The Book of Raven

I plan to talk about my new puppy until people are sick of me and tell me to shut up already.

The Book of Raven

So, I have a puppy, now.

It’s something I have often thought about, but I really wasn’t looking for one.  Most of the dogs I have acquired in my life were unwanted, discarded by someone.  After Viktor died, of course I missed him, but I still had four dogs, which is plenty.  It’s not like I was actively pursuing the idea of getting a fifth dog. I certainly would never think of going out and buying a puppy from a breeder.

The trouble is, Google has me listed as a shelter.  Three Retrievers Lost Pet Rescue is a service that finds lost pets, but there are very few businesses of that nature, so there is no category for what I do.  They either lump me together with shelters or groomers or dog walkers, which is not at all what we do.  Probably ten times a day I get calls for people wanting shelter services.  They want to surrender dogs and cats.  They are looking for their lost pet and they want to come to our facility to see the lost pets, but we don’t have a facility because we are not a shelter.  I’ve had people give me bad reviews because we are not a shelter like Google says we are, but I never said we were a shelter!  My web page describes our services, and states clearly that we are not a shelter, but many people don’t read that part.

I usually don’t answer the phone because I get more calls from telemarketers and people looking for a shelter than I get from people who actually want help finding their lost cats and dogs.  I rely on the contact form to make that connection with people who really need our services, and also I go back and listen to voicemail to see if any of the calls are actually for me.  On Wednesday morning, October 18th, I answered a call, I don’t know why.  The woman said she had a black lab puppy that just showed up at her house 2 months ago, and she didn’t know what to do with her.  The local animal control wouldn’t take her because they had no space.  She had posted in the area and online about the puppy, but no one claimed her.  She needed to surrender the dog.

Although I don’t usually help with that sort of thing, (our nonprofit for stray dogs is designed to help dogs wandering loose with no known owner, not dogs in someone’s possession that need to be surrendered) I said I would see what I could do.  Maybe I could connect her with a rescue that would like to help in that situation. Could she text me a picture of the dog?  At 11:24 AM, she texted me a picture of the puppy, and I was done.  This girl looked so much like Kelsy that I just ached.

I have thought of Kelsy every single day since she died.  Kelsy is my constant companion, my secular saint.  I talk to her all the time.  She is with me in a sort of virtual reality, but without the goggles.  She is there like my shadow.  I was not looking for a replacement for Kelsy because she never really left.

When I saw a picture of the puppy, they had named her Bird, I immediately pictured her playing with my dogs, going to the beach, learning to be a search dog, having a great career, and being my companion for her entire life.  Although I probably could have found someone who would adopt this beautiful girl, I can’t think of anyone who would appreciate her and build a great life for her like I would.

Before Tino and I went to pick her up, I didn’t have any doubts that she would live the rest of her life with me, but if I had had any doubts, they would have evaporated when she jumped into my arms as if we were old friends.  How could it be possible that someone would lose this dog, or dump her?  I guess some people just aren’t prepared to fully appreciate an energetic puppy.

Tino and I went to a nearby park with the puppy.  She played with Tino right away, and she chased him when I threw the stick for him.  We played for an hour.  I didn’t dislike the name Bird, or Birdie, but I wanted something less generic.  I started to think of black birds, and it wasn’t long before I settled on Raven.  I love ravens.  She came home and met the pack.  While they weren’t exactly happy to see her, they didn’t mind too much.

Raven has been with us five days, and I have taken more than 400 pictures and videos of her.  I started a journal for Raven on that first day, and I have kept notes of things like her vet visit, and what we did on that day.  I definitely loved Kelsy every day of her life.  I gave her a good life, and I appreciated her.  I’m certain that I told her I loved her.  It wasn’t until after Kelsy died that I fully appreciated that she was something special, something more.  I think it was because she was my work partner, because we went everywhere together.  Also, because I was Kelsy’s handler, it was my job to pay attention to her, to read her body language, to be tuned into her.  When she died, I thought I would just grieve like I had when I had lost Tess and Porter before her.   They were great dogs and I loved them.  The loss of Kelsy was something orders of magnitude greater.  It was such a loss that I really could not let go of her, and so she has been with me ever since.  Kelsy is just present with me.  After Kelsy was no longer with us physically, I regretted not having more pictures of her, and better quality pictures. I also wished I had kept better notes about things we did.  Because Tino came along right when Kelsy died, I have tens of thousands of pictures of Tino.  I also have great records of most of the searches we have done together, but there are some gaps in the records of Tino’s work. Tino’s life has been and will be heavily documented.  Raven’s life will be even more heavily documented, hopefully completely and throughly.

