Three times in as many weeks, other dog owners have remarked to me that I’m being unfair, if not cruel as far as Tess is concerned. “It’s too much for her” they said, “Why does she have to be out with me all day?”. “Should a dog be forced to cope with so much work and training?”. “How can she be expected to work such long hours in all conditions and in every kind of environment?”.

Of vital importance in any on-going search and rescue operation is a search dog’s trained ability to find , even at night, any possibly lost or discarded items, such as clothing, shoes, jewellery or even mobile phones that might belong to, for example, a missing child or an elderly person suffering from dementia, but who has well and truly wandered off with the weather fast closing in.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility after all, that such items could easily reveal important clues as to the missing person’s probable whereabouts. Surprisingly however, search dogs usually need to be taught to look routinely for things that might be located well above their own eye-level as well as in all those awkward to get to places on the ground!

Mmm….Well, maybe they’re right and I should limit Tess to no more than an hour or less of stick-throwing, frisbee-catching or ball-chasing every day like any normal dog. She certainly enjoys that kind of thing, but then, she already does one or other (plus her favourittist thing of all….swimming) during her lunch-break. Plus, what would she do for the rest of the day….Stay at home all by herself presumably! I don’t think so. Besides, she howls and cries by the front door for hours if I go out in my work clothes without her and I’m certain she’d go completely insane inside of a fortnight!

Here, a very happy and willing Tess (basically because it’s yet another chance to be in the water) practises retrieval in a small, though quite fast-flowing and ice-cold section of river on the water-logged and potentially tricky Wiltshire Downs.

Perhaps she could come with me anyway, but only be restricted to walking by my side well away from any freezing water, rocky slopes, bramble patches or other potentially life-threatening hazards. At least the walking by my side part of it would reduce the number of miles she covers in any given day by at least half, thus protecting her from getting terminally knackered!

Searching for items (or even bodies) in freezing cold water in all conditions, in any environment and at any time of the year is perhaps one activity virtually designed with the incredibly resilient and hardy Labrador in mind, whereas a dog, such as the notoriously aggressive and dangerously unpredictable Pit-Bull Terrier, despite being the preferred breed and affectation of the “look at me, I own a Pit-Bull Terrier so I must be ‘ard” type of social inadequate so prevalent in our society today, wouldn’t last so much as a morning doing this kind of work….It would be like expecting their owners to be able to yomp fifty miles overnight across trackless terrain behind enemy lines with seventy or eighty pounds of kit on their backs….It just ain’t gonna happen! You see, being insecure enough to feel such a desperate need to appear (or even actually be) “hard and aggressive” and being “tough and courageous” enough to be able to do a very demanding and difficult job under the most hazardous of conditions are two completely different things evolved over countless millennia from two very different places in the emotional spectrum. Oops, almost got carried away there. Nearly went into rant mode….and after trying so hard to avoid passing any kind of comment at all on the many illegal-type Pit-Bull Terriers still in circulation (let alone some of their dim-witted owners) following the incredibly horrific and utterly pointless death of that poor little four year-old boy last week in the jaws of his family’s totally illegal Pit-Bull!

Look….I do appreciate people’s concern, but they have to understand that Tess is a Labrador….a working Labrador in fact and that like any other breed of working dog, such as the amazing Spaniel or Border Collie breeds, she was bred for a life out of doors. We acquired her from a litter born to a pair of typically small, gun-dog Labradors working for their keep on one of the big country estates close to where we live. The breed is world-famous for being immensely tough physically, utterly brave and steadfastly stoic under all conditions. Add to that the fact that Tess is outrageously bright and enormously keen to rise to any challenge thrown at her and you might begin to understand that, if she was suddenly denied the chance to accompany me on a workaday basis and do all the things that have been required of her since she was knee-high to Poodle poo, then she just wouldn’t understand it and probably become very, very depressed as a result.

From higher altitude mountain or hillside scrubland to low-level flood plain, training for Tess continues in as wide a variety of environments as possible.

The thing is, Tess and I are a team and I know that’s the way she sees it too. Her loyalty to me is unquestioning and, without trying to sound overly dramatic, I would risk my life for her without a moment’s hesitation! In fact, the problems we’ve encountered while out and about in the past have rarely been of our own making and could just as easily have happened to us at any time on any ordinary walk in the countryside.

The fact that she was working at the time had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Tess….from wide awake and ready to take on the world first thing in the morning to totally knackered and fast asleep with her head resting on my arm as I do my paperwork in the evening. Life is undoubtedly very demanding for this little dog, but I know for a fact that she wouldn’t have it any other way!

The fact is that there’s no way that you can force a dog to work as hard as Tess does day-in, day-out unless it totally wants to. Tess does what she does because she loves doing it and to deny her the kind of life she has loved from the outset now would, I believe, be the absolute cruellest of things to do! Basically, I recognise in Tess the ability to be a kind of Royal Marine of Dogs, in other words “99.9% simply need not apply!”.