The dogs fit for a catwalk: high fashion at Crufts
THE WORLD’S most famous dog show celebrated its 124th anniversary last week, but while the organisers toasted the past, the dogs were embracing the future.
Life on four legs has changed a lot since Charles Cruft, a Victorian pet food salesman, staged his first show, and today we are witnessing the unstoppable rise of Techno Dog.
Unstoppable up to a point. Instead of crying “heel!” as your hound vanishes over a hill, modern owners can send a smartphone message to the dog’s all-in-one remote control collar. And if that doesn’t work, track it down with the built-in GPS device.
The dogs soon learn the perks of co-operation. Yesterday at the NEC in Birmingham, Samsung was showing off the kennel of the future – a £20,000 Dream Doghouse, featuring a “pushto-woof” owner-summoning system, an automated fooddispensing system and a heated hydrotherapy relaxation pool.
“We’re reflecting the nation’s growing trend for using technology,” said Andy Griffiths, president of Samsung Electronics UK. “We did a lot of research on what modern dog owners want, and we see this as the kind of tech the discerning dog of the future will expect.”
Wired and fully interfaced, Techno Dog increasingly sneers at such relics of traditional dogdom as leads and whistles. Who needs them, the mutts ask, when there are cool gadgets such as the Blue Fang collar, which serves as a kind of advanced communication link between the dog and its owner. The owner sends messages by iPhone or Android, and the dog sends back responses, giving information such as how much ground it has covered, what its heartbeat is and where it is heading. The US-designed Blue Fang can even distinguish between “natural” and “needless” barking, and send out a puff of citronella essence to deter the latter.
Then there’s PetPace, a collar-mounted system that claims to monitor your dog’s mood and happiness, and send you a text if it’s feeling out of sorts. Sources say technology products are by far the fastest-growing segment of the dog products industry, and a quarter of the creatures now have their own social media profiles.
Which may explain the parallel rise of Narcisso-Dog. On display at Crufts yesterday was the world’s first dog selfie-taking apparatus, invented by dog food company Canidae. The dog stands on a pressure-sensitive mat, which triggers a camera shutter. “We see this as a big step forward,” said Steve Brown, managing director. “If there’s one thing the British love more than their dogs it’s sharing pictures of their dogs, and our apparatus helps them do that.”
While many see such gadgets as bringing a welcome bow-wow factor to the venerable business of keeping a dog, traditionalists worry that the core values of ownership — trust, loyalty, understanding — are being eroded.
“A lot of owners now don’t even want to exercise their dogs, and they don’t know that a good relationship comes from spending lots of time together,” said long-time Crufts regular Nancy Randall, 63, an old-English sheepdog owner from Harrogate.
“Knowing your dog is the key to everything, and if you treat it like some kind of robot, you won’t get much pleasure out of it.”
Beyond the bleeps and tweets of technology, Crufts claims the show continues to grow and prosper on the strength of its worldwide appeal, with this year’s featuring almost 22,000 dogs, including a record 3,000 from overseas and 200 breeds.
The Kennel Club, which has run the show since 1938, has put much effort into expunging the spectre of Frankendog, the exaggerated specimens, unscrupulously bred to meet the judges’ often-antiquated criteria. A bull-mastiff, for example, was supposed to have “fair wrinkle when interested, but not in repose”. The controversy that surrounded the trend led to the show being dropped by the BBC, but the club now stresses its commitment to responsible breeding, and dogs that are “healthy and happy”.
And if there’s any suspicion they aren’t, you can now call up and ask them.