There’s proving to be a great deal we don’t properly understand about KiKi, and it’s certainly more complex than we were initially prepared for. Still, there are pleasures to be had in what we do know of her.  At just over three years of age her enthusiasm for life is boundless. She leaves us in awe as she leaps over obstacles at breathtaking speed, scales seemingly impossible inclines above the river bank and tears through the undergrowth on the scent of mice, rabbits and foxes. In the late evening dusk in the Glens of Antrim we find ourselves terrified that we may lose her in the gathering dark. A few minutes later she reappears, mud up to her chest, tongue flapping, panting. Overjoyed.

“The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.

Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs