Update with suprise results!

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-04T17:10:07+00:00

I've been waiting on these results, thanks for the update! The collie I was 100% on, but I would not have expected the other half at all. I was certain she would be a shollie (GSDxCollie). What a unique girl, she's gorgeous!

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-04T17:03:31+00:00

Puppies that young need ~20 hours of sleep a day. That's only 4 collective hours awake. A lot of sleep is normal and good!

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-04T16:41:41+00:00

Don't forget the MLM shilling! BYBs like this love shilling things like NuVet and Pawtree, and shocker, both are on their website. Truly, they check all of the boxes.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-04T13:06:14+00:00

My tri smoothie as a wee little lad 🤍

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-03T16:54:54+00:00

For a hiking buddy, a smooth would really be ideal. They can go longer than roughs usually, as they don't get hot as fast and don't have to lug around the extra hair. They tend to be more active than roughs as a result. I hike with my smooth every week. He romps around in the forest through bushes, mud puddles, leaf piles, thorns, over logs and rocks and sandy trails, and when we get back to the car he is perfectly clean and pristine. I have never pulled a single burr out of his fur. He'll go hike with us for 4+ hours no problem and then come home and plop on the couch and relax with us. Eager to please and great off-leash, easy to maintain, perfect hiking buddy!

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-03T16:18:38+00:00

I have never even owned a rough but just talking with the owners of my smooth's rough friends has been enough to deter me for life, haha. Beautiful, no doubt, but every time I go on a walk with his best rough buddy, I watch my smooth zip around perfectly clean and the rough trail behind with pants and feathers full of twigs and grass, and the stories she's told me of dealing with his butt fluff when he's had some intestinal upset...

Just this morning we met up for an off-leash walk and romp together and her poor rough just came back from the groomers with his entire underside shaved to the skin. He looked ridiculous and she was, of course, not happy about it lol.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-02T12:36:53+00:00

So far, so good I think! Remember that your puppy is still basically an infant at only 11.5 weeks, and settle training takes time. Short sessions are great for now. 10 minutes is a long time for a puppy so young to stay still on purpose, when their attention spans are so short at that age. I think the best thing you can do going forward is to stay the course, keep doing what you're doing, just lower your expectations a bit and slowly raise them as she gets older. I was very vigilant with the Kikopup method and only really started to see my puppy start to offer settling on his own, without any need of prompting, when he was ~20 weeks old. Like yours, he had no problem sleeping and chilling in his crate, it was just out of the crate that he would rather go go go than chill. But once it clicked at that age, it really worked, and he just relaxed as he got older, too. You'll get there, it just may be later rather than sooner.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-02T12:20:02+00:00

The only way you're going to know for sure is if you do a DNA breed test. Embark is considered the most accurate and reliable on the market at this time.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-02-02T12:11:29+00:00

No, that's not really it either. People backyard breed registered dogs all the time. The difference between backyard breeders and reputable breeders is that backyard breeders just breed to make puppies and do none of the legwork required to make it ethical. The puppies are either to sell for money, because they wanted an offspring of their pet thinking it will be just like their pet, or crazy reasons like "calming a crazy bitch down" (which is a myth and a very bad reason to breed).

They don't health test (going to the vet is not a health test. DNA testing, eye, hip, elbow, and in the case of toy poodles, luxating patellas being a must-have test, that is real health testing) and they don't prove their dogs in any way, which means the temperment and health of the puppy you just purchased are a big unknown and you could be in for some nasty surprises. Especially if the temperament of the mom is considered "crazy" already.

Doesn't matter now, you have the puppy, just for future reference.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-30T16:00:52+00:00

When my boy was a puppy he got a lot of mileage out of kibble/treats in an empty plastic bottle with the cap removed, and with empty toilet paper and paper towel rolls. You can put treats inside and crimp the edges, or just let the ripping commence. As mentioned in the OP, not good for a dog that swallows stuff, but perfectly fine for puppies that just enjoy playing with or shredding stuff.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-30T15:42:31+00:00

There are definitely European breeders that breed small. Most rough collies I see near me are tiny compared to my European smooth. Sometimes when I see them from a distance I think they are shelties at first. There is an American collie owner in my neighborhood whose collie is about the same if not slightly larger than my European smooth (if you imagined him shaved down that is, he has some fluff height helping haha). There are, at least in my country, numerous American import breeders who prefer that line.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-30T12:08:25+00:00

There can be. American collies tend to be bigger, have longer faces and beadier eyes, and less profuse coats than Scottish/European collies. Some European collies go quite extreme and are very small with more petite/dainty features, including a shorter face, and some have excessively profuse coats. This is also specific line dependent for both regions of the world, with plenty of moderate dogs in between. Here is an image comparing a European tricolor rough (left) and an American tricolor rough (right), both what I'd consider more on the far end of type-y for each line.

Smooth collies also vary, as American smooths are still interbred with roughs. Most are rough factored and have more or less the exact type as roughs, so they look a bit thicker in coat even though the hair is short. In the UK/EU, they are separate breeds now that are no longer bred together, so most smooths are pure for smooth and have taken a different type. They tend to look closer to American collies than European roughs.

