On seeing Madi's puppies from her first litter we decided we would keep a female from the litter, the puppy we selected was Jodi, she is a large female of good sound construction, her two major faults as far as showing is concerned are (1) her coat colour has a brown haze and (2) she does not have good movement, she tends to pace a lot. Bearing this in mind we did not keep her for showing, if we had been able to it would have been nice but not our priority, we wanted another dog we could use to add to our therapy visiting dogs. At the age of 6 months 2 days Jodi was Assessed and passed as a therapy visiting dog, at that time she was the youngest dog to be passed as a therapy dog. The rules have now changed regarding the minimum age and length of ownership a dog can be assessed at.  

Starting her visiting at a local Residential Care Home where she would rotate her visits with her mother Madi and Uncle Heiko she was an instant hit with the residents who were fortunate to see her from starting her visits as a gorgeous fluffy 6 month old puppy.  Her weekly visits were eagerly awaited by all - except the Matron who was not a dog person at all, when she saw any of our dogs visiting she would take a short detour to avoid us. After a few months the Matron was a little more tolerant in that she did not avoid the dogs, she was ok as long as she was one side of her desk and they the other, this was still a big improvement.

When giving a talk at a school all the children in the hall fell in love with Jodi, she just sat on the floor next to them while they all gave he big hugs, like her mother Jodi has fantastic temperement and is another great ambassador for the breed while doing her therapy work.

We have only had one litter from Jodi, not long after her litter had gone off to their new homes she started to show signs of limping on one of her back legs, x-rayed showed a badly damaged hip, this was probably caused during mating. A hip replacement operation was performed and within a very short time she was back to normal running around the fields, Jodi continued to run and play in the fields right upto the time of her deat when she was just over 8 years 4 months old. He sudden death hitting us harder than any of our previous dogs as we were not expecting this at all.