We know little of KiKi’s past. Nothing at all really about her formative experiences. What we have seen is a dog whose behaviour can touch both extremes. Gentle, even docile, entirely at ease around Leica without a hint of aggression. Lively and playful, a little wilful, clearly pretty smart too. Everything we had hoped for, indeed expected,…

The past few days with KiKI have been difficult. Since her first outbursts on Sunday, she continues to be volatile in the presence of other dogs, Leica being the singular exception thankfully. A visit to Martha’s sister and her dog Barney seemed to start well, but quickly descended into a scrap. Neither dog was injured…

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld as interviewed in the Errol Morris film, “The Unknown Known”, there are things we know, or rather understand, that we do not know about KiKi. There are too, things we think we know about dogs, about Dalmatians, that will be tested in the coming months. The test starts now. It’s Sunday morning…

On the journey back from ASH with KiKi, we go over the things we have read about how best to introduce her to our house, and how to manage her integration with Leica. We chose not to subject Leica to the eight or nine hour round trip by car when we collected KiKi. Instead, we’ve…

So. KiKi is coming home. We collected her today from ASH. The journey down to Wicklow seemed endless. When we arrived we found Remi, Helena and their volunteers swamped. Six dogs were to be rehomed today, including KiKi, while the rest of the dogs still needed to be walked and fed and tended to. KiKi…

We understand that KiKi’s rehoming will be unlike our past experience with our other dogs. The first three years after bringing Leica and Flash home had been a rollercoaster of learning on the fly. We were each used to having dogs around the house throughout our childhood, and we had read up on what we…

Having been to ASH and seen KiKi we knew we wanted to bring her home. Circumstances though did not allow us to take her then and there. A family wedding in England meant that we were scheduled to leave the country for a week just a few days later, and we knew that to bring KiKi home only…

We saw KiKi’s picture on the ASH Animal Rescue website on Friday. It’s too soon, we said. Leica will get better, we said. We’ll get better, we said. It’ll be fine. Well that resolution lasted all of about two days before we called them. “Is KiKi the Dalmatian still there? OK, we’ll be there on…