We’ve had Niva a little over a month now, so I thought it would be fun to put my thoughts into a post on how she’s doing.
Niva is a really wonderful dog. I feel like I could just end the post there, ha! She has a great, friendly, and fairly submissive temperament. She’s not even slightly sassy. She’s all sweetness!
Niva is amazing and very patient with Sadie, and it’s such a blessing and a relief to know they get along.
Sometimes I can’t believe she’s still a puppy at only nine-months-old because she’s pretty well behaved!
Yes, she sometimes jumps when she’s excited, pulls on the leash when we walk, does some hardcore begging/food smuggling, and occasionally knocks Sadie over in the yard, but she hasn’t chewed much, doesn’t need to be crated when we leave the house, and is relatively calm for a puppy.
We brought her home on a Monday and she went into her first heat on Thursday. So glad that’s done and very thankful for hardwood floors!
She also escaped our fence twice in less than 24 hours when we first brought her home. Since then, she hasn’t escaped anymore, though! She caught on quick with house training, which was surprising (in a wonderful way!) since she had never lived in a house until she came home with us.
While huskies are known to have a high prey drive with small animals like cats, she has been very good with Malcolm. She definitely likes to hunt, though. Last week she caught and killed a bird in our yard and was casually eating it.
I’m not sure if I have any big plans with her as far as showing her/training her to be a therapy dog/etc. She’s pretty big for a husky, at a little over 50 pounds and less than a year old, so I don’t know if she fits the breed standard for showing. She is beautiful, though!
As far as training, I definitely want to do some obedience classes with her once things are re-opened from COVID-19, but I’m not sure if we will pursue therapy dog work. She absolutely has the temperament to be a therapy dog, but huskies are a lot harder to train than other breeds. They definitely have a mind of their own! We will see.
In the meantime, she has become such a source of joy to our family and has healed my heart in so many ways since everything that happened in the past several months with Lola and Mavis. I’ll never be able to replace those two, and we didn’t adopt Niva as a replacement, but she has been absolutely amazing. I guess this post was just a longwinded way of saying that I’m really thankful to God for our sweet pup and that we all love her a whole bunch 🙂
