Of course the story of Kili coming into our lives had to be long and complicated.
Following my graduation from vet school we picked up and moved the whole herd to a new town for my new job. I immediately started thinking about a second greyhound. I had a feeling it might take a bit of time to find an appropriate candidate so I wanted to start early since my intention was to have the second dog arrive sometime in mid-summer. Why mid-summer? I wanted time to get the new house in order, but I didn't want a new, young dog when it started getting dark early and getting cold. I enlisted some help to find me a young, female, small animal safe, high work drive greyhound. Summer came and went with essentially no prospects. Finding an agility hound with limited prey drive proved to be difficult. In fact, at one point near the end of the summer I almost ended up a border collie/lab cross.
The end of September rolled around and I finally decided I was basically giving up for the year. I was questioning whether I would ever be able to find this hound that I desired when I was given the name of a (somewhat) local to me CKC breeder. A quick google search revealed that her dogs were involved in all kinds of dog sport, including agility. I fired off an e-mail to her thinking that perhaps if she knew she might be having a litter sometime that I could get on the wait list. The next morning I found an e-mail from her saying that she had not one but TWO litters of puppies, ages 4.5 and 5.5 weeks old and she still had several available. Well, that was basically it. I told her what I wanted: female agility prospect and she recommended a pup from each litter, with her recommendation being the older pup. A few weeks later I drove to meet the two pups and ended up putting the older one into my truck to make the drive home. That is the long winded version of how Kili came to be with us.
Kili has gone on to be a fabulous first agility dog and pioneer for greyhounds in Canada. In the United States there have been several handlers who have run a number of very successful greyhounds, but Kili is the first for Canada where she has titled in 2 different agility organizations, AAC and CKC. In 2015 and 2016 she was the #3 Hound in CKC agility. In 2017 she was the #1 Hound in CKC agility.
In January 2017 she became the first greyhound ever to earn her Agility Trial Champion of Canada (ATChC) from the AAC. Although not the highest title a dog can earn in AAC, the ATChC is the first "big" title, requiring a dog to display versatility by completing 4 different Masters titles to achieve it.
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