Glimmergruvans Uzak was my first Kelpie and he came to us on Midsummer’s Eve 1998.
Earlier, I had only had German Shepherds and it took me some time to get used to his size (or lack of size) but that’s no problem today. Uzak is very social both with people and dogs and he loves puppies. He has a high working capacity and is quite hard; he wants to exercise often and for long. He learns new things very easily even if it took quite some time in the beginning before I had learned to understand the characteristics of this breed, something that caused us some communication problems.
Uzak is Swedish Working Champion in searching but if I hadn’t had such urgent training companions he would not have become a search dog. He simply WOULD NOT leave the the person who the dog are suppose to find when doing searching for persons. Seldom did a group of dog trainers have so much fun during the training sessions as we had. No matter what I did – I jumped, ran, whistled, I was cheerful, angry, passive, active – nothing would help. Many times I said to myself and to my training companions “I’ve hade enough, I quit the search”. But each time I was persuaded to try again. The solution was a trumpet which we hade used a New Year’s Eve. I noticed that Uzak was very interested when we blew that trumpet so I put one of them in my pocket to try at the next search. Of course, I was very curious to see if it would work, but I was very sceptic bearing in mind that nothing else had worked out. When it was our turn, Uzak happened to see the running person in the forest and false-started. I took out my trumpet and blew it. Uzak immediately turned around and came back to me. Success! At last he understood what I wanted him to do and after that training session we never had any problem about leaving the hidden person. We had then tried to solve this problem every week for FOUR MONTHS – and I was so happy. The fact that we could solve this problem has had the impact on me that I seldom give up even if a task seems hopeless.
Uzak is Champion of Dog Shows in Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Since he got CACIB in all three countries he is also International and Nordic Champion of Dog Show. He competes in elite class in both Searching and Tracking. He has also tried level 2 of Report and has passed an aptitude test in Wild Animal Tracking.
Uzak is also the father of 8 puppies who were born on the Twelfth Night 2004. We are very sorry that we were not able to keep a puppy after him, but we also had a half-sister to Uzak and we thought that two dogs were enough – they really keep us busy.