Counting Sheep!

Soley took part in the Herding Instinct Test event sponsored by the Rare Breed Performance Club of Ontario, tester was Sue Jewell of Have Ewe Herd farm, Sue is a CKC Herding Judge and breeder of Shetland Sheepdogs.

Soley passed the test and received a Herding Instinct Test Certificate! Sue's comments were "Interesting dog! Did a nice natural gather and also driving". Here is the test report if you want to see how Soley was marked in each category:

Postman rings twice . . .

More good news came in the mail today - Soley's OFA report arrived and her hips are rated OFA Excellent! I'm very pleased and surprised, because her prelims were Good and it's more common for hip evaluations to stay the same or even drop a rating.

When her hip rating appears on the OFA site I will post a link to her results page -

I stopped to get the dogs some knuckle bones to celebrate, it sounds like a termite invasion as they've been gnawing away at them for the last hour.

"Coming Back for More"

Tindra graduated from her intermediate puppy class last night, along with sister Leika.

She doesn't get a holiday though, we start another class next week, we will be learning Rally ! The class members will be Tindra, Soley and Leika, and 2 Portugese Water Dogs (who are also litter-mates). It looks like Rally will be our sport for the year as our agility trainer is still looking for a new facility.

Soley also got a certificate yesterday, she is #4 Iceland Sheepdog for 2007 in the Dogs in Canada Top Show Dog point system. I'm sure another certificate is on it's way to her breeder for Belglen Riddari and that will put two Belglen dogs in the top 5.




The Belglen 2008 litter arrived a while ago and pictures are here.

Happy Six-month Day

It's been so long since I updated - April has been a busy month for us and the dogs.
Sóley got her report back from her OFA Thyroid exam and she has normal results. The OFA recommends testing at least every other year until age 6, as antibodies most often show up between 2 and 5 years of age, which can be years before clinical signs appear. We will likely follow a similar protocol as for CERF eye exams, and perform thyroid testing within a year of any mating and again between age 6-8 (our vet recommends comprehensive blood panels at age 7). It was very interesting to view the OFA thyroid statistics which reports the incidence of thyroid in all breeds having more than 50 individuals tested.



We attended the Sue Ailsby seminar "Mind to Mind with your Dog" on April 12-13 and it was a wonderful experience. Sue provided a great mix of inspiration, practical advice,and humor. What really stood out for me was her ability to make me re-think how we relate to our dogs. It was a very motivational experience and I recommend her seminar to any dog owner.



Sue also discussed structure and movement & her pictures and diagrams showed the "cathedral" effect of good structure and muscling in the rear assembly, so here is a picture of Tindra.




Tindra was six months old on the 17th, can't believe where the time goes! Here she is after a little show training session and absolutely no grooming :)
Three of the pups from the litter are now registered and little Elska should be registered very soon as all her paperwork has been submitted to CKC last week. I am waiting on the co-owner form for co-owned puppy Disa.



That's the end of the tale for today!

New Pics of Elska

Thanks to Alisha for sending these pictures, taken by her husband. I love to see these puppies enjoying the beach like their sire does in Maine. Elska is a wonderful ambassador for the breed on the West Coast.

Website Updates

It's taking me longer than expected to transfer my old pages to the new site!

I used a template kit to make the site, sort of like making Pillsbury cookies, all I had to do was add decorations. It's editing and uploading the images that takes all the time. I've also relied on Scott to do the R&D on choosing web editing software and I'm still using NVu to make the pages and I'm now using Filezilla to upload them to the server. (Scott also helps me sound like I know what I'm talking about). But from scratch or from a kit, a website is a time-consuming project. Like herding ducks, it's much more complicated to do than it looks. I could pay someone to do a pretty decent website in much less time, but there's the issue of giving up creative control. What person who breeds and shows their own dogs is going to give up control over their website? LOL

I digress - here are links to the recently added or updated pages:

Litters page
Has links to Max's page and the litter evaluation photos
News
Soley's page and her Show results page
Max's page
Litter evaluation photo page - watch the puppies grow up

Next project in the pipeline are the pages on natural rearing and other health issues and then I hope to do individual pages for each puppy from our first litter.

Good Vet Visit

We took Soley to the health clinic hosted by Golden Retriever Club of Greater Toronto, and she had a CERF exam, OFA hip x-ray, and thyroid blood draw. Very happy to say that Soley has another CERF Normal exam, no remarks. We have to wait for the results of the OFA hip x-ray but we were all happy with the positioning. Here's the picture!



