KiKi was 2 years and 4 months old when she came to live with us, a little younger obviously when she was take in by ASH Animal Rescue. In a little more than a month, on May 27th we will celebrate her fourth birthday. I’ve mentioned before that the early experiences in a dog’s life have a disproportionate impact on their later development and it remains true that our experiences with KiKi have been very different than our time with Leica and her sister.

KiKi has been with us less than half her life, and we have asked her to relearn how we expect her to behave in many of her day to day experiences. Again, there have been many areas in which her behaviour has been faultless: her attachment to Leica; her cleanliness; her gentleness. It seems even clearer now that her outbursts of aggression towards strange dogs, which I always felt not to be indicative of her true nature, had been if not actively encouraged, at least allowed to go unchecked. Until she came to live with us KiKi had not been spayed, and would have been in season more than once. Whether she had borne a litter, we do not know but from her behaviour with certain soft toys we do have our suspicions. Perhaps her only experience with dogs outside her immediate circle revolved around breeding, we don’t know for sure and it’s probably fruitless to continue to speculate on the issue.

We are still cautious, we are aware that she is a strong, powerful dog who can react in a heartbeat if startled, but this half-life she had before, where the company of other dogs was a fearful and stressful experience has ended.