The DogCast Radio blog

Here's another Crufts story. Alan Checkley and his Support Dog, Fudge, will be at Crufts on Friday 6th March. Support Dogs is a founder member of Assistance Dogs UK and also a full voting member of Assistance Dogs International, an organisation that represents assistance dog training programmes around the world. Every year Support Dogs receives in excess of fifty applications for dogs from each of its programmes, which means that there is currently a two-year waiting list. Without secure and regular funding the wait may be even longer and demand for dogs continues to increase every year.

The press releases about Crufts are coming thick and fast now - I shall pass the more interesting ones on to you! I interviewed Claire Guest a while ago, when she was just getting started with the cancer detection training and charity. It's fascinating, and a great cause to support. She has trained dogs to do amazing jobs, and it's a pleasure to watch them work. She will be at Crufts again this year. You can hear interviews with her in Episode 48, Episode 63 and Episode 70 of DogCast Radio.

Cancer and Bio-detection Dogs receives support from Samsung Electronics

I mentioned in a recent show that Star, our Bichon Frise, has certain preferences. Call them preferences, or idiosyncrasies, or eccentricities. Whatever you call them, she has them. She has definite ideas on how her life should be; when she should go for a walk, when she should have access to the garden, when she should be on your lap, and so on. The basic rule seems to be that all these things should happen whenever she jolly well wants them to happen, thank you very much!

Usually on a Saturday I buy the Daily Mail. To be honest this has more to do with them having a good television listing magazine, and fun puzzles than it does with any political affiliation. If you want to know my political stance here it is : they're all roughly as bad as each other. Anyway, this weekend we fancied a change so we bought the Times. Shan't be doing it again.

Episode 82 of DogCast Radio is now available. This episode has an interview with one of those eccentrics you encounter occasionally in the dog world. Vlasidslav Roytapel is the Russian Dog Wizard. He now lives in the USA, although he has trained dogs all over the world, and currently he offers pet owners solutions to their problems.

Okay check this story out. Sarah Harding from pop group Girls Aloud has a new puppy. Aah! He's all cute, and he's so little he hasn't even got a name yet. Sarah described the puppy as her "baby" as she took him along to a meeting with her on the day she got him.

You know some people say that dogs and children don't mix? Well in my opinion dogs and violins don't mix. I have recently started to learn to play the violin. I can play piano a little, and quite a few woodwind instruments ( it's all the same basic concept - a tube with holes to make pitch variations), but stringed instruments have always eluded me. I was bought my first guitar when I was under ten years old. Now, quite a few years later, I still only know a few chords, and most of those I get wrong. I also take ages to change from one chord to the next.

So I decided to ask for a violin for Christmas. Not Christmas just gone, oh no, this was way

We've just got home from a highly enjoyable visit to Graeme and Maureen Sims. Graeme has a book out later this month, and having read it, I can thoroughly recommend it. Give a Dog a Home focuses on how best to settle rescue dogs into their new homes, and how to approach training them. Graeme uses two rescues dogs he has taken in, to illustrate how it can require lateral thinking to come up with a training regime that suits the dog. The interview we recorded today with Graeme will be in a DogCast Radio show later this year.

The book is a great read; Graeme is a brilliant

We've had snow this week, which has brought fun and problems. Working from home, and home schooling too meant no snow days, but we managed to get out and have some fun. The dogs were so excited by this sudden covering of strange white stuff, and ran around exploring it. We have learned from experience not to let Star go out in the snow for too long. We learned this late one Sunday evening when we were so excited ourselves about an unexpected snowfall that we were all out in the garden at ten o'clock in the evening. Because it was dark, we didn't realise until we went back into the house, that Star had amassed a huge amount of little balls of snow in her fluffy coat.

As you'll have noticed I like signs regarding the subject of dog poop. Not the bog standard (if you'll excuse the pun) ones that you see every day, but the more unusual ones. I've highlighted a few in this blog, and while going though old holiday photos I came across this beauty. Written in two languages, not just one, is a bonus, but the real joy is the illustration of the dog. I challenge you to name that breed!

It looks like the body of a Basset, the head a Dachshund, the tail of a Labrador, and legs made of cardboard tubes by the looks of them. There is the