Ellen

Founder at CIK9 & Critical Impact Flyball Team, Passionate Dog Lover & Artisan

I’ve lived with dogs all my life, from the moment I came home from hospital. My childhood was spent with Weimaraners and a Springer Spaniel up to the age of 12, when my Mum and Dad added our first bloodhound to the family. After a couple of years there were more Bloodhounds than humans in the house, they were smitten! My Mum had a successful showing career with the hounds and I used to accompany her regularly to shows up and down the country.

When Sam and I married he brought Dottie, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier to the family and we made the choice to add a Dogue de Bordeaux, a childhood dream of mine since watching Turner and Hooch over and over on VHS 
Barney was a dog in a million.

As we had children, they too had an immediate love for dogs and our eldest, Madi asked for a dog for her 6th birthday….this is when our first Border Collie, Kizzy, joined our family and 2 years later introduced us to the world of Flyball.

It didn’t take long for the whole family to become hooked on flyball, which saw us expand our family pets so they too could enjoy this exciting sport, we’ve taken in unwanted dogs and introduced them to a life of tennis balls and tuggys!!!

As we trained more dogs to be rewarded with tugs, some of the more enthusiastic dogs made short work of them! Rather than continually replacing we took a look at repairing some of these tugs. These repairs gave us some knowledge as to why they didn’t last as long as our dogs needed them to and we went on to develop our own style of tuggys…….and CIK9 was born.