This year Crufts focused on dog welfare including how to groom and care for your dog. Medical Detection Dogs did a demo and there was some work by UK sniffer dogs – emphasising how important getting your dog to use their nose can be!
Did you watch Crufts?
I couldn’t go again this year, so I was delighted to be able to watch Channel 4’s coverage.
This year the focus was on dog welfare and there were lots of presentations and short clips to help dog owners across the country look after their dogs better and make them happy and content.
One clip talked about the importance of handling your dog regularly, checking their eyes, ears, and mouth, checking all over their body and legs and emphasising the importance of teeth cleaning. Just as we teach everyone who attends our Perfect Pet courses.
Talking about handling your dog and grooming
Another short session talked about grooming and caring for your dog’s coat properly and encouraging every puppy owner to take their dogs to the groomer around 12 weeks of age. They don’t need a groom of course at that point – it’s all about getting them used to the sights, sounds, smells and equipment.
And I was delighted to see a demonstration by Medical Detection Dogs, our Down Dog charity. It showed these wonderful dogs demonstrating their skills. These dogs can detect diseases such as various cancers and Covid. Other dogs alert people with certain diseases to take action to protect or treat themselves, for example, telling diabetics when they are about to suffer dangerously low blood sugar, and alerting people with a condition known as POTS, a disease where people can faint suddenly and possibly damage themselves, and many others.
There was also a short clip about the work of UK sniffer dogs, where they emphasised how beneficial it is for dogs to use their noses and engage their brains in sniffing out particular scents – and the 5 month old dachshund puppy they used in the demonstration was just gorgeous!
Dogs love to play scent games
Down Dog encourages everyone to play scent games with their dogs. You’ll marvel at their amazing abilities and you can have great fun with these games. Our Nose Nerds programme not only helps you teach your dog to become brilliant at sniffing out different scents in all sorts of situations, but there’s also puzzles and an adventure story for the humans to enjoy too.
There are many dog sports shown at Crufts, including Rally. Rally is a fun dog sport that can be enjoyed by owners and dogs at all levels of training. We hold two Rally classes a week.
Both Nose Nerds and Rally are part of our Devotee membership, but you can come and have a taster of both of these at our Introduction to Rally and Nosework sessions at our Down Dog base. You’ll spend half the time finding out about Rally and the other half marvelling at your dog’s scenting ability.
It costs just £25, and you can book your place here – there are limited places available. (NB If you are already booked on our PiiP course you get this as part of that course anyway – please don’t book it as extra!)
We’d love to see you there.
Keep training and stay safe,
Carol
PS Huge congratulations to Baxer, the flat coat retriever who won Best in Show – great dog. And wonderful too, to see a Border Collie in the final. Not that I’m biased….
