SPLISH SPLASH

Just a short post and a video at the end of it. Terra is almost four months now, weighs 24 pounds and is slowly taking over the entire universe .. if she learns how to purchase kibble on her own, we may be in trouble. I don't want to be superfluous to this dog.

As we go on and she is getting older, Terra is discovering more and more and having more new experiences. As we are getting into the warm weather, it became time for us to open our doggie pool .. well, not exclusively a doogie pool, on occasion it has been used my many semi intoxicated drunk people to cool their feet in, at my birthday party. Miss Hayley was not impressed. Of course, now she has to share her pool with the puppy ...

Terra took to the pool like .. well, like a border collie to water.




Now, Miss Hayley loves her pool and of course she loves the Beaches and of course she loves the beach at Springhaven Lodge .. but all that water is good for playing in, not swimming. Will Terra like to swim? We'll have to wait and see.

But she sure liked the pool. As she walked around it, she created ripples and of course she had to try herding the ripples ...





and when she discovered that the water was coming out of the hose, she tried to take that right out of the pool ..




I am border collie, I shall control you ..

At one point Collette took the hose out of the water and was spraying it and Terra decided it was great fun to catch the water, even leaping in the air to do so. So yes, the pool is a big hit.





Here's the video, Terra at the beach and with her trusty lifeguard, Miss Hayley.

Pool Girl from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

THE UPS AND DOWNS

Having a puppy is definitely a case of up and downs, successes and failures, steps forwards and steps backwards

Terra's housebreaking progress is a day to day thing. She is big enough now to master the back steps so she can go out into the yard, which she absolutely loves. One day she will be almost perfect, alerting at the back door so we can let her out, the next day she will have five accidental piddles in the house, the next day only one or two. The alerts are not yet steady; sometimes she seems to forget and just goes, other times she will whine at the door .. but you need be speedy, she waits until she is near bursting and there is no dallying in letting her out.

Leash training is coming along. Collette walks her to and from the park everyday and although not perfect of course, Terra is doing very well all things considered.

There is also a lot of progress being made in terms of the relationships between my two border collies. Outside, as you will see in the included video, Miss Hayley is much more accepting of the puppy and she is just beginning to actively engage her in play. It has been a few years since Hayley has wanted to wrestle with another dog, she is more the "let me herd them" kind of gal. But I can see that this will soon happen with Terra.

Another postitive sign is illustrated by the photo below. While Hayley is more adamant about keeping Terra "in her place" in the house, when they can lay quietly together, I take that as real progress.

The video shows Terra playing in her park and the two girls playing here in the yard, but it shows a couple of Terra adventures as well: The first is a brief sortie into the bathtub. When Miss Hayley was a pup, she would jump into the tub and stretch out inside it, but this was in the middle of summer, before central air. Terra is just being Terra, exploring her world

Then we have a puppy classic, an event we have seen with every dog we've owned: The old puppy in the mirror. Terra discovered this elusive, bratty puppy (Hey! She's copying me!) last night, in the mirror in our guest room. Very typical behaviour, curiosity, vocalising, and wandering into the other room to find out just where that puppy is ...

OK, so it's not original, but I dare you not to find it cute ...

Who's The Puppy In The Mirror? from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

INTRODUCING .... TERRA

Yes, here she is, the latest member of our family, Terra, as of this posting an eight week female border collie. Picked up this morning from a lovely family in Chatham, Ontario, which is about a three hour drive from here. There is a little video at the bottom of this post that chronicles the journey.

Collette and I have been talking about getting another border for years, but the timing never seemed right. When Gypsy passed it opened the door a bit, in his last couple of years it didn't seem fair to bring a rambunctious border collie puppy into the house. Then we took Hayley to her new vet, Dr Mike, and he gave her a totally clean bill of heath, nothing that surprised us, but it was good to have confirmation.

Now, we know that it may take a while for these two to get along but Hayley, as a rule, likes other dogs and as long as we help her maintain her status, we think they should do fine. I have heard many stories of older dogs matched with puppies and thriving with the new arrival. If Terra shows any tendency at all to chase a ball, and doesn't mind being herded, then Hayley will be ecstatic. Of course, Terra is a herding dog as well, so we'll have to see how that goes.

When I picked Terra up, there were two females left, almost identical in markings (again, reference the video) but it was her personality that stood out; when she was being ignored, she made her presence known with a series of persistent yips and knew that this was our dog.

She has already had many adventures; a three hour car ride back to Toronto, a whirlwind visit to Collette's school to meet her new mom, a brief visit to our local dog park, and trying to entice the older border collie to play with her.

I'm going to keep this post short, ending it with the video but obviously, there will be many posts to come ... and don't really ask me why she's called Terra or why we decided on this particular spelling, but Collette thought that it may have something to do with holy terra ....

