Kira the Akbash

Meet Kira, the Akbash. We adopted her from the Idaho Humane Society. The story of how we got her can be found here.

• Unlike most Akbash, Kira is not very independent. She has started to whine in one or both of our absences this week.
• She knew how to sit and shake on command when we brought her home. She may know several other tricks that we don't know the prompts for. Since then, we've taught her how to lay down and play dead as well. She learned these tricks in a day or two. Right now we're working on "back-up" which has only been somewhat successful
• We read that her breed needs a job or another form of intellectual stimulation if they are relegated to small spaces or they begin to display problematic behavior. We've followed a suggestion to allow her to direct our walks in order to keep her stimulated. We take her on walks at least three times a day. We take her to the dog park at least two-three times per week. And we take her hiking at least once a week.
• Unlike her breed she's interested in other dogs. Sometimes she randomly barks at other dogs on walks. At 106 pounds, her barks are pretty intimidating.
• At the dog park, she's kind of awkward. We don't think she has been socialized very much. She tries to play with other dogs but doesn't seem to understand how to. When playing with her, we've realized she likes to be chased. At the dog park she'll run up to another dog hoping to be chased and they'll just stand there. She's ran in a pack twice. When the other dogs changed direction she stood there confused as other dogs rammed into her.
• She spends most of her days sleeping. At first this worried us but we read it's normal for large dogs to sleep 16-18 hours per day.
• She tires out easily. On walks she'll sometimes lay down in a shaded area forcing us to take us a break. We read her breed is low energy and they prefer to save their energy for a time when they may need it to fend off an attack.