I’m fairly certain Raven will be a search dog, and a very good one.  If she tells me that she absolutely does not want to be a search dog, then I will be happy to have her sleep on the couch all day and go on other adventures.  From what I have seen of her in the first five days, I think she will have the qualities of a great search dog.  When I teach classes on how to train and use a search dog, I tell my students how important it is to have complete records of their training and their official searches.  You need to learn from these experiences so you can do better in the future.  My records of Tino’s training and work history are not 100% complete.  Raven offers a new opportunity to really keep track.  In fact, yesterday she came to training with us.  She didn’t actually train in the sense of find dogs or cats, but we tested her out on a cat to see her reaction.  I think it is enough positive interest that we could work with it.  She is definitely interested in other dogs, and I think she will have a drive to find them. Please watch this video of her first day at training.

Because Kelsy has been on my mind, or in my mind, every day for more than seven years after her death, I have been thinking about how people, including dogs, because dogs are people, can be remembered after they die.  Kelsy is also a character in my fiction writing.  In my previous novel, The Retrievers of Useless Bay, Kelsy is a search dog with a microchip in her brain, and she communicates directly with her human handler.  The Kelsy of my novel is basically a dog/AI hybrid.  In the subsequent novel, which I have been working on for years, Kelsy is alive again decades in the future.  Because her mind was largely contained on a microchip, the data on that chip could be uploaded to a new chip in a new dog, a black Lab that was going to be euthanized because a brain anomaly.  In my fiction, Kelsy lives forever.  I’m also working on another novel where Kelsy and her human live for 10,000 years, and the story follows them as they work to preserve a forest in a healthy state for 10,000 years.  Kelsy and her human are the guardians of a forest, the stewards of an ecosystem .

It’s not really science fiction for a person to be digitally preserved.  People are doing it now, and someone can live on after their death as an avatar. There are commercial services to help you do this. I would hope that Raven would live at least 15 years, and in that time, the technology will be developed so that a person, including a dog, can be digitally preserved as an avatar, and potentially someday be uploaded into a very lifelike robot body.  Within my lifetime, perhaps the technology will only be able to make a good digital avatar, and not a physical copy.  Either way, it is very likely that when Raven dies someday, I will be able to keep her with me as a digital copy.  At the very least, I can write about her, and then in the future I can view my pictures and videos of her and read my writings.  Because I often wish I had a better written and pictorial record of Kelsy, I can only assume that I will someday want the maximum amount of preserved memories of Raven.

Just before Raven came along, I got a new iPhone 15 Pro Max.  It takes great pictures and videos.  Also, it has many ways of recording and preserving data.  I can do voice to text, so it is easier than ever to keep written notes.  I can make voice memos.  There are dozens of apps I could use to keep great records of Raven.  In her first five days, I have documented her life in granular detail.  I don’t think it would be that hard to preserve memories of every day of Raven’s life. It’s a good thing I opted for the full terabyte of storage on my new phone.

I want to earn this puppy. I want to deserve this goodness that has fallen into my life.  Since I am adopting her, I want to give her the best life possible.  Of course, I love her madly, because how could you not.  I will do everything I can to make sure she has a long and happy life, and I will document her life as a search dog so that I can improve our ability to find lost pets.  I will also document her life so that she can be digitally preserved in some form or another.  Raven is a forever dog, not just in the sense that I would keep her and care for her for her entire life.  Of course I would do that.  I plan to chronicle this puppy’s life in detail, so that she will never die.  By the end of her life, that data I collect about her would fill a bookshelf.  Raven will be the most documented dog in the history of the world.  The Book of Raven will be dozens of volumes. Or many terabytes on a chip or in the cloud.

I won’t make you read all of it.  I will probably talk about Raven in this newsletter inordinately much, but I will try to condense it and just give you the highlights, and the cute pictures.  I hope you will enjoy reading about Raven a fraction as much as I plan to enjoy living with her and working and playing with her.  She has been wonderful in the first five days.  I plan to build her into a great dog, living life to the fullest.  I hope some of you will come along on this journey with us.