English dogs

Believe it or not, I think this is the only picture of a dog that I took all the time we were in England. 

 

I've already forgotten his name but he was one of several dogs hiking with their owners on Glastonbury Tor.  There was a sign on the gate that we passed through saying that there were no sheep grazing on the Tor that day so dogs were welcome to be offleash.  This guy was on a leash with his humans but there were several up there that were running free. 


One of the nice things about dogs in England is that they are welcome in so many places, most notably in pubs, where we saw quite a few.  Englishmen must be a hardier lot because no one seems to have come down with a dreaded dog disease from dogs being in places where food and drink are served.   Or maybe their dogs are cleaner, or maybe Americans are just germ-phobic. 

I had heard that pitbulls were banned over there, but we continued to see quite a few.  Labs were very popular, especially in the country.  We saw a couple shepherds, one Dane, but I don't think we saw a single rottie. 

There was one particular breed of dog that we saw a lot of when traveling through Wiltshire and Dorset.  It's a cute, scruffy little thing you would first assume to be a mixed breed, but we saw too many of them that all looked the same.  I failed to ask anyone what it was, but I've done some searching on the internet and have determined it was a Border Terrier.

I talked to several people with dogs and one of the first things I heard from most of them was "he's a rescue." Paul O'Grady (a daytime television personality, sort of a mix of Liberace and Oprah if you will) has a show dedicated to dog rescue and was putting on a huge fund raising event for a shelter while we were there.  We didn't go because Clay was afraid I'd come home with a dog.

A pub called the George Inn in Lacock had a "dogwheel."  It is a device mounted in a wall near the fireplace.  It's essentially like an exercise wheel operated historically by a now-extinct breed of dog called a Turnspit.  The dog was placed into the wheel to run in place, turning the wheel, which powered a mechanical turnspit device in the fire place to turn meat as it was cooked.  Apparently the Turnspit is an extinct breed of dog, but a hyper Jack Russell could probably perform the same task. 

The single family home with a big backyard seems to be virtually non-existent, so they are nation of dog walkers as a matter of necessity, choice, or both.  There seemed to be public footpaths all over the countryside that are ideal for that, the roads however, are not.

I'm not going to bore everyone here with a lot of photos from the trip, but if you are interested in seeing them I've uploaded a batch of them here.  There's a lot of them, so don't feel obliged to wade through them all.  I've generally captioned the first pic in the series from each location and few others that are noteworthy.