermates and her parents are doing well in their new homes. Maybe we should arrange a reunion for them sometime? A first birthday party for the pups? 😀

Some pics attached!

See you soon,

– Beth