Welcome K9 Chava!!!
We want to spend a minute recognizing the newest member of our team, K9 Chava. Chava has a unique story and we are excited to share it with you. Everything from her name to her story caught our attention.
Chava is an approximately 1.5 year old Belgian Malinois. Although she only weighs 40 pounds, all 40 of those pounds are full of love and happiness. Chava came to us from California. She was a stray for a period of her life and was ultimately rescued by a group called Woof Project. Woof Project does a great job of fostering dogs, and has a specific focus on Belgian Malinois. They place the dog with a foster while they work on finding an adoptive home for it. We stumbled across their add, right when we were beginning to look at adding new canines to our team, to replace our soon to be retiring canines. After many conversations, the consensus was that she seemed to be everything we were looking for. In fact, we had a hard time understanding how she had not been adopted already.
Chava came with her name, and we see no reason to change it. The name has two different backgrounds. The spanish background is pronounced more phonetically and to my understanding has a meaning of “young girl”. The other form of the word is a hebrew, and pronounced more like Ha-Va. The name in hebrew means “Life”, and was also the name of Eve in the Bible. It is derived from the word chavah, which means “to give life”, or “to live”. Naturally they are both fitting. I was especially drawn to the hebrew form because I feel she was given a second chance through Woof Project. In addition, now that she is part of our Search and Rescue program, she has the opportunity to help save life.
We have now been getting to know Chava for about one week. She has surpassed all of our expectations thus far. She has a strong drive to work, and is a quick learner. She is full of energy and about as bouncy as a young kangaroo. She is very sweet. She starts her training in the same way all of our pups do, with obedience. She will quickly progress to new skillsets.
When I went to pick her up, I was equal parts excited and nervous. Excited for this new adventure and nervous about the unknown. We have always been good about trying to prevent any possible negative exposures, that could affect their future work. Obviously with Chava, there will always be a phase of her life that we won’t know. However, she has completely put my feeling on this to rest. She is ready to move forward and so are we. Follow us for more updates on Chava as she starts this training process.
Chava welcome to the team, you are already great!
