Katie, the Wonder Dog
What can you
say about the world's most perfect dog. Katie was actually my husband's dog. Here is a
picture of her with her ever present tennis ball. She was a ball nut. Katie was bought for
my husband to be a bird dog. Her dad was a high power setter out this way. Trails End
Tomoka - during his prime, he won everything in site for setters. Katie had drive. Boy did
Katie have drive. In fact Katie had so much drive you needed a jet helicopter to hunt
behind her. Katie had a running problem and we didn't know how to fix it. The only advice
we could get from anyone was to put a shock collar on and we weren't going to do that. So
Katie never met her full potential since you couldn't let her off leash on grass or the
dog was gone. She was skunked, she was kicked by cows, she was ripped by barb wire fences,
but she never, ever, ever slowed down.
Katie was a field bred English Setter and registered in the Field Dog Stud Book. Just a little trivia, the first dog registered by AKC was an English Setter (I think his name was Apollo) I saw a picture of the dog and he looked like he could have been Katie's brother. The AKC version of the English Setter has dramatically changed since that first dog. Katie is what the working version looks like. She was a little larger than a border collie. People were constantly asking what kind of dog she was and I would tell them "tongue-in-cheek" that she was a long-haired Dalmatian. No one ever challenged me on that. In fact one day a lady came up and asked me if Katie was a long-haired Dalmatian.
Katie was brilliant. The training challenge with Katie was that if you
showed her how to do something she
would think of 50 different variations of
how it could be done. AKC doesn't appreciate that kind of genius in the obedience ring. My
husband use to tell people he didn't train Katie, he just let her read the book. It
breaks my heart that we didn't know about operant conditioning and clicker trainer when we
had Katie. Katie received her CD and was ranked #8 English Setter the year she competed.
(She only went to 4 shows.) She took several placements. What was amazing is she placed,
not knowing how to finish. She lost 3-5 points at each show on the finish. After her CD I
just lost any real desire to compete. I hated all
the correcting needed to get "perfection." Katie played with agility and
tracking but she died a premature death when she ate a foreign object that was thrown into
her yard by a child. Katie was a once-in-a-lifetime dog.