Full of love and energy throughout her 15 years of life, Tekla’s legacy is OneMind Dogs.
In 2003, Finnish agility expert Janita Leinonen and her six year old border collie Tekla were in peak form. But over a few weeks, Tekla's responsiveness started to falter and soon she stopped responding to even the most basic commands. One day she didn't even notice Janita arrive home. A trip to the vet confirmed that, for no obvious reason, Tekla had become deaf.
Devastated, Janita wanted to keep working with her beloved border collie, so she started to look at other ways to communicate with her. After months of observing and learning from Tekla, she started to understand what was going on in her dog’s mind, both in everyday life, and on the agility course. Janita realized that Tekla automatically understood a lot of her body language. Then she started testing the silent techniques with other dogs - and her dog Cosmo, who could hear perfectly well, improved his speed on the agility course by three seconds! Janita knew she was onto something special - and so began the OneMind Dogs story.
Nobody noticed that Tekla was deaf
Janita started using her new techniques in her training sessions for agility students, using Tekla as a demo dog in puppy classes. An hour into the class, she would ask her students if they noticed anything different about Tekla. Her students never noticed that Tekla was deaf! Always the model agility dog, she was in perfect connection with Janita.
The power of silence
Whenever Janita and Tekla competed in agility contests, the whole arena would fall eerily silent. People stopped talking, and dogs even stopped barking, as Janita and Tekla worked their wordless magic.
Tekla’s legacy
After Tekla became deaf she kept excelling in competition, with a higher percentage of clear rounds than when she could hear!
Thanks to her, Janita learned to listen and the OneMind Dogs method spread around the world.
Janita says: We started slowly, with trial and error. I have always believed that everything happens in life for a reason. I can’t even imagine the state agility would be in Finland right now, without Tekla’s deafness. It launched major changes in agility handling and training, which over the years have proven to have a huge impact on Finnish agility. I’m grateful that I had the privilege of owning a dog as special as Tekla.