Introducing Terra from Victor Kellar on Vimeo

THE LIFE OF A GYPSY

Any regular readers of this blog will know all about our beloved border collie Hayley. Well, Miss Hayley was not our own four legged companion, she had a quieter, yet equally significant companion, our cat Gypsy.




It is unfortunate that I have been remiss in giving Gypsy his due on this forum; last night, at age 22 (or so) Gypsy passed away. It was not a shock, he has been ill for a week or so and we knew his string was running out. I think it was a good passing, he was laying on his heating pad, made a little chirping kind of sound and just went.

It is always sad, when you lose a pet. Collette and I lost our first dog, Gigs, over a decade ago, Gypsy was still a young cat then. Both deaths were hard but Gigs was over 13, Gypsy was 22, and that is just the natural order of things.

Gypsy came to us in his own, unusual way. It was at the first house Collette and I lived in here, on our own, and it was late in the fall, towards the end of October. Leaves were down and it was getting cool. Collette was out in the yard, just finishing up some garden/yard work when she heard this small, plaintive sound; she looked in her herb garden and there it was, this tiny, minuscule black kitten. Baby, I mean, just hatched. His eyes had probably just opened and were this dark cobalt blue. There were a lot of feral cats in that area and this was clearly one. Collette saw no sign of other kittens or of mama. Her instinct was to wait to see if mama would come back but it was getting dark and it was getting cold so, being Collette, she brought the kitten into the house ...

We had a dog at that time, our first dog, Gigs. He was a few years old at the time and we were totally dedicated to him and had no intention of getting a cat. I don't describe myself as cat person but I've had a few over the years. Collette grew up with a cat, it was still alive when we first met but we were, and are, dog people.

Still, here was Collette with this tiny, newly born, venerable kitten. She didn't want to leave the cat out in the cold, so her first thought was to bring the cat inside ... Now, let's stop our program here to learn something about our beloved Collette; if she brings a stray into the house, it's going to stay in the house. Forever. That's how we got Gigs, our friend Karen dropped him into our bed one morning and we had him for about 13 years. Hell, that's how Collette got me, she took me home one night and 25 years later, I still haven't left ...

So, in other words, Collette decided to keep the cat. But she just had to convince me to go along with it. She knew she had two points in her favour. One, was the fact that Gypsy was entirely black. I've only owned black cats. The second point was my essential frugalness; Collette and our friend Michele went out right away and loaded up on kitty supplies; food, litter, litter box, collar, etc. Her rationale was that if she had already invested in the cat, I would accept him. As usual, she was right.



He was such a young kitten, so recently abandoned, Collette had to feed him formula from a doll's bottle and she had to teach him how to defecate, by ..er .. stimulating him. He was so small that when we took to our vet to have him checked him over, Dr Bell only charged us half the normal visit rate as he was "only half a cat"

Gypsy was a feral cat and for the first several years of his life, he was an outdoor cat. And a murderer. One morning I was in the bathroom, you know, solving that pesky cold fusion problem, when in walks Gypsy, a freshly slain bird in his jaws. "Here you go boss, you pluck him, I'll fire up the BBQ" He was an awesome mouser. But one thing you need to know about domestic cats who get their dinner out of a can: They don't kill for food. The kill for fun. Gypsy liked to break one of their back legs so they couldn't run away. When he got bored with playing with them but if there was still life in them, he would drop the poor abused rodent in my shoe, so he could find it later. Yeh, I learned to shake out my sneakers before putting them on. Eventually Gypsy became a civilized indoor cat, basically learning that he was small, pampered and no competition for the real wild beasts of the neighbourhood; like most males he got tired of prowling around all night and discovered the bliss of kicking back on the couch with a cold beer ... um, ok, I may be projecting here just a bit ..


Although Gypsy did lose a lot of his feral heritage, it did take him a while to warm up to people As in, someone who had been to our house three or four years into his life, finally seeing him and saying "I didn't know you had a cat" I told someone he was in the witness protection program from all those mouse murders.


Once he matured and calmed down a bit, he got along pretty well with Gigs; generally they ignored each other but on more than one occasion I found them curled up, sleeping, sharing the same chair. Yes, there was the famous incident when Gypsy was still a kitten, he went for one of the dog's treats and Gigs taught him that was a very bad, bad thing .. Gypsy bore the scar from that to the day he died, but other than that, it was domestic bliss. But Gigs passed on, Gypsy enjoyed a few months of solitary bliss .. and along comes a new puppy. A border collie puppy. A I-really-need-to-herd-something-but-I-don't-know-what-Hey-you'll-do puppy... Leave it to say, Gypsy spent a good year sleeping on top of the console TV, out of herding range. But eventually, these two worked out their boundaries as well. We kept attributing Gypsy's long life to an attempt to outlive a second dog ...


