This will be long due to borzoi love… fair warning.
So many stories. So many memories.
My borzoi girl had not read all the dos and don’ts. She was fine with cats and small dogs - a smooth fox terrier brought her up! Barn cats were never in peril - in the winter they used to curl up against her to keep warm. She also did obedience, agility and was delighted with flyball as a new game when her bone cancer was discovered… 
When we did agility, she would gather lots of onlookers for her run - not because she was technically amazing and fast - far from it. Her turns were far too wide to make a lot of the course times and she overjumped everything - we almost always had time faults… clear on course, but time faults. Plus, she often liked to pause and strike a pose on top of the a-frame - with one WOOF! to make sure everyone noticed her! She knew she was being watched - and often got applause for this stunt. My friends told me that people looked to see when she was running and came to watch her because she was Happiness. Joy. Delight. She knew that the course - and the adjoining rings as well - was set up just for her to have fun with.
We finished a run at one trial that she decided included a top speed zoomie of the entire ring between the dog walk and the next jump… and a very well known agility competitor and judge came up to me as we left the ring and said she thought we were amazing… as THAT was what agility should be all about. The fun and the joy.
She ran coyotes off the property at top speed when we lived and worked on a ranch in the mountains… and was far too smart to let them bait her into following them into the bush where their numbers would have the advantage.
Once we moved, she was great at the dog park off leash with a 100% recall that I worked on from the time she was tiny. She would wade out into the river at the dog park and slowly lay down, serene and happy, luxuriating in the cool water while Labs and Goldens leapt and splashed around her… and over her… her tail floating on the current.
I set her ashes afloat at her favorite soaking place in the dog park.
She was not like many borzois - a bit aloof, not good off-leash or out of a yard, not good with cats etc. We were trailering horses through Idaho when she was still a pup - and a woman ran out of a shop when we stopped for gas and excitedly asked if that was a borzio puppy!
We laughed - and adopted that term for the rest of her life. She was a goofy, funny borzio - as opposed to a regal borzoi.
Here she is at a big outdoor agility trial years ago… [ATTACH=JSON]{“alt”:“Click image for larger version Name: 12697268_10154540692754392_2623644158095607225_o.jpg Views: 1 Size: 15.1 KB ID: 9833059”,“data-align”:“none”,“data-attachmentid”:“9833059”,“data-size”:“full”,“title”:“12697268_10154540692754392_2623644158095607225_o.jpg”}[/ATTACH]
and it actually sounds like an awesome cross that I could see some people doing on purpose!