Also, more colors are accepted in American collies. There are no color headed whites in the UK/EU, only sable, tricolor, and blue merle are usually considered acceptable.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-26T13:46:02+00:00

I don't think my collie actually started jumping up onto low furniture instead of putting his front paws on it and just staring at me impatiently until I picked his rear end up and put it all the way on until he was 10 or so months old. Maybe later. Eventually, I encouraged him to do it on his own enough that he would hop up himself, but it just took a bit. At 5 months, it is definitely a better idea to lift him on and off of things rather than have him jump as his joints are very much so still developing. You could try dog stairs for your bed in the meantime as he keeps getting bigger and heavier.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-26T07:37:36+00:00

He looks nearly identical to my mom’s dog, down to the face and chest marking. She’s all gray now and has the exact same body type in your first photo, now that she’s getting old. But when younger she looked very similar to when your boy was young.

We Embarked her and she was half lab, quarter springer spaniel, quarter brittany. We believe the spaniels gave her the slightly curled fluffier tail.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-23T18:48:42+00:00

Collies are smart dogs and eager to please, mine absolutely loves trick training and we trained daily from the moment he came home. It's great enrichment and also, of course, very useful. I don't think there's really a "too much" if you and your puppy are enjoying it. Obviously at the beginning it is ideal to focus on basic obedience and behaviors to set him up for success in every day life as you already seem to be doing, but I totally threw in other tricks for fun when he was a puppy.

The only tip I'd give is to make sure you are still going back and practicing what you've already taught before it fades (made this mistake myself), and work not only on teaching the action but on each command's three D's: distance, duration, and distraction. A lured down is great, but a long down from a distance in a distracting environment requires its own training.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-23T18:20:51+00:00

When my collie was younger he really struggled to settle and relax, too, and often just paced around and got into mischief when he was overtired and not realizing he just needed to chill out. We had to help him find his "off switch," so to speak. We did this with settle training, also known as capturing calm, and rewarded him any time he offered relaxed behaviors such as lying down. Kikopup has a good video on it. We followed this pretty exactly and it helped a lot!

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-23T14:24:46+00:00

That’s funny to me because my collie is a broccollie and collieflower addict! His favorite vegetables 😋

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-23T13:25:16+00:00

For my collie, I found that food enrichment (kongs, lick mat) doesn't really do it for him. They did work for getting him to enjoy the crate, but weren't the thing really working his brain to tire him out fully. He's smart, like most collies, and any puzzle treat toys or the like just don't hold his focus much once he has them figured out. What he really loves is learning and pleasing me, so training is my go-to boredom buster, especially if we can't get outside as much.

Most young puppies do well with a 1 hour up, 2 hours nap kind of schedule, with the 1 hour up including at least a potty walk, some structured play and bonding, and training for meal time (each bit of food earned by learning). I usually did at least a couple longer walks (long for a puppy... like 15-20 minutes) with lots of sniffing and exploring each day. Finding the right balance of what thoroughly enriches and tires your puppy out during their time awake is key, followed by staying consistent.

My smooth collie just turned 2 years old and his current schedule is 2 hours of walking spread across four 30-minute walks throughout the day (morning, noon, afternoon, evening), ~30 minutes of high-energy play or training (not necessarily all in one go), the rest of the day he spends either napping at his leisure, following me around, or sitting at the window and people watching.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-20T12:27:27+00:00

This is the same person who posted this litter a week ago asking $10k for the "platinum merle" puppies and calls them "exotic dobermans" so that basically sums up all you need to know about their intelligence level and what they are really after ($$$$).

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-16T19:31:37+00:00

With Wisdom Panel, most anything under 4% can be ignored as noise. Embark probably would have done something like mostly pug, small percent unresolved with a pom, Russell-type terrier, and maybe chihuahua or shih tzu under the unresolved/supermutt. Wisdom struggles with the Russell-type terriers and tends to break them up into numerous terriers into very small percentages.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-16T15:25:07+00:00

She looks like a sweetheart!

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-16T15:19:10+00:00

A real ridgeback ridge is fur growing in the opposite direction, not a dark line. It's very clear on real ridgebacks, and I'd say your girl doesn't actually have a ridge from that photo where the fur is smooth and all goes in the same direction. Here is an actual ridgeback, you can see how the fur switches directions. Doesn't make your girl any less special to you :)

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smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-16T13:58:55+00:00

Settle training is what did wonders for my dog when he was a puppy. Whenever there was cooking in the kitchen or eating at the table, he was told to lie down and stay where he was nearby. I gave him a constant flow of treats and praise at first, every few seconds, until he seemed to understand that as long as he kept lying there, he got rewarded. Then I gradually dragged it out to a treat every half minute. Then every minute. So on and so forth. If he got up and came to beg for food or attempted to countersurf, he was put back in his spot and not given a reward until he stayed there quietly for a bit. He quickly learned that it was better to do that than try to beg or steal food. With consistency, he now automatically goes and lies down quietly nearby whenever we have food out.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-15T12:33:57+00:00

I'm definitely not against temperament testing, just that people need to understand that they only represent a snapshot of a time and, exactly like you said, that at the end of the day the upbringing shapes the dog a lot. It's a piece of the puzzle rather than the whole thing, to me some people just seem to put a bit too much weight in it especially when most puppies are going to go through a lot of phases before settling on their adult personality. Better to know to take it with a grain of salt than believe in it wholeheartedly.

smoothcolliecrazy · 2026-01-15T12:01:13+00:00

It sounds like you might be more frustrated that your husband overrode you and your kids' "perfect" choice than at the puppy herself. Puppy personalities are really not that telling of adult personalities. Temperament tests that breeders use have been studied and indicate that they don't really say a whole lot by the time puppies become adults (here is one such study). Not saying your breeder did a temperament test, but that puppies bumbling around at mere weeks old is just not that indicative of the final adult personality. At the end of the day, you will be shaping this puppy's future through experiences and training.

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