Trigger Warning - Sexual harassment/assault. The following video may not be suitable for children or young viewers; if you are watching as a family please skip from about 9:30 to 12:00 and have an adult pre-watch the video entirely before deciding what you feel is appropriate for younger viewers.

The story of us getting a puppy turns out to have been a complicated one, years in the making, but ultimately one of the happiest moments of our lives. We feel so grateful to get to welcome little Freja into our family and look forward to building a strong bond together. We haven’t had her long but I can already tell that she is going to be as fierce as her name suggests, full of fire and a deep desire to work every day and learn. She takes a nap for less than an hour and then bounces back as if her batteries are fully charged. If you’ve been watching us since the van build you probably saw this coming because Alfie was a special dog, but if you’re disappointed we didn’t start our pack of dogs by rescuing a dog from an animal shelter I hope this video will at least explain some of the thinking behind getting a working line German shepherd for personal protection. The working line has a number of differences to traditional German shepherds that I wasn’t able to explain in the video, but there’s a ton of information online about them if you’d like to learn more! We’ve already enlisted the help of a professional dog training program to get Freja ready for her role, and the progress she has been making is pretty incredible to watch. Our routine is still coming together (it's been a bit of a hurricane experience getting acclimated to having a puppy in our lives) but we typically spend 1-2 hours per day training her—starting with 5-10 minute sessions at first and then slowly building up to 30-minute chunks.

If the decision was entirely up to Dana, we would have rescued a dog instead by heading down to the humane society and finding a nice Maui mutt ; ) But for me, I really wanted to be 100% certain that our first dog would be up to the challenge of protecting our family—I grew up with rescue dogs, and while its an incredibly rewarding experience, not every rescue is suited for personal protection as a consequence of the trauma they may have suffered prior to ending up in a shelter. I’m hopeful that by starting our dog training education with a highly trainable dog like Freja we can gain the skills necessary to rescue less fortunate dogs in the future with a much higher chance of success.

Cheers,
Lou