Alfie managed to go out on his walk for Heidi again yesterday. He wasn’t having a good day so said it was a bit of a struggle, but he did it and was proud of having raised some more for Heidi’s cause. He says he’s willing to try going out one more time if someone else would like to sponsor him at least £10 for Heidi. If you mark your donation as Alfie then he’ll go out and walk another mile. https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/walkforheidi
Anyway, that isn’t the good news. The good news is about
dog showing. You may not be aware, but our breed is on what’s called the Import Register. It’s because there are not that many of us yet in the country. Anyway, how it all works is that we can only compete in the special classes for Working Breeds on the Import Register. Even though shows have a class called ‘Any Variety Not Separately Classified’ which you’d think included us in ‘any’, we can’t go into those classes as it really means ‘Any variety except import register’. Not many shows had Import Register classes so we often had to travel a long way to compete at all.
If we won our classes in Import Register that was it. We couldn’t go any further or compete against the other dogs. One of us could have been the best dog in the show overall, but we wouldn’t have been allowed to prove it. Now all that has changed. So, the good news is that the Kennel Club have changed how everything works. Now there has to be a class for Import Register dogs in every dog show. That in itself is good news, but on top of that the one of us who wins the Import Register classes is able to go on to the next stage of the show to compete against the winners of the other classes. It’s a really exciting opportunity for all those who are showing. Obviously, that doesn’t include me because of my bad leg, but it does include Wilma. More importantly it includes dogs like Basil, Sybil and Buddy who are taking showing more seriously. We really hope one of them does well at Crufts and can go on to compete in the next stage. It’s all very exciting. We’ll be cheering them on.
Aristotle
You can find short stories to read at www.alfiedog.com
Alfie’s Diary – the Book as well as our other books are available HERE