Take Two, They're Small!

I'm the non-dog person, remember? The one who was persuaded by a TV program on Animal Planet to get a dog, after not having had one for more than 35 years -- after never having had one of my own, that wasn't "the family dog." The one who wandered into a beginning agility class with Miko the WonderDog just to see what it was like and did her best to resist the appeal and the challenge and is still doing her best to keep from getting caught up in the competition end of it all because BT,DT with the horses, and didn't much like the person I was back then.

So yeah, that person. So what happens? We go for a drive on Labor Day weekend (hey, why not?!), with the vague notion of looking at a miniature poodle at a shelter in Santa Rosa. Really, it was just a destination. We wanted to get out of the house for the day. We took Miko; maybe we'd drop in on friends in Guerneville, let him swim in the river. Or maybe we'd go to the beach.

The poodle was a cute little dog, but some other people were there first, and besides he didn't like cats. Oh well. But while Elsa was looking at some other small dogs, one of the shelter workers found out that I did agility with Miko. Weren't Border Collies supposed to be good agility dogs? Yes indeed, said I. "You got a BeeCee?" They did, or anyway a BC/Australian Shepherd mix. Cat friendly, people super-friendly; he and Miko played happily together in the field behind the shelter. And so, although I'd said I didn't want a border collie (too OCD for me! the best thing about Miko is that he isn't a BC!), I went home that day with one in the back of the car.

He was pretty skinny because he'd been in the hospital with kennel cough (and later turned out to be giardia positive -- yikes!), and had really, really bad hair. I expect his coat had been badly matted and maybe full of burrs, so someone took the kitchen shears to him. In the pictures on this page, he's gained nearly 4 lbs (bringing him up to just a little over 40), and while his coat isn't exactly great, it's much better than it was. I'm hoping that in the spring when he sheds out, his summer coat will look shiny and nice.

All we were told about Miko's life before we got him was that he'd been picked up as a stray. He was housebroken and pretty well socialized, so he'd been some(careless)body's dog at some point in his young life. We don't know much about Moxie's past, either, except that it must have been sad. How he came to be in the shelter was like this: One night in July '06, a car was observed driving slowly down a road. It stopped. A door opened. A dog came flying out head over heels, over a fence into a back yard. The door closed, the car sped away. There were witnesses, but no one got the license number. As it happened, the owner of the backyard sometimes fostered dogs for the shelter. She kept her sudden visitor for 2 weeks, during which she learned that he was sweet tempered, affectionate, housebroken, crate-trained, and would sit and lie down on command. Who on earth would literally throw away such a great little dog?

I imagine it was a case of someone being beguiled by a cute little black puppy, and having no idea what an adolescent border collie would be like in an apartment, or house with small yard -- not enough exercise, not enough mental challenge ... Moxie is a handful even now.

He is not the small couch-potato 2nd dog we probably should have gotten. But Miko would probably have made that dog's life miserable. He and Moxie are well matched, size and energy-wise. Try as they might, they can't quite tire each other out, but they do take the edge off till it's time for a training session or a trip to the park.


Come on and throw the freakin ball, wouldja??!!

Moxie hasn't started formal agility training yet, but I take him to the practice field with Miko most weekends and he's gonna be a pistol. He's fast, of course, and focused, and fearless. Best of all, he loves the whole process. His favorite things are the contact obstacles, especially the dogwalk; he'll self-reward by running back and forth over that 6 or 8 times if I let him (not that I always have much choice!) He likes the tunnels too, and even the teeter, which a lot of dogs hate. I think he'll be a good jumper too, though right now he tends to run so fast that he flattens out. We're working on it.

How this all came to be...

Everyone who knows anything about me at all, knows that I'm a Cat Person who used to be a Horse (and Cat) person, who has no use whatever for dogs. None. So how on earth did I end up with not one but two high-energy canines of the train me and give me jobs to do or I'll destroy your house variety? I swear it's from watching Animal Planet! There was a program, kind of a mini-series, on late at night a few years ago, called "Cell Dogs." Maybe you saw it. The show highlighted inmates in various prisons who were in a program in which they learned to train dogs rescued from animal shelters to be service dogs for the disabled, or in some cases just good companion animals. In the first show I watched, 6 or 8 guys with little or no experience in dog training were paired with dogs straight from the pound, with the goal of turning those dogs into helpers for disabled people. The dogs learned to open and close doors, turn lights off and on, pick up dropped objects, take laundry out of the dryer and all manner of other useful activities. I thought it was about the coolest thing I'd seen in a long time, and I knew there was no way I was going to get Scrabble, my cat, to lift a paw to help me. Maybe I should get a ... dog?

But where? How big and what kind? Male or female? My cats have pretty much all simply found their way into my life, kittens dumped on my doorstep. They appeared. I fed them. They stayed. About dogs, though, all I knew was to avoid the puppy mills. There are a number of excellent rescue organizations around here, so we went to a mobile adoption one Saturday in September of 2004. We were charmed by a comical-looking corgi-german shepherd (?) mix, but he had some health issues and by the next morning when we had decided we wanted to take him anyway, someone else had given him a home. I was surprised at how disappointed I felt.

Long story short, we ended up that afternoon at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society,where Miko was waiting. He was about 9 months old, a maybe shepherd mix, maybe dobie mix, the shelter people said. Later we learned he's an Australian Kelpie mix. (I'd never heard of kelpies -- they herd cattle and sheep in the outback. We don't know what the not-kelpie part is; some kind of hunting dog -- pointer or hound, perhaps, because of his talented sniffer and high prey drive.) About 45 lbs, a bit bigger than we'd planned, playful and energetic but sweet tempered. We jumped through all the necessary hoops (BEBHS is really careful about where they place their animals), and the following Tuesday our new dog came home with us.

Getting him and Scrabble to co-exist took some time, and is worth an entry of its own.

Miko started basic obedience classes immediately after we got him, and he's been in school one way or another pretty steadily ever since. He's an exceptionally smart and very willing dog. But while he as learned a few utility skills -- he'll pick up things I drop, he'll bring me my shoes, turn on a pressure-sensitive light with his paw etc -- and some cute tricks, for the past year or a little more we've been concentrating on the sport of agility. This seems like a natural progression to me, since when I had horses, they were jumpers. Makes sense to train my dog to jump too! And run through tunnels and climb A-frames and do all that other fun stuff.

And here we are.