I’ve tied more knots in things over the last two days than I have since suture week at vet school. Knot after knot after knot after knot. But we have to: it doesn’t matter how brave your rescue attempt is or how fast you make it to the victim, if your knot bites it, so do you. So practice we did. I thought I would show you a couple of teaser pics from our water day.
This is Bobby, our willing disaster victim. Bobby routinely tumbles into rivers, falls down cliffs, and needs to be lifted from gullies. In his defense, he can’t see very well.
Xena, an actual dog belonging to the person who rented us the boat, had no idea what to think of Bobby.
And because our instructor is thorough, and also because we only had one fake dog to pull into the boat, we also practiced rescuing people. Because nothing is worse than an animal rescuer whose gets into trouble and none of the team knows what to do because he doesn’t have four legs.
As it so happens, I made a rather sizable mistake myself during my turn to be the rescuer, but because we were in this placid volcanic lake it resulted in nothing worse than embarrassment and a deeper understanding of why you always double check your buckles. I am learning a TON.
Sounds like there are a lot of important lessons, and practice no doubt makes things second-nature when real rescue is required 🙂