 
After more than a year of extensive research, Emily finally narrowed down the breed of dog she wanted to two candidates. One was a breed that none of us had ever heard of, available only in southern BC, and which cost a bazillion dollars. The other was a Border Collie, at a reasonable cost, whose breeder was in Edmonton. Guess which one we went with.All the facts about Border Collies described on the previous page we found to be true, particularly the one about their herding instinct. As a puppy, Abby immediately began herding things, especially a basketball on the lawn. She tried herding our other dog Trixie ("What?? You gave your dog a stripper name??"), but Trixie would have none of it.   We picked up Abby from the breeder's in August 2004. The breeder told us that her parents had been working sheep herders in Scotland, and that he had brought them to Canada to raise litters here. About a year after we'd gotten Abby from him, he called us to tell us that Abby's mother had passed away, and to ask if we'd be willing to sell Abby back to him, for breeding purposes. We told him that we'd had Abby spayed, but it wouldn't have mattered; by then she was a part of our family! Even the cats tolerated her. 
We owned many dogs over the years, but Abby was by far the most intelligent dog I have ever known. Once when I was throwing a Frisbee for her, and occasionally a ball, I wondered what she would do if I threw both at once. She went after the Frisbee first, caught it in the air as always, and then went to find the ball. At first she dropped the Frisbee to pick up the ball, then dropped the ball, tried to pick up both at once, and couldn't. Then she did the most remarkable thing. She picked up the Frisbee upside down (a lucky accident, probably), and tried to scoop up the ball with the Frisbee so she could carry both! Ultimately she was unsuccessful, as the ball kept rolling off, but this use of an improvised tool was an obvious indicator of her intelligence. Abby loved chasing a Frisbee. She would do it tirelessly, for as long as you could do it before your arm got tired. She would often leap into the air to make a flying catch, seemingly without looking. Her sense of anticipation was incredible. Strangely, Border Collies are not the best Frisbee catchers. They are good at it, but they need to learn the skill, as they don't instictively look over their shoulder to catch sight of the Frisbee. 
When Abby was living with me, I would let her out every morning, and occasionally she would disappear into the bush after a deer, eventually to come trotting back twenty minutes later ... very frustrating for me, because I would be late for work, and for her, because she never caught one! One spring a mother fox chose our back yard to have a litter of baby foxes, which presented a problem ... I didn't want Abby to hurt them. I needn't have worried. The foxes seemed to know when we were coming outside, and would disappear. One time Abby did spot them, and chased them, but they were too quick for her. Except once; she managed to run down and bowl over one of the kits. Abby was more surprised than the fox was; she had no intention of hurting it; she probably just wanted to herd it! Abby seemed to have an intense dislike of snakes, which was probably instictive. She had never seen one, but we were always buying her plush snake toys after we discovered how she would react to them.You only had to say "ssss ...." and she would grab the toy by the tail and whip it back and forth until it was 'dead', exactly the way predators deal with snakes in the wild. How did she know to do this? Instinct, I guess. I saw this for real one summer as Abby and I were driving to Ontario to visit family. We'd stopped at a rocky turnout in northern Ontario for some exercise and were walking on some rocks. Abby spotted a medium-sized Garter snake (non-venomous) and killed it just the way she did with her toy snakes. I was amazed. Abby's temperament was incredibly loving. It's said that a test of how well you can trust a dog around kids is to get down and pretend to eat its food as it is eating. Most dogs will growl a little. Some will push you away. Abby just kept eating, and didn't mind at all. Although I think she ate faster, just in case ... Abby didn't like peas. She had an amazing ability to detect them in any leftovers you might give her. Plop down a few spoonfuls of leftover stew into her bowl, come back twenty minutes later, and you'd find an empty plate with seven peas lined up on the edge. 
Abby was always Emily's dog, but when she went off to college, and later to work and to travel, Abby stayed with me. But I usually visited Jesse and Emily every six weeks or so, and in the summer, and Abby often made the trip with me. Her favourite thing was when we did the Tim Horton's Drive-Thru in Whitecourt, because the server at the window would always give her a Timbit.Somehow Abby knew when we were getting close to Whitecourt; I never said anything, but from being fast asleep, she would perk up and stand on the seat looking out the window as we got close to the town, and positively quiver with excitement as we made our way up the hill towards where the donuts were! 
 Towards the end of her life, around the summer of 2017, Abby was suffering from arthritis and incontinence. Medications kept her pain-free, but the vet told me that she was in her nineties in 'people years', and that we shouldn't let her jump for Frisbees. She was happy that fall to lay on the floor beside me as I did school work. She died in my arms in early 2018. You can probably tell from what I've written here that Abby was more a member of our family than a 'pet'. That was true of all the amimals we shared our home with over the years. My love of dogs was expressed pretty clearly in a short story I once wrote, called 'Baby'. |