Who are we actually?
Let’s introduce ourselves.
We are Theo and Greet van de Veerdonk, we have been together for over 40 years and have been surrounded by dogs for just as long.
Greet grew up with dogs and, with the exception of her study-time, has always been surrounded by dogs.
Theo was drawn into this passion and has also adopted it.
We have always had several shelter dogs until our last one passed away in 1998.
Since our 4 children were still very young at the time, we decided not to get a dog anymore.
An intention that we obviously could not keep.
At that time, the shelters were full of dogs that we didn’t like and we decided to look for purebred dogs.
What were we looking for?
A loyal, intelligent and social dog that is energetic and highly trainable.
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 herding are our main sports although we have also done and still do a lot of walking/hiking, cycling and other activities.
We started breeding out of love for this breed. It soon became clear that this breed has a small gene pool. We know about more and more health problems in the race . And in our believing is this partly arising from a (too) small gene pool.
In 2008 we started to orientate on the working kelpie. These originally have the same ancestors as the Australian Kelpie. Since there are considerably more working kelpies than Australian kelpies, this is, in our opinion, 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 the working capacity.
In 2009 we purchased our first doubly registered Working/Australian kelpie.
Jelle was our first double registered kelpie and what an asset to our pack!
Totally different from the rest of the pack? That’s how you look at it. We saw a lot of similarities.
Sensitive, an enormous will to please, loyal and independent. Jelle has had a lot of input in our offspring. Meanwhile we have several double registered (WKC and FCI registered) kelpies.
We also consider the kelpie as one breed with 2 types.