About the thyroid test - this is not a wide-spread health issue in the Icelandic sheepdog, although I know of hypothyroid in a few dogs (from publicly posted results) but we want to have a baseline blood exam for any of our young adults in case it's useful for comparison later in life. Different breeds can also have different normal thyroid ranges so it will be interesting to collect even a little data on this.

Soley behaved very well and attracted a lot of interest as usual. She was very stoic during the thyroid blood draw, it's a lot of blood to take from a dog her size! She weighed 24.7 pounds on the vet's scale which they told us weighs about half a pound under.

A few photos

Yesterday's post was so dull I have to post some photos to liven it up:



Her nickname is "Sphaghetti Girl"
(Scott was building his new computer so there was electronic junk all over the living room for a while )




Here she is with a collection of the cat's toys

Registration Progress

Our litter was registered with the Canadian Kennel Club on March 30, 2008 (I had sent in the application on March 17th when I got Max's CKC number). So now it's time to register the individual puppies and I have already started the process on-line for all of the puppies. The certificates for some of the puppies should be on their way shortly. For the co-owned puppies there is an extra step, a co-owner form needs to be signed by the buyers, sent to me and then mailed to the CKC.

Just a few comments because we have had questions about the registration process for Iceland Sheepdogs. It took me months to understand this so I will cover just some essentials. In Canada our federal law regulates the sale of purebred dogs - if a dog is not registered by the appropriate Canadian registry (for most breeds that is the CKC, but there are some separate registries for breeds like Border collies, Coton de Tulear etc.) the dog is not considered purebred and legally cannot be sold as such. As a breeder I am expected to supply the certificate of registration to the new owners within six months of the sale date. This law applies to every breeder selling purebred dogs, not just to CKC members. The breeder of the dog must complete the registration process, I cannot leave it up to the new owners or the breed club to do so. Also, it is my responsibility to ensure the dog has some permanent identification before it goes to the new owner, this can either be a tattoo or a CKC-approved microchip. My puppies were microchipped before they went to their new owners. Keep in mind that this is a federal law and it explains why Canadian breeders cannot offer to sell puppies without registration papers, and we cannot charge an extra price for registration papers either.

I mentioned waiting for Soley's registration and I should explain that. When the Icelandics went from Misc to full CKC recognition, there were some delays as most imported dogs (such as Soley's parents) had to go to registration committees before they and then their offspring could be registered. I know all the Canadian breeders worked quite diligently at getting their imported dogs registered at considerable effort and expense. Several other breeds had been moved to full recognition at the same time and it's my understanding that some of the delay was just due to the backlog of work needed to be done by the CKC to transfer all these members of newly recognized breeds to full registration. I really appreciate the achievement of getting dogs registered as it allows me to enjoy showing Soley in CKC conformation, we will be able to compete in CKC performance events, and of course allowed us to breed our litter of registered puppies.

Max was imported from Iceland and resides in Maine, so his registration application had to go before the CKC committee which convenes quarterly. We missed the cut-off for the December meeting by a couple of weeks so that's why it was processed at the March meeting. Future litters sired by Max in Canada (which I'm sure there will be!) will be registered more quickly since both parents will already have their CKC registration numbers.

If you plan to breed CKC registered Icelandics, and if you live in Canada that should be the preferred choice :) I strongly recommend starting the registration process as soon as possible. Dogs imported from Iceland and living in the U.S. will have their applications processed at the quarterly registration committee meetings. The application has to be received by CKC a month before the committee date, so that their staff have time to review the application and they will request the applicants supply any missing information, etc. Dogs imported from Iceland and living in Canada are currently required to go to a committee meeting after they reach one year of age. It seems like the CKC is also requiring committee evaluations for dogs bred in U.S. and imported to Canada, if their parents are not CKC registered. So I also recommend, if you are looking in the U.S. for a prospective breeding or show dog, look for litters from CKC registered parents. This will prevent delays in being able to show and/or breed your dog, and possibly the disappointment of not being able to register your dog.

Water Baby

Testing the Water

Yesterday was Tindra's first trip to the beach . . . and Scott was very pleased to report that she went right into the water, without needing any persuasion - it was choppy and the waves made her jump back, but she didn't mind getting wet at all.




Follow the Pug - she had a good role model, if the pug can do it, so can she




This reminds me of her father -



Back on dry land, with a friend