About us
Hi, I’m Elina! I run Zeta Centauri with my husband, Tane, from our home in North Holland. We are a small kennel of Polish Hunting Spaniels. When I’m not thinking about dogs, I work as a behavioural science consultant and AI adoption and governance specialist. I have spent much of my career studying why people behave as they do, and I bring the same curiosity to dogs. I am particularly interested in behaviour, genetics, functional structure and early puppy development, all of which I also write about on my BusyDoggie blog.
Training and activities are a large part of our life with the dogs. I previously competed in agility with Grace and have competed with Astra since 2025. Tane started agility training in 2025 and made his competition debut with Grace in January 2026. We also train nosework actively with both dogs and incorporate hunting training into everyday walks and activities. For a better idea of our daily life with Grace and Astra, take a look at BusyDoggie on Instagram.
The kennel is inspired by Nell, the dog who changed how I understood dogs and what they need from us. Her original registered name was Zeta Centauri, meaning “the bright one”. Nell was my husband’s working cocker spaniel, and I met her when she was two. She was intense, loud, opinionated and not always easy to live with. Many of the approaches that were supposed to work with dogs did not work with her, and trying to understand why gradually changed how I looked at behaviour. She taught me to ask how a dog might experience a situation.
When Grace came into our lives in 2019, I started learning even more about dogs. Gradually, I started to think some of Nell’s challenging characteristics may have had their roots in her earliest experiences, and I wondered how life might have been different for her with a better start.
Eventually, I realised that although I could not make life better for every dog, I could perhaps make a small difference by giving a handful of dogs the best start I know how to give them. I could try to stack the odds towards minds and bodies that allow them to thrive, and help place them in families where life together is harmonious and joyful.
Grace had our first litter in 2023, and we kept her daughter Astra. Raising the puppies and following them as they have grown has been fascinating, especially seeing how characteristics from both sides of the family appear and recombine in six quite different dogs. Behavioural inheritance is one of the things I find most interesting about breeding, alongside the influence of early development and later experience.
We chose Polish Hunting Spaniels because we like what the breed is intended to be: a moderate, versatile hunting spaniel that can work closely with people and also live comfortably as part of a family. It is still a young breed with a small population, so maintaining health and genetic diversity requires careful choices. Working and show dogs have also not split into separate types, and many dogs do both.
We are actively involved in the Polish breed community. Since 2019, we have visited Poland eight times and taken part in our annual breed club show several times. I am the admin of both the international and Polish breed sites, and a general contact for international enquiries about the breed. Tane and I are also building the breed health database to bring together information about pedigrees, health testing, genetic diversity, longevity and other aspects of the breed. We hope it will make existing information easier to use and support better-informed breeding decisions.
You can read more about our breeding philosophy, meet Grace and Astra, or learn more about the Polish Hunting Spaniel. I have also written longer versions of how we found the breed and why the kennel carries Nell’s name on BusyDoggie.
And because life with spaniels is never serious…
