1. Where did you get all your pets’ names?

sivi is named after a friend’s OC, who is a little boy who can turn into a dog. i always thought his name was really cute, but he was also one of my favorite characters.

disco is named after an alolan raichu i had. i just named it disco bc it’s the first thing i thought of, but i ended up actually liking it.

camazotz is named after the planet in a wrinkle in time. the creature IT possesses the minds of the people that encounter IT and their eyes turn red when IT’s in control. cam has red eyes!

wee beastie is named after leeuwenhoek’s name for microorganisms and i thought it was cute.

zamboni was named when i was doing walkthroughs at a middle school and heard a teacher giving a lesson on similes. one of her examples was something along the lines of, “the pizza was as flat as if it had been run over by a zamboni,” and not only was that simile hilarious, the word “zamboni” was hilarious and a perfect name for the rat i’d just brought home.

knives came from scott pilgrim, altho i never considered her “named after” knives chau. i just thought it was a sick name.

mighty just…came to me. i thought it was cute. also kind of came from mighty mouse, except…she was a rat…

other names i plan to use are: ender (ender’s game), novinha (speaker for the dead), and kiowa (the things they carried).

2. How did you discover Silken Windhounds?

the “mellow” factor was probably biggest for me. i’m very sleepy and love my naps. i just can’t with exuberant dogs. i can’t deal. but most of the breeds i was finding were either tiny and squash-faced, or gigantic (borzois, great danes, etc.). so i looked at greyhounds, but i wanted to get a puppy rather than an adult dog, which is hard to find in the breed. plus rescues are sooo picky about their applicants! so i looked at whippets, but they seemed a little high-strung, and oh how i wished they had longer hair! thus i found windsprites, but there were only a couple of breeders i could find info on and they were all very far away from me……..but looking into windsprites led me to silken windhounds, and BAM, just as i was certain they were the breed for me (i lurked on the fb pages for weeks, maybe months, and went out to an lgra meet to meet some silkens), someone posted on the fb puppy page saying she had a litter of 10 on the way–just 60 miles away from me.

3. What made you decide on a Silken Windhound?

i was originally obsessed with german shepherds, but after a long hard internal struggle, i had to face the facts: i was not a good fit for a gsd, and a gsd was not a good fit for me. so i made a list of all the traits i wanted in a dog and went from there. my list looked something like this: medium to long hair, medium size, low energy and mellow but happy to hike/bike/whatever, biddable, quiet, confident, 100% friendly toward other dogs, and able to easily go everywhere with me.

4. Why did you choose Sivi out of all his littermates?

i chose sivi because he was the only pup who consistently greeted me and wanted to interact with me when i visited. their breeder had a lot going on in her personal life and so the puppies got very little exposure to visitors and the outside world. i liked that sivi wasn’t afraid of me despite all that. the others were quite shy and would hide when i visited. even when i went to pick sivi up to take him home, he ran right up to me and sat down like he knew i was there to get him.

moon and rossi were both more cuddly, overtly loving dogs, which was why i adored them. but they were not as confident as sivi and i had my reservations about that. and i lucked out bc sivi turned out to be just cuddly enough for me!

i do prefer the idea of the breeder choosing FOR you, however. i made my decision based off of a few hour-long visits over the course of 7-8 weeks. i would have been interested to see who the breeder would have chosen for me had she reserved the right to make that decision. i love sivi, of course, and seeing moon again definitely reinforced my love for sivi, but truth be told, i didn’t know any of the puppies all that well when i made my decision.

at the same time, i truly loved every single puppy in that litter. i know who owns every one of the ten of them and where they are located (excepting meryx, who is somewhere in norcal–i haven’t even seen updated pics of him) and i have seen all but two of them again in person since taking sivi home. i spent so long deciding which would be mine that they all sort of felt like mine at some point. i had a special attachment to moon bc i kept him for a weekend to take him to a specialty show to try to help get him adopted. he was very very sweet (much sweeter than sivi lol), but sivi has a quality of independence, shrewdness, and aloofness that i find i actually really enjoy and even prefer over moon’s indiscriminate sweetness.

5. What are the pros/cons to owning a Silken Windhound?

i’ll answer to the best of my ability, but as i’m sure you’ve already assumed, sivi is an individual. he is as different from the typical silken as he is the same as the typical silken, so anything i say about his individual personality, you should know that not every silken will be like that. and i’ll try to include as many “cons” as i can, since i’m sure you’ll get mainly pros from other people you ask. silkens are really cool dogs.

