Kasey
	Gender: Female Age: 11 months Height/Weight: 19.5"/33 lbs. House-trained: Fenced yard required: Preferrd Location: SE Michigan Foster Home: Jeff and Hillary	Crate-trained: Learning Treat-motivated: Yes Toy-motivated: Yes Likes Car Rides: tbd Good with cats: tbd Good with kids: tbd Commands: sit, hand-touch

Kasey was adopted in February, 2016. Here she is with her new mom!

Kasey is a small black and white purebred Border Collie. She’s 19.5" tall and weighs only 33 lbs, but she needs to gain some weight. At only 11 months old, she is a bundle of joy and energy. She doesn’t know much yet, but she’s getting a good education from both us and our resident dog.

She is completely potty-trained (no accidents so far!) and even asks to go out, albeit quietly. Usually she’ll just sit by the door looking longingly. In the morning, she lets us sleep in until she can’t hold it anymore and will start whining quietly.

Training is progressing smoothly. She came to us knowing how to sit, and we’re working on down, hand touches, and crate games. She likes toys more than food, but will work eagerly for both as long as you take lots of balance breaks to keep her interested. You can tell when she gets frustrated easily and she starts looking for something else to do. She tugs very softly and instead prefers to mouth the toys. Balls and thrown toys are also exciting, but really it’s the chase she likes, running after the toy only to stop and pick it up for a little while sometimes. Speaking of running, she loves to run fast. We never really considered our yard to be small until we saw her run across the back in maybe 5 strides.

Most of our time is spent inside and she either plays with our resident dog or sleeps on or near her people. She understands the concept of gates, but if you go too far away, she’ll jump it with ease to make sure you’re ok. She is a fantastic player with our resident dog and they both seem to understand each other really well, so we let them play as long as they want provided they’re able to immediately stop when we ask. This is really easy to do because as soon as they hear a treat bag open, they’ll come running to a sit. Most of their play is quiet wrestling with mouths open. Kasey does this really odd move where she sticks her head between her hind legs. I’m not sure how effective it is, but we’ll definitely share if we ever get a photo because it’s hilarious. Anytime one of them gets a bit uncomfortable, the other immediately backs off.

We haven’t tested Kasey with cats or kids, but I would be inclined to say cats would move too quickly and she would chase afterwards. We’ll try to have some kids over soon to see how she reacts. She still mouths at people a little bit during play. It’s never rough and a shriek makes her back off. She also sometimes pounces, which could be scary for a kid that isn’t used to it.

It would be well advised that her future home keep food and toys off the counter because she will occasionally try to to help clean up. She’s even willing to make sure that the counter is completely clean by using a chair as a step stool. Fortunately, she’s quickly learning that anything worth eating is found on the ground, and not on the counters. We were told that she knows how to open doors with long horizontal handles, but even though our home has plenty of those, we have not yet seen this behavior.

She will go in her crate if encouraged at night and settles down easily, sleeping through the night without a sound. During the day, she takes between 30–60 minutes to stop howling when left alone. She prefers to have a soft blanket or towel with her and once she settles, stays settled until her people return home. There is still some training to do to get her more comfortable with being left alone in the crate, but we are optimistic that she will adapt nicely to a routine now that she isn’t changing homes every few days.

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