Who are we really
Let us introduce ourselves.
We are Theo and Greet van de Veerdonk, together for over 40 years and surrounded by dogs for just as long.
Greet grew up with dogs and, with the exception of her student days, has always been surrounded by them. Theo was drawn into this passion and adopted it too.
We have always had several shelter dogs until our last one died in 1998.
Since our 4 children were very young at the time, we decided not to get another dog. A resolution we obviously could not keep.
This time, we decided to focus on pedigree dogs.
What were we looking for? A loyal, intelligent and social dog that is energetic and easy to train. And preferably short-haired.
We soon came across the Australian Kelpie and in 1999 we picked up our first Australian Kelpie.
A great breed that we do a lot of dog sports with.
Agility, mantrailing and sheep herding are our main sports although we also did and still do a lot of walking/hiking, cycling and other activities.
Out of love for this breed, we started breeding . It soon became clear that this breed has a small gene pool.
There are also more and more health problems. In our opinion, these are partly caused by a (too) small gene pool.
We started looking at the working kelpie in 2008. These originally have the same ancestors as the Australian Kelpie. As there are considerably more working kelpies than Australian kelpies, we believe this is the basis for expanding the gene pool. And with an expansion of the gene pool, you can also work on the health of the breed and on maintaining working ability.
In 2009, we purchased our first dual registered Working/Australian kelpie.
Jelle was our first double registered kelpie and what an addition to our pack !
Totally different from the rest of the pack? That’s how you look at it. Above all, we saw many similarities.
Sensitive, an enormous will to please, loyal and independent.
Jelle has had a lot of input in our offspring.
We now have several dually registered (WKC and FCI registered) kelpies.
We also consider the kelpie as one breed with 2 types.
All our puppies have FCI pedigrees some also have Working Kelpie Counselling pedigrees.
For our dual registered kelpies (FCI and WKC) we have a separate website under the kennel name we have with Working Kelpie Counselling: kataas!
kataaskelpies.nl
