18/05/2026
Some of you have been following Kes’s journey from the very beginning from the moment she arrived as part of our accidental surprise litter from Kite and Tali, born right here at home, in my arms.
I kept her because she felt right. The right amount of energy, the right amount of drive, the right kind of character that I look for in a dog. I wasn’t expecting her to feel quite so perfectly matched to me, but she did from the start.
And then March happened.
At four and a half months old, Kes was running in the paddock with her brother Buzz when he collided into her. She started limping on and off over the following couple of weeks, and once we got to the vet and the physio, we put a rehab plan in place and settled in for the long haul.
Four weeks into that plan, she started limping again. That told us something more was going on, and so we pushed for further investigation an orthopaedic referral and a CT scan. What they found was a rare fracture of the growth plates in her carpus. The good news is that the orthopaedic is positive it should resolve on its own once the growth plates close and the cartilage becomes bone. Not the journey we wanted, but the prognosis is encouraging.
These last few months have looked nothing like what I had planned for her. No sheep. No obedience training. No freedom to just run and be a puppy. Instead, we’ve lived in the world of lead walks, three metre long lines, five metre long lines, cooperative care, calm work, and a lot of very thoughtful walking.
I was genuinely worried about asking so much of such a young puppy for so long. But honestly? Kes has made it easy.
She is cool headed, motivated, and so easy to communicate with. Teaching her something, anything is a joy, because she just wants to work. She wants to please. She wants to be useful. Cooperative care, obedience, trick training — she throws herself into all of it with the same enthusiasm and focus. She just wants to be good, and that makes everything feel effortless.
Our solo walks have become one of my favourite parts of the day. Just me and her, out on the farm, keeping things quiet. She doesn’t chase. She’s not easily wound up by movement or distractions. She stalks the sheep every chance she gets, of course but I can call her off easily, and honestly it just makes me excited for what’s to come. I have a feeling she’s going to be something special on livestock when she’s finally ready.
These months of restriction have actually built something unexpected, a different kind of relationship, a different set of expectations, a bond that I don’t think we’d have found any other way. She is my perfect little shadow.
Seven months old, born in my arms, and already she is everything I could have asked for.
Here’s to the next chapter, Kes. 🐾
And I want to use her story to raise awareness of something, because I think it matters.
This injury happened because two puppies the same age were running together and one collided into the other. That’s it. No recklessness, no deliberate high impact activity — just puppies being puppies. In twenty one years of owning Border Collies, across seven dogs, it had never happened to me before. But it did. And it can happen to anyone.
What makes these injuries so easy to miss is that they don’t always look dramatic. A puppy with a growth plate injury won’t necessarily limp constantly. They might seem perfectly fine one day and slightly off the next. It’s easy to think they’ve just tweaked something and carry on as normal — and if that injury is never properly investigated, and the puppy continues running, playing, doing repetitive high impact activities, tumbling around with other dogs on uneven ground it can quietly develop into a serious long term orthopaedic problem.
This happened to me, with my own dogs, in a controlled environment, with no intervention on my part. Just two puppies running together. Imagine the damage that can be inadvertently created when high impact activity is built into a puppy’s daily routine from an early age ( like repetition of ball or disc throwing!)
I’m not sharing this to frighten anyone. I’m sharing it because if it can happen to me after twenty one years, it can happen to anyone. If your puppy is even occasionally, intermittently off on a leg get it checked. Investigate it properly. It might be nothing. But it might be something that, caught early, can be managed and resolved completely.
Kes is proof that it can have a happy ending. But only because we didn’t ignore it. 🐾
