Growing, growing.... gone!

Since the day that Maiki arrived, back in February, I've been taking a photo now and then to show how much she's grown. Well, this one is going to be the last of the "growth photos" taken with that little teddy bear - partly because Maiki has stopped growing now. She's been the same size for the past couple of months - almost as high as my knee, and around 15 kilos, which is at the lower end of the size range for a border collie. 

The vet thinks that the months of injury and the medication she was taking during that time combined to stunt her growth a bit and she has remained slightly smaller than normal. She's not as tall as all the other border collies we know in the town. Having said that, Maiki's mother was not a particularly big dog and so I guess there's every possibility that her size is just genetic and not to do with the injury at all.

The second reason why this will be the last photo with the teddy bear is because Maiki ripped its brains out at the weekend! The poor bear still has a body, but his head is gone... or at least it's devoid of stuffing now.

This past weekend, I felt a bit like a character in a TV crime show, as we swabbed the girls' cheeks for DNA testing.

Rough collies (that's the kind of dog that played Lassie) often have a gene mutation called MDR1, which makes them intolerant of certain drugs and anaesthetics. About 5% of border collies have the defective gene too. It's a tiny percentage, but it's worth doing the test so that you don't need to worry about whether the vet will prescribe your dog a dangerous medication or whether you could lose your beloved pet on the operating table when she's being sterilised. 

So together with a friend in town, who owns the red border collie, Cumbia, in the photo above, we did the DNA swabs yesterday and they're being picked up by the laboratory today. In three weeks or so, we'll get the health report that will let us know whether the dogs tested positive or negative for the gene.