A Day in the Sun!

Welcome back to Kyrie's blog! It was such a nice spring day we went outside to take some new pictures of Kyrie. :) We are very proud of our girl as this past month she graduated from her Basic Obedience class. We had "home-schooled" her up to that point but decided to do the class for socialization and testing with distractions. It has worked wonders for her confidence levels with people and dogs! Now we are in a beginning Rally class because our teacher decided we were advanced enough to skip intermediate obedience, and Kyrie is the youngest dog in the class. :)



Here are some pictures of Kyrie from today. I was lucky enough to catch her in a GREAT flying trot!



Is this Kyrie looking for her ball or Kyrie about to eat a dandelion?



This one was taken from far away but it is a good shot of her structure from the side so I kept it. :)



Kyrie caught in a rare moment of non-motion!



We hope you enjoyed our pictures, we will close with another one taken recently of Kyr with one of her favorite chew-toys!



Next up, I'm hoping to publish some discussion about Kyrie's obedience class and our thoughts on it, comparing it to other methods we have experienced or read about. Stay tuned!!

Kyrie and London, Take 2!

I just had to snag a second and post another double-shot of our girl Kyrie next to her ancestor, London the Littlest Hobo! She has a more feminine head and the photos are not perfectly matched, but I think she has come along since the last one!!

The old photo:



The new photo:



We love our Hobo girl!!

The Hutto IABCA Show!

At the end of January Zak and I took Leo and Kyrie down to Hutto, TX, a few hours south, for the IABCA Winter Sieger show! This is held at the Triple Crown canine events facility, which is INCREDIBLE! Here is Kyrie looking at everything before she gets out of the Element:



Kyrie only participated in Show 3 this weekend, because we were a little short on cash this time. She came in third behind Leo and Christi Tanon's beautiful Bruno, who is growing up into a gorgeous dog! Following are the judge's comments:

"Developing well, slow maturing. Needs self confidence in ring. Coat: Good Texture! Head still developing, scissor bite, dark eyes, ears erect, deep chest with moderate bone. Back angulation: Well Angulated. Topline near level with slight slope. Well set tail, movement a little close in front. Rating: SG-1." The SG-1 rating means Kyrie will get a young adult Champion title from the IABCA if she gets another two of those ratings! We will need to be sure to show her in June and see how she does!

This place was so amazing that I made time between shows to take pictures! I wish we lived closer to Austin, I swear I would be here every weekend! Here is the front of the main building, where the rings were set up. Every weekend there is some sort of dog show, obedience or agility trial, or other canine event!



They had a big yard for all the dogs to do their business off to the left of the entrance, complete with handy pooper scoopers. Further beyond that were rows of at least six kennel buildings--I assumed for when people had their dogs stay at the facility for training. There was also a big Grooming Center just down the row from where we were parked:




To the right was a playground for kids, to keep the little ones busy while their parents and dogs were being trained! Off to the left of the playground was the Pro Shop, which was not open while we were there but which carries all sorts of dog equipment and supplies.



There were kids playing at the playground on Sunday, while their parents participated in Schutzhund events in the HUGE outdoor events field!



Here is the beautiful driveway, leading off toward the main road. In the other direction is the entrance to a "Dog Adventure Trail" for members only. They looked to have more than a few acres of fenced woods, hills and trails for the dogs and their people to explore!



Finally we close with the beautiful sunset over the hill Saturday evening. Thanks for sharing your wonderful facility with us, Hutto!



For more details from the show--including how our other Shiloh, Leo, did--step on over to Leo's blog!!

Kyrie at Work!

Around October we noticed that Kyrie's personality was changing, moving away from the happy-go-lucky frenetic puppy we were used to. Tina had always said that Kyrie was the more cautious type, more inclined to watch and figure things out, less like Leo who was just a rambunctious people-lover. Sure enough, Kyrie was growing up!

One of the side effects of this very alert and reactive period--some people call it a fear period, but it's really just the dog growing out of the oblivious puppy phase--was that Kyrie started to display a more aloof and sometimes outright shy nature. We didn't want to encourage the shyness, so we launched a triple-pronged socialization plan! Phase one of the plan was for me to take Kyrie to work more often, to remove her from her "safe" home environment and expose her to new people. So I took one of our extra baby gates to work, and Kyrie accompanied me a couple days a week for a few weeks in a row. During that time we did notice that she became better about meeting new people, though she was still a very submissive girl and did not like people to "loom" over her (she is much more likely to approach when they kneel down to her level) and she preferred to have me greet the people with her. When we were not encouraging my co-workers to visit, she would park herself next to my chair, just like in the picture!



At one point later on I was talking to Jessica of Strauss Haus Shiloh Shepherds, one of our excellent ISSR Licensed Breeders. She told me about her own aloof, high-energy girls. It turned out that Jessica's girls had gone through this same phase that Kyrie was going through, at the same age! I was very relieved when I found that out. Jessica encouraged us to keep working with Kyrie and said that if we continued to socialize it would all work out just fine!

Our two other socialization methods included attending a big dog show in Hutto and enrolling Kyrie in Obedience class! Read on...next up: the Hutto IABCA Show!

Kyrie's Family, Continued!

While I'm at it I wanted to put up some pictures of Kyrie's parents and some of her grandparents. Once again, these are property of New Zion Shilohs, Denise Harden (owner of Maya and Scout), Ti Amo Desert Mountain Shilohs and Wolf Creek Shilohs (Mike owns Kyrie's very famous Grand Victor granddad, Storm!).

Here are Kyrie's parents. Scout is a gorgeous buff smooth who tested out as an excellent Search-and-Rescue prospect, and Maya is a dark sable smooth who comes from good (non-attack) working lines (I know Denise does herding with her). Apologies for the very dark pic of Maya, we really should have taken pictures of her at Homecoming last year but we were so busy we forgot! The pic of Scout, though, is one we took while he was in the show ring.




I don't have pictures of Kyrie's grandparents on her father's side, but I did find some of her grandma and grandpa on Maya's side! Both beautiful dogs, and both breed Champions and Grand Victors, they are Storm of Wolf Creek Shilohs and Tang of Ti Amo Desert Mountain Shilohs! For Tang's page on their website, with more pictures, follow this link. For more pictures of Storm (and Kyrie's new cousins from the Sadie/Storm litter!), click on the link for Wolf Creek Shilohs.

Storm:



Tang:


Many ISSR Shiloh breeders make it their project to try to put together a picture pedigree for their dogs. As Zak and I are finishing up our paperwork to enter the ISSR Licensed Breeder in Training program, I was thinking of this when I started putting these pictures together! We hope you enjoyed them. :)

Kyrie's Family!

Kyrie turned one year old on January 13th, 2009! We love her dearly and are very happy with her sweet temperament and incredible intelligence. For her first birthday I wanted to do what I did with Leo's blog (you can see his if you follow this link) and put up some pictures of her littermates! Unfortunately, unlike Leo's Holly/Acer '07 litter, we could not stay in contact with most of the pups' families as they grew. The pictures I have are mostly cobbled together and taken at many different ages, but we hope that you will enjoy them anyway! I would like to also give credit where it is due--these pictures are property of New Zion Shilohs and Silver Run Shilohs, except for the ones of Kyrie which of course are ours. ;)


Here is Kyrie at just before one year (it was a lousy day but we wanted to get some pics anyway!).



If you would like to see pictures of Kyrie and her siblings when they were only nine weeks old, follow this link to Tina Barber's New Zion Shiloh Shepherds website! Kyrie's littermates were nicknamed Tank, Twin (that's Kyrie), Happy, Toes, Tug, Wookie, and Diva! Wookie and Diva were Kyrie's sisters. Both of them were plush golden sables! The one we still know about is now named Mya after her mother. Here is a picture of her as an older pup--what a sweet face!



Next are Kyrie's two twin golden sable brothers! Happy is now called Moose, and boy did he clean up some awards at Homecoming last year! He was only seven months old in this picture:



And then there is Toes, now called Clancy! This picture was taken at around ten months old I think? He looks a lot like Kyrie in body style, and Moose in color!



We don't have any pictures of Kyrie's brother Tug, who was the only plush male, except for this one from his eight weeks LER. He looks kind of like a plush version of Kyrie and Tank (now called Tucker)!



And speaking of Tucker...what a gorgeous boy! He not only won awards at Homecoming, he did great with his young handler in the Junior Handlers class, too! I really love Tucker and once his owner Debbie has his page up at http://shepherdsridge.com I will be sure to drop the link in here for you to see some better pictures of him! For now, here's a pic at Homecoming, when he was seven months old. You can really see how he and Kyrie resemble each other!

The War of the Ear!

We are pleased to announce that the War of the Ear has been WON! Above, you can see pictures of Kyrie side-by-side. The one on the left, with the floppy ear, was taken when she was six months old. Soon after this we attended Homecoming in New York and the daughter of our breed founder, Lisa Barber, showed me how to properly brace Kyrie's ear. A good ear brace needs to be light (we used moleskin), attached with a good non-latex skin adhesive (we bought some Torbot Bonding Cement, the same brand Lisa used), and also the right shape and size! Below I've included a picture of the brace. After the one we got at Homecoming fell out (it took Kyrie about two weeks to wear out a brace to the point where it would fall out), I kept it and used it as a pattern to cut new braces. :)



You can see that the brace is fairly large. Be sure to put its base near the base of the ear, so that it can work with the good support musculature and cartilage there where the ear meets the skull. You can also see that it is rounded; I realized that this shape helps to spread out the ear a bit so it can keep its proper shape. Lisa is one smart cookie! And she has LOADS of experience, of course!!

We did one further thing to the brace, and I would like to send a thank-you out to Buddha the ISSR Shiloh Shepherd's owners for their great blog on bracing his ears! In it they talk about how they used a product called Breathe-Right Nasal Strips to help give additional strength to the mole foam. As we were pretty sure that Kyrie's ear had a heavy crease on the outside edge that was keeping it from standing, we applied one of those nasal strips along the outer edge of the moleskin, for additional support. Here is a picture of Kyr in her pen at my workplace. I took her to work a lot with me until she got used to the braces, to make sure that she did not worry them out!



We had been told that ear bracing was not something that got results overnight. After the first brace stayed in for two weeks and fell out, I was very disheartened because Kyrie's ear sagged again after only one hour. :( But we braced again, and two weeks later when it fell out her ear stayed up longer...three to four hours and the sag was not as bad. That still seemed like not enough change to me, and I was afraid that nothing would work! But we braced again...two more weeks and I put in another brace right away without seeing how long the ear would stay up this time--I didn't want to discourage myself!! So four weeks went by. I kind of screwed up that last brace because I didn't put it far enough down in the ear--it was a little wobbly. But even then, it seemed to be staying up...I was full of hope! Finally, when that brace fell out, we let it go and waited. The ear stayed up...it was up for good!!! The war of the ear was won!

It took us two months of bracing to override seven or eight months of floppy ear. Kyrie turns eleven months this Friday. I am very happy that this coming year, she will be able to go to the IABCA shows and participate! A floppy ear would have disqualified her. Lisa, Olga, Buddha's parents, and everyone who chimed in with ear tips on our wonderful Shiloh Shepherd Friends forum, we can't thank you enough for helping us to win the War of the Ear!