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.