i’ll start by speaking in general about the breed/sighthounds. i will say that when i first met silkens their personality seemed a bit “flat” to me. the reason being they were quite reserved with me, a stranger, and they made very little noise and movement compared to other breeds i’d seen. but they were mellow, and they were sweet, and those were the things i wanted most. as i met more of them, i began to see the subtleties in their personalities and saw that they were not lacking at all–it was me who had to adjust the way i was looking at these dogs. my dogs at home with my parents were a golden retriever, a terrier mix, and a maltipoo. these are all exuberant, smelly, sometimes noisy dogs that, more than anything in the world, want to be right next to you getting pet at all moments of the day. to me, that was how a dog showed its affection–squealing with delight when you come home, scooting up close, soaking up love and attention.

sivi was not like that. some silkens are, but most are not, at least not in the way that my terrier mix, oliver, is. adjusting to sighthounds was hard for about 6 months. sivi is an extremely independent dog, first of all. most silkens are really openly affectionate and cuddly; mine is not. i think a lot of my frustration with sivi was in thinking he didn’t really like me as much as my other dogs liked me. that wasn’t true–he just showed affection in a different way than other dogs. once i figured that out, we developed a crazy tight bond. sometimes, sivi just looks at me affectionately. sometimes him being somewhere he can see me is as satisfying to him as it is for my terrier to practically crawl into my lap. and i got better at showing him MY affection too. he didn’t want to roughhouse with me or be held. but he sure does love his “puppy massages”! and he sure does love napping with me.

now, training. everyone raved about what biddable sighthounds these dogs were. i wanted a dog to try obedience with, but i didn’t want a dog as driven and energetic as, say, a german shepherd (a breed crush of mine that i don’t know if i can ever actually own). i wanted a dog that would be food motivated and learn quickly. sivi is both of those things, but it wasn’t immediately clear to me because he didn’t work like oliver, or any of our existing dogs, for that matter. sivi is particular about how and when he works, and what food he’s getting as payment for that work. typical sighthound quirks, i’m told, but for me it was an adjustment. oliver wants to do everything i ask him to do at any given moment, and all just for a pat on the head or a “good boy”. sivi was prone to being too tired, too bored, or too picky to work whenever i wanted. so, i had to figure out how to motivate him, because the things i did with the other three dogs didn’t work with him. now he works VERY well and is very smart, and he likes to work for me. he’ll even tell me off if he knows it’s the usual time we work and i’m still eating dinner. our mentor at obedience class mentioned that we have an “incredible bond”, and not just once. it seems whenever she introduces me to anyone, she has to tell them how lovely my dog is and how bonded we are. it’s probably the most important compliment i’ve gotten in the past year.

a bit of a side note, though still related to training: sivi was a NAUGHTY puppy, probably the naughtiest i’ve ever had. this is not typical of a silken, but nevertheless, he was naughty. he’s STILL a devious little bastard. that too was hard to get used to, because our other dogs would never dream of breaking a rule. they would be devastated to have anyone mad at them. to sivi, rules are just guidelines, only to be followed at his discretion. he will still try to dig in the yard and counter surf if you don’t watch him very closely. you can tell him to leave something alone 100 times, and he never will until you either put it away, or he wins. maybe that’s common sense to some people, but our other three dogs were never like that. you told them no, leave it, and they said, ok! meanwhile, sivi will sometimes look right at me as he does something he knows is wrong. as you can imagine, potty training with him was a nightmare. he’d hold it for 5+ hours when he was only 10 weeks old just for the chance to pee on a blanket or dog bed. again, not at all typical of a silken, and one of the things i hated most about sivi’s puppyhood. he was still having accidents at 8 months, and when i traveled this summer, he acted out in true sivi fashion by peeing in the kitchen. oliver was potty trained in a day, so this was unfathomable to me. my parents would tease me because i was such a fanatic about dog training at the time and they would be like, well how come you can’t teach your own puppy to pee outside? i found this really embarrassing and frustrating haha. but we got through it, and now looking back i know i handled it all the wrong way. i was treating sivi like he was oliver, and he wasn’t oliver.

so i guess to summarize: i had very little exposure and experience with sighthounds in general when i got sivi, so there was a learning curve for sure. however, now that i understand him better and have changed the way i approach things with him, things are so much better. i love the shit outta that dog, and he adores me too. anyway, thanks for asking this, because it was nice to look at the past year with sivi critically and see how far we’ve come. no matter how much you research, how much you prepare, there will be things you weren’t ready for. but then it’s all okay in the end.

6. Is Sivi related to any other Silkens on Tumblr?

@scoretheearth (now deleted and on insta: vesperteener) owns sivi’s littermate, vespertine. other than that, there’s not much of a relation there between sivi and any tumblr dogs.

7. Who are all these other dogs in your house?

houston: 11 yr old golden retriever

oliver: 9 yr old wheaten terrier mix with PRA

zoe: 3 yr old maltipoo

they all belong to my parents, altho i have a very close bond with oliver. he is forever my heart dog. <3

all three of them have their own tag, so feel free to look ‘em up.

8. Who is Sivi’s breeder?

none of your business. :) she won’t be having any other litters anyway.