More on CCI & the dogs

Some quick notes about the program.

CCI's headquarters are in Santa Rosa, CA, outside of San Francisco.

CCI's dogs all come from their own breeding program.  The have about 120 breeding dogs currently and there are always some of the puppies turned in for graduate training who are used for breeding stock for the future.  All others are spayed or neutered.

All the breeding stock lives in comfort in various homes throughout the San Francisco area - with in 90 miles of Santa Rosa, so when a lovely lady goes into heat, there's always a lucky fellow who gets the nod.

As for the names - we still don't know the origin of Leeta's name & we may never know, but I'll keep looking.  Puppies are named through approval from the national office.  The names come form various sources.  Firstly, each puppy in a litter always gets a name with the same first letter as the rest of its litter mates.  That means Leeta's litter all started with "L."

We have no ideas what the others are at this time, but we know she's one of eight in her litter.  There may be others in her littler waiting to graduate next class here in Orlando and some may have graduated in the other regions at the same time Leeta was.  We'll check the website in the upcoming weeks to see.

The actual names can be suggested by the people who take care of the breeding stock, can be suggested by National and are sometimes named because of a nice donation at the right time.  Others are named for companies who donate as well (such as Ballard).  Dogs can share a name with another CCI dog, but only when the original dog retires from work.  So in our class, there was a Rossie II and a Ford V among others.  

Since there are around 600 CCI puppies born every year, the name list is a long one indeed, though all the puppies who don't make it through advanced training can share their name with a working dog eventually.

That's probably how Leeta got named - an unusual name to come up with when all the common "L" names were occupied.  One other thing, a name cannot be confused with a command either, so no "Joe" (go), "Kit" (sit), "Fred" (bed), etc (well technically Etc could be a name...)