Well, he didn't quite make it, but boy he made a run at it. We will miss him but, as we ponder getting a new border collie pup, it is unlikely that we will ever get another cat. Of course, I've said that before ...







Happy hunting, buddy.

WALKING MISS HAYLEY

So, another Miss Hayley post, with another Miss Hayley video at the bottom. This is from our regular weekend visit to Cedarvale Park. We have been going to this big ravine park for several years now. We like it because there is a lot of space, a long ravine trail that leads into it, and a couple of smaller trails within the park itself that are pretty sheltered. And most importantly, there are dogs there, lots of dogs. We often refer to Cedarvale as the "dog park" while it was not, not legally ...until this past fall.

There are not an awful lot of official off leash parks in Toronto; there are, to the best of my knowledge, no off leash parks at all, but parks with off leash areas. In the last couple of years a lot has been made of the fact that there is something like a quarter million dogs in greater Toronto and not near enough off leash areas to service them all. It is a contentious issue here. This city is definitely divided along dog/no dog lines. I just don't me leash/off leash, I mean have a dog, don't have a dog. The more crowded our city gets, the more anti-dog sentiment we seem to have.

Which leads me to the whole off leash situation. I am essentially not a fan of off leash areas. I am a firm believer that your dog should be on leash on the street, on the public transit, in other public places. Miss Hayley is well behaved and well trained but I can't imagine walking her in the street off leash. First of all, it is dangerous. I've trained Hayley but I haven't trained every car, truck, bus, taxi .. or pedestrians. Secondly, I think it is inconsiderate. People walking along the street don't need to be pestered by a dog.

Parks are different. Not that I think people should be pestered, but parks are essentially recreational spaces. People aren't there chugging along on their errands, preoccupied with their business, they are there to relax, have fun, maybe do sport or exercise. Just like Miss Hayley and I. A park like Cedarvale, with its miles of trails and huge open spaces, should be able to be shared by all; truth is, in the summer, most of the two legged animals all crowd onto the sidewalks to exploit their wheels, leaving all that grass to the dogs.

Of course, the problem with sharing is, everyone needs to be on their best manners. And, my god, I don't know what goes through the minds of a lot of dog owners. They have no right to be out in public with their dog off leash, let alone on. You have the shit issue, which is really a big problem. If dog owners just pick up after their animals, a lot of the animosity against them would wane.

The other issue is dog behaviour. Some of the stuff I've seen makes my head ache. Dogs with their heads in coolers, dogs stealing other dogs' toys, dogs jumping ... a few weeks ago I was walking Hayley around our little neighbourhood park and for one entire circuit, about 15 minutes, I was assaulted by this kerry blue terrier. The whole way this thing was jumping up on me, while her owner remained stationary in the middle of the park, waving her hands in distress ... not a very successful dog training technique.

So I am not surprised that people want off leash areas, especially fenced in ones. People don't want dogs shitting on their grass and jumping on their pants, and I can't blame them. It doesn't have to be that way. If owners were responsible, picked up after their mutts, taught them manners, we could all happily co-exist.

So what's my issue with off leash areas, you ask? (You probably didn't ask but its my blog and in my blog you asked) I have a few concerns. One is, a fenced in area attracts irresponsible dog owners. Oh great, they say, there is a fence, my dog, my unruly, undisciplined dog, can run amok without my ever having to worry about etiquette or safety or proper socialization. The new off leash area in Cedarvale is huge. I don't think my video does it justice. Last weekend I saw a couple come in, let their dog off, then lean against the fence and and drink coffee and chat while their pet went gamboling off with a bunch of strange dogs .. great, that's the purpose of off leash areas. But it is also the danger. Dogs interacting always has the potential to go south But if you are there, observing, you can stop a problem before it starts. I know my dog and her border collie insanity; if that head goes down and starts to twist, some other dog is about to get gripped .. and as a rule I don't want that. So I call her off before it begins.

The other issue with a fenced in area is that it is great for a dog like Hayley, who loves to run and play with other dogs, a big contained area works great. But not all dogs like this kind of play and neither do their owners. They like to walk, and a place like Cedarvale, with all its trails, appeals to them. Of course, you can walk your dog on the leash but it is not the same. Off leash just gives you and your dog more freedom, Miss Hayley loves to wander a bit and sniff and explore. The video shows us on one of the lovely back trails, covered in snow, where the off leash Hayley is free to just move around and be a dog.

Still and all, it was a great day in the dog park. Lots of fresh snow and a relief from the absolutely frigid temps we have been experiencing lately. While we were there we met our friend hand his dog, who also happens to be a border collie ..and who happens to be called Hayley. Two border collie Hayleys, you know that is trouble.You will see in the video that lots of people came out on a Sunday to enjoy a nice winter day. Cross country skier, sledders, dogs ... and all sharing.

