Raven’s First Birthday

Raven

Today is Raven’s first birthday.  I don’t actually know when her birthday is, but she was approximately five months old when she came to me seven months ago, so I am picking 5/21 as her birthday.  Besides being her birthday, we have achieved the milestone of seven months of not dying because of Raven.  She hasn’t, so far, burned the house down or knocked me out with a large stick, though not for lack of trying.  She hasn’t dragged me in front of a car.  I feel like, if she hasn’t killed me yet, I stand a better chance of surviving her puppyhood now that she is past the one year mark and possibly showing some signs of being less crazy.

I think Raven’s craziness may make her the best search dog I have ever worked with.  She certainly has skill and drive.  She loves search training, and I feel that she is farther along, at this stage in her training, than any other dog I’ve worked with.  Actually, her main problem is that she has too much enthusiasm for searching, and she tires herself out by pulling so hard.  I think she will improve in this regard. We will continue to challenge her, and expose her to new problems and situations.

With each new search dog I have trained, I have told myself that I would keep complete and accurate records of that dog’s training and search career.  I have failed in that goal every time.  I am doing much better with Raphael, but still his record has a few gaps where I didn’t record enough observations.  So far, I have video from every training session with Raven, and there is still the possibility that I can achieve my goal of 100% documentation of her career.

The other issue with Raven is that I want her to have a full career, which means i need to stay in shape to work with her as her handler for the next 12 years.  This is a good thing, good motivation for me.  It means I can’t retire any time soon.  I want Raven to have a great career for her sake, because search work is enjoyable for the dog, if you do it right.  I also want to her to have a full, and fully documented, career for the sake of using her as an example in teaching.  Mu has had a long and well-documented career.  I have notes and stories about hundreds of his searches.  However, I don’t have a complete database of his searches where I could definitively say he worked x number of searches and had a success rate of this exact percentage.  The best I can say is that he worked more than 1200 searches and found more than 300 cats, but not a precise number.  With Raven, I have another chance to aim for precision in her records.

Of course, Raven is also beautiful and funny, and I plan to have thousands of pictures and videos of her, both in her work and playing and resting.  She is beautiful.  She does remind me of Kelsy every time I look at her, even though she really doesn’t look that much like Kelsy.  Every once in a while, from a certain angle, I will get a picture of her that looks very much like Kelsy.  Raven will be her own person, and I won’t compare her to Kelsy.  In personality, she is much more like Mu, a troublemaker who keeps me on my toes.

I loved Raven the moment I met her.  I’m going to love her all of her life, even if for some reason it turns out that she won’t be a search dog after all.  We are going to have a great life together, of that I am sure.