Freya

Freya is where Nachtwald starts. We chose her from a German litter in 2015 for the ages in her pedigree: both grandmothers past eleven, and a great-grandsire who worked until ten. Germany stopped cropping and docking long before she was born, so she has the ears and tail she arrived with. She gave us three litters. Her daughter Vera, her granddaughters Dahlia and Fable, and her son Cairo are all still here or close by. She earned her IPO1 and her ZTP back when the sport still carried that name, and she was spayed and retired at six. She turns twelve in November. The photos here are from her working years, because that is how we still see her. The muzzle is grey now. Her April Holter, at eleven, showed fourteen single VPCs in 24 hours with no couplets or runs, and her echocardiogram is normal for her age. We keep testing her every year, because a breeding dog's heart results matter most after her breeding days are over. Freya carries one copy of vWD and one copy of the DCM2 variant. She is the reason we tell buyers that a gene test is a small piece of information, and a twelve-year-old Dobermann asleep in the sun is a large one.