Ronja
(Curragh's Esir Folkvang)
Dutch Junior Champion
Ronja 38 weeks old
The newest addition to our household is Ronja. She is a daughter of Kari's half-sister Åsa. She was born 4 May 2007. Ronja was the firstborn and only bitch in a litter of four. She has a long tail, as does one of her brothers. The other two brothers have stubby tails. She came to us on 8 July 2007.
Even as a puppy, Ronja is already a very outgoing dog. She likes other dogs. She greets them in a subordinate fashion, often even peeing. But she soon tries to get them to play.
People she mostly looks at with a wagging tail and she's convinced everybody loves er. Well, most people do and she gets lots of petting from them.
She likes to explore the world and it's seldom she's scared of something. If so, it's usually just for a short time, after which she will go and see what the scary thing is. If it's still too scary, we go explore together and make a small detour to check it out.
She plays with Joschka and Kari a lot. Both gentlemen sometimes find her very tiring. Each in their own way have found ways of making her back off. Joschka can give an incredibly dirty look which is more impressive than whatever growl he might give. And Kari can mostly ignore her very well, even when she's hanging on the his neck. He just walks on. If it gets to be a bit too much, he needs to be much clearer than Joschka, but he does manage to get the message accross.
We have some nice videos of Ronja playing with her mother, Kari and Joschka on YouTube.
Ronja also likes to play with us. She loves tug games. We've either reinforced letting go of the toy with a food reward or by continuing to play. She likes playing together so much, that she found out all by herself that bringing back the toy leads to further play. Sometimes, she pushes the toy back into our hands. Clever girl!
Ronja loves cuddling as well. You can even stroke her quite hard, she simply loves it.
At 16 months, she's still very outgoing, though she is a bit more picky about who she chooses as friends. Some dogs she's really crazy about, others she doesn't care about so much anymore. She has also learned that not everyone on earth thinks she's adorable. She now only goes to people who invite her to. She is still very playfull and has a slight preference of toys over food in training, which she loves to do.
You can see what Ronja and her brothers looked like in the litter on this photo site set up by their breeder, Bonnie Benneker. Bonnie also made a special page for the litter on her website. Ronja is mostly identified as Folkvang (after her pedigree name).
Ronja 12 weken oud
You can find more photos of Ronja and our other dogs in our Doghouse Rock photo-album.
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