Animal Lovers Web Blog

As extensive animal keepers and all round animal lovers some of the highlights of the summer for us this year have been attending the various agricultural and horticultural shows. This is something that we have done occasionally before but this year we have made a point of attending as many as we can.

The latest show was the Sedgefield Show 2008 which we attended yesterday and despite the dreadful weather with frequent heavy rain we still managed to have a fantastic time.

As is usually the case at shows I spent the majority of my time looking at the wonderful sheep on display. While the Sedgefield Show cannot compete in numbers and varieties on display with the larger shows it does have the advantage of being more personal, which allows you much more time with the animals and a better chance of speaking in detail with the owners and breeders.

At this year’s Sedgefield show one breed of sheep particularly caught our eye which was a rare and special breed sheep, the Oxford Down. These are a pretty rare breed of sheep with only 70 small flocks in the whole of the UK, but they are totally adorable and apparently have a great temperament and for those who consume their animals I’m told that they produce excellent meat.

I certainly plan to look into this breed of sheep in more detail and would be very interested in possibly getting some of our own, as pets but with the option to possibly breed on a small scale and some point in the future. You can see an Oxford Down sheep ewe and lamb in the pictures.

I did manage to move on from the sheep eventually to see some of the other animals on display which included some lovely cattle, poultry including game fowl, guinea pigs, rabbits and dog trials. The rest of the family spent much of the day in the dog section and watching the fascinating dog trials on display. The lovely brown and white Border Collie above wasn’t in the show but was gorgeous nonetheless and the owner was good enough to let me take a picture.

As well as the animals there were a whole host of other activities including prize vegetable, flower, cake and crafts and tasting sessions from local farm shops with many delicious meats and cheeses to sample. It was certainly not a day to be watching the waistline.

Other interesting activities were a demonstration by some fox hounds and horses, fun run and a fancy dress competition for horses and you can see one of my favourites in the picture at the top of this post.

All in all the Sedgefield show was a fantastic day out and is already in the diary for next year, as I just check what is next in line for this year!!

John

Animal Lovers Web

More often than not as I am sat going about my business in the study I have the constant companion of background radio, usually talk radio as my taste in music is rarely well served by the daytime music channels and I find it less distracting. Every now and then though, the words strike home and the background noise becomes compulsive listening.

This happened to me this morning whilst listening to the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC Radio 5Live when she had studio guest presenter, Ryan O’Meara managing director of the well known dog magazine K9. The reason that the listening became compulsive was the amount of sense that he was talking about how to increase the levels of responsible dog ownership in todays society.

The debate had been triggered by a call by the RSPCA to be given greater powers to punish the owners of dangerous dogs, which is fair enough, but I tended to agree with Ryan O’Meara that rather than than just beating unfit dog owners with a bigger stick after the event that a better and more effective solution must be to improve the education for dog owners and would be dog owners.

He even went so far as to say that some form of assessment of an would be dog owners suitability to own dogs should be introduced and that this should involve some form of dog test assessment before qualification is granted. Victoria Derbyshire then asked him to come up with five questions that may be typical of a “responsible owners dog test“, you can see these questions for yourself and have a go at them in our dog discussion forum, I think you will agree that they are pretty difficult.

Difficult though these dog questions may be, I think few could argue that by learning to answer questions such as these we would all become much better informed dog owners and that could only be a good thing. I think his idea was to have an assessment procedure similar to that for obtaining a drivers licence, which is not too unreasonable if you think about it. You need to prove that you are capable of being in control of a potentially dangerous vehicle, so why not for a potentially dangerous animal?

Obviously, no one in life wants even more hassle, assessments, red tape, legislation or bureaucracy but if it led to better dog owners and through this better behaved and safer dogs then surely it is a target worth striving for?

John

Animal Lovers Web.com