GOLDEN ROSE YASMINE

05.04.1991 - 13.12.2004

Assi, my first collie, was a dog much longed for. I had now lived without a dog for ten years. During these years I had finished my studies, started to work and given birth to my daughter Clara and she had become nine years old. Now I had time for a dog again. There were no difficulties in choosing the breed of the dog, I had always wanted a collie. At that time the most popular dogs were Labrador  and Golden Retrievers - collies were not so common, at least not in our area.   Assi was a very smart dog, and one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. She was an English lined collie, but she looked more like the American ones - she was bigger than the average collie bitch, she had quite a strong head and her coat looked like the original collie-coat. Assi never took part in a dog-show, and l am not quite sure that the judges should have appriciated her  the way I did. We lived in a time when many breeders strived for a small, graceful dog with an enormous coat.  Assi was also very ill  all her life, she suffered from frequent infections in her urethra, from cronical intestinal diseases and her hips got the result of B/D. Assi was a shy dog, too. I had to acclimatize her to new things and places slowly and carefully. She was very gun-shy, afraid of fireworks,  thunderstorms  etc. And while she also was a very soft dog, she never forgot the places wher she had had frightening experiences.  Assi loved to rove the woods. She was extremely happy when we spent a couple of weeks in the cottage in Kuusamo, from where we were able to walk or to ski up to the mountains. Although Assi always was ill, she still was in a good fysical condition - she kept herself thin (she was quite uninterested in food) which made it easy for her to move - she never showed any signs of bad hips. Together with Assi I trained a little obedience, too. She was the one who learned  fastest in the group and she would have had potential to continue, but unfortunately there were neither no continuing obedience training nor working dog training offered here at that time.  I think, Assi would have loved both search and tracking very much . Because hardly no possibilities of taking part in different kinds of activities were offered,  we had to try to give her some kind of mental stimulation at home. Among others Assi learend to count. When you mentioned a number between 1 and 9, Assi barked so many times as the number said - and you could take the numbers in different order - she never missed!

This mix of two poems is dedicated to my very special, heart-dog Assi: