I hope lots of you were able to catch ‘The Secret Life of Dogs’ with Martin Clunes on Thursday 31st January at 9pm on ITV. If not, it is a definite must see! At the start, Martin Clunes says “the way you see your dog will never be the same again” and he is quite right, they are extraordinary creatures that have adapted over centuries and earned a place in our lives and hearts, and the programme certainly captured this. Part natural history, part scientific and part wholehearted pure celebration of the joy that dogs bring to many of us.
The Independent and Guardian reviews appear to be a little less convinced of this and the Guardian even goes as far as to say that we are “in the grip of a slightly irrational dog infatuation”. The Independent reckoned that it “did not acknowledge the downsides of dog ownership” and adopted a “piously devotional attitude to the species”. Each to their own views I suppose but then the programme was never supposed to be looking at these aspects. Waterside Chiropractic and its resident Boxer dogs Merlot and Sol found elements of the programme to be more than just a little fascinating and ok, maybe many other aspects of dogs and dog ownership were not brought to the fore, but then, there is only so much that can be fitted into an hour’s programme.
The slow motion shots of dogs shaking off water were really clever and the video of the Basset Hound demonstrated this perfectly by virtue of the type of skin that the Basset has. How many people were actually aware that dogs are also right or left pawed? This can go some way to explain why some dogs also can have skeletal misalignments predominantly more one side than the other as they too can have a more dominant side, just like us humans. All the more reason to get your dog checked out regularly at Waterside Chiropractic as together with the ‘live for the moment’ attitude that dogs tend to have means that they just go for it and can suffer the consequences of musculoskeletal problems later. The way that a dog uses its tongue to draw in water whilst drinking was also a great piece of footage and certainly explains why there often tends to be as much water around the drinking bowl as there is in it!
After such a great hour’s entertainment about the (no longer not so) secret life of dogs, I am certainly looking forward to seeing Martin Clunes and his “Heavy Horsepower” programme on ITV on Thursday 7th February at 9pm.