I mentioned “smartness” for the 1st characteristics for the Border Collie in my previous blog, 2nd one is it’s “friendliness”.
Saki’s friendliness hasn’t changed since she was puppy. (Although recently, we notice she likes human better than dogs!) When we first took her out for a walk, she used to greet every single dog & person!
Her lovely face (as most of the puppy dogs!) plus her friendly expression melted everyone’s hart!
Our 14 years old son often gives her some rough play and some mischievous thing, but Saki is very patient and she even shows her respect to him! For example, she waits forever when she is told to wait when my son puts her food in a bowl. How sweet of her!
My son, who is a teenager, often shows his frustration, then he comes to Saki to give her a cuddle and kisses.
We love ❤️ seeing this. For Saki, it must be quite frustrating as my son comes to cuddle her while she is at sleep, but she never gets angry. She has such warm hart. Thank you so much, Saki for your love to us 💕 .
Im my previous blog I introduced the first characteristic of Border Collie-they are smart. After that I remembered one thing.
A few years ago my work colleague and I were talking about dogs. She said to me, “my dog (border collie named Katie knows a lot of words.”. She showed me the video which surprised me a lot!
In the video, there were about 10 objects, such as shoe, bag, cloths etc. When my colleague said “shoe” to Katie, she went to fetch it without making any mistakes!
I have read new article which introduces about the Border Collie who identifies more than 100 words. Border Collie’s smartness is proven!
How many words does our Saki know? Not bad..she loves the words “ball” or “park” -she responds so well to these! However, she recently she learnt the word “shower”.
We noticed she doesn’t like being washed, but I don’t think she knew the word “shower”. Yesterday Saki had a swim in the sea first time after the winter was over.
She showed nervousness when she heard the water running to fill the bath tub.
That night, my husband teased her saying “would you like shower again”? Then she quickly ran to me to ask for my help! We all agreed Saki learnt a new word!
As generally said, there are 3 characteristics of Border collie-they are smart, agile and royal to the owners.
①SmartーDavid, my husband, used to volunteer as a dog trainer as a teenager (since 16 years old). He has had about 7 dogs in his life. The very last one, called Angus, Border Collie & Irish wolf hand mix, came to him as an adult dog. He was quite aggressive first time, and it took David a long time to train him. When I met Angus first time he was already a very gentle & smart dog.
Toilet training would be one of the big topic for everyone when welcoming a dog to home. We live in an apartment. We placed a small size real lawn for Saki’s toilet. She had a few accidents, but she quickly learnt to use the lawn for her toilet (took about two months to learn). After a while- around two months passed, she stopped using it, and only did toilet outside when she is taken out for a walk three times a day.
Regarding basic command, “Hand”, “Sit” and “Drop”, David started training her when she was around 3 months old. With some treats, she quickly learnt. She is training to wait after she is told to “sit” before she eats. Quite often we forget to say “Dozo” , =”please” in Japanese, so she keeps waiting for a while! (so sorry, Saki chan!)
FYI, please see here to access to the movie which shows one point command lesson by David. (To be continued.)
I pause the report on Eve’s situation (the ex wild dog who ran away from my sister’s place since late August.) Although she hasn’t been reunited with my sister yet, we believe she will return when timing is right. Thank to everyone who has given us kind words and the person who has been helping my sister, Mimi.
I am introducing our beloved dog, Saki the Border Collie. Saki is a chocolate coloured female border collie, born in April 2020 (1.5 yrs old) .
Since my husband and I lost our last two dogs before my son was born (16 years ago), we have been missing having a dog, but we didn’t have a chance to welcome one.
Since COVID hit and we stayed at home due to lock down, we started thinking now is the time to welcome a dog. We searched firstly shelters, however, there was none available (we live in an apartment, so only middle size dog can be kept.).
Then I searched breeders, but they are all out of dogs and asked me to register our interest. The price was also ridiculously high. For example, average price for Shiba dog was AU$7,000!
We didn’t feel right to pay this much for a dog, so our hope was almost gone. However, when I was chatting with my work colleague, she suggested to contact the breeder where she got her border collie from.
Without any hope I contacted the breeder, and to my surprise, she said,” we just had 8 puppies yesterday, I am going to send photos, so you can choose which one you want.”
With this unexpected answer, we had to make our decision quickly, however, it didn’t take us long to say yes, please to the breeder. My husband told me that girl border collies should be smaller in size (unlike our last dog Angus, border collie mix), and they are smart dogs.
What we chose (they all looked the same, but we chose one!) was a brown coloured one. There were black & white ones, too but I like the way the breeder said the colour was “chocolate colour”.
The lady from the breeder sent us a photo of Saki’s father and mother. Her father had the same colour with Saki, chocolate & white and mother, black & white. I didn’t know until I studied more about border collies, that there are more than 30 type of border collies depending on colours and sizes. Since her father’s name was “Whisky”, we decided to name ours “Saki” (similar to Sake=Japanese drink, but it is actually popular Japanese girl’s name, means “flower blossom”. To be continued.