Now you all you go sing Kumbyah amongst yourselves. I'm getting a beer.



Miss Hayley at Cedarvale from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

LIFE IS A BEACH

A hot, sunny day in Toronto. The second week of July and we have had few of these so some kind of primal impulse demands: Off to the beach!

Or, this being Toronto, off to the Beaches .. or is it the Beach? Let me explain. So Toronto sprawls along this puny body of water known as Lake Ontario, something like 7,000 square kilometers of water, smallest of the Great Lakes, separates us from the USA ... it's just a lot of water, ok? Toronto has something like 46 kilometers of waterfront but when people say the Beaches they are usually to referring to a stretch of public beaches, east of Yonge Street. For as long as I have lived in Toronto we have called this neighbourhood the Beaches but now, for some reason, they want us to call it the Beach ... Miss Hayley cocks her head and looks at me and says "Sand, water, the swimming dogs I refer to as Water Sheep .." and she begins trotting herself to the subway.

The Beaches have two "off leash" areas, where dogs are allowed to run at large. Dogs running at large is a big issue in Toronto. We have traffic jams, pollution, escalating gun crime, crumbling infrastructures, cops being busted as dope dealers, people who can't afford food and rent in the same month ... and the city government is obsessed with dogs running around without their leashes. In point of fact it is illegal for dogs to be on any beach in Ontario (unless designated leash free) even on leash. Something about maintaining some kind of environmental status. On hot days in Toronto your eyes tear and your lungs burn but dammit, we don't have dogs on the beach ... but I digress. This isn't about politics, it's about border collies on the beach.

So paranoia about dog poop aside, there are a few off leash areas in the Beaches. One is a large fenced in area at Kew Beach, where the shoreline is mostly gravel, there are a lot of weeds growing around, and the sand is more gravel ... all of which concerns Miss Hayley not a whit. There is water here. And rocks. And Water Sheep. Understand: Miss Hayley has never actually seen a sheep. This is a working dog that took a very early retirement .. like at birth. So, dogs are sheep, animals of lesser intelligence whose sole purpose is to be herded. Mind you, in Hayley's world, pretty much everything alive is an animal of lesser intelligence. Including me. But her food comes in bags, and I have thumbs and access to scissors, so she tolerates me.

If you have watched some of the other Miss Hayley videos on this blog you have seen several shots of her wading around in the water. Wading is the operative term. Hayley does not swim. Oh, Hayley can swim, and she swims quite well. If Collette or I are swimming she will go out with us as far as we go; you can grab her by the base of her tail and she will pull you through the water; she is a strong swimmer. She can swim but in true border collie fashion she just chooses not to. It may have something to do with not liking when her feet leave the earth. Border collies are swift, agile, nimble runners, if there is nothing solid under one's paws, you are not running ... that would not be logical. So, when the Water Sheep are foolishly venturing out into the deep water, our border collie's herding technique changes from gripping (a grip is when the border collie turns her head, opens her mouth, places it around the shins of the animal being chased, then swiftly closes her jaws, causing the sheep to lose its footing .. this is not biting .. oh no .. this is gripping ...) to loudly barking. Incessantly, loudly barking. I am not sure what Miss Hayley is saying when she does this, perhaps something like: "You do realize, I know you are coming back, so you can't lure me out there, and when you do get back, boy are you getting bitten .. er .. I mean gripped"

When one owns the world's only Water Sheep herding dog, it is refreshing to watch other dogs playing; yes, playing. Humans throw balls into the water, the dogs swim into the water, dogs fetch the balls, dogs return the balls to their humans. This is not Miss Hayley behaviour. Humans throw spherical objects into the water, Water Sheep think about swimming into the water, World's Smartest Dog lunges into the water and turns the Water Sheep back towards shore, leaving spherical object to bob in the water, forlorn and unfetched. World's Smartest Dog smugly lays on the beach, surveying her masterpiece of mayhem.

Though, it should be noted here for the record, Miss Hayley actually waded into water, put a ball in her jaws, brought it back up the beach and dropped it at my feet. But surely this was not fetching. This was tennis ball herding. With a very special grip. Um .. sure.

Miss Hayley is adept at herding all kinds of critters. Here she has just successfully herded a hairy video editor who, in turn, apparently just herded a runaway sandal.

After a long and arduous day of Water Sheep herding what is a border collie and her pack leaders to do? Well, obviously, they go have a beer. Well, the humans have beer. Miss Hayley has hand baked goodies from the Three Dog Bakery called Pup Tarts ... I know, I know, so please stop snickering.

Here is the little video I made to accompany Collette's photos. In the long shots you will see what we Torontoians refer to as "haze". Everyone else calls it smog. Ah, well, it was still a great day. Music is .. hell, you'll know it ...

Miss Hayley on the Beach from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.