My dog, Meg, is not one of those neat handbag-sized pooches. She doesn’t have a wardrobe of canine ready-to-wear. And although she lives in London, rather than the Welsh hills where she was born, her idea of a good time does not involve, say, an expensive grooming session followed by a hug.
It involves an extended session racing through, or rolling around, mud, water or, if she’s particularly lucky, fox shit.
So, while the idea of attaching an expensive electronic tracking device to a dog to see where it goes and how far it runs, and how fast, is all very well in principle, I have doubts how this will work out in practice. And then the Dog Tracker Plus arrives in the post. It is, it turns out, not a slick, shiny, iPhone-style device for dogs; it’s a massive blue rubber collar with two large lumps of gadgetry embedded into it, big enough to fit a leopard. Meg, not without good reason, eyes it with suspicion.
Then the mishaps begin. I download the app, but the first time I go out and press “track a walk”, nothing is recorded, though we’ve gone 7.2km according to the Runmeter app I use on my phone.
The second time I turn it on, a friend takes Meg on a jaunt and I enjoy watching her progress on the phone. I can see from the satellite map that she seems to be hanging out in a cafe a couple of miles away and returns by a suspiciously fast and straight route. Did you catch the bus? I ask the friend. “I may have,” he says looking only slightly guilty. Later, I test the “find my dog” function and it locates her squarely in the local hospital. I double check but no, she’s definitely still under the kitchen table.
I finally get it working for me on a Christmas Day run back in the Welsh hills. Runmeter says I’ve gone 4.98km, “Track a walk” says Meg’s gone 5.5km. Having watched her marauding across fields and woodland while I’ve slowly plodded behind, I find this unlikely.
In summary: if your dog is a bolter, or you suspect your husband is using “walking the dog” as a synonym for “visiting his mistress”, then it’s possibly worth the money. For all other purposes, I’d stick to a running app.
