Dog owners will soon be able to deploy sat-nav technology to track down a missing pet. A high-tech dog collar was previewed yesterday on the first day of the Crufts Show. The lockable collar, on sale from July, is made of anticut material to deter thieves and sends texts to the owner’s mobile telephone if the dog crosses a preset boundary. The owner can log on to a website where, using the sat-nav technology of the collar, they can pinpoint the pet’s location.
The collar is not cheap at £200, but its makers, Retrieva, insist that it is worth it. Andrew Stuart, the company’s director, said: “Dog theft is out there but it’s not high on the list of police priorities, for obvious reasons. But for owners or families, if a dog gets lost it is a traumatic experience.”
About 23,000 pedigree dogs, including more than 1,160 from abroad, are expected to take part in the annual show, at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. The event is recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest dog show.
Organisers say that this year will be the second-largest show in Crufts’s 117 years, with only 27 fewer registered dogs than the largest show in 1991.
Over the next three days dogs will compete in more than 2,000 classes and ultimately for the title of Best in Show, which will be awarded on Sunday.
William Hill has closed betting on which breed would win amid talk of a mystery “superdog”. In only a few hours the odds on the winner coming from the “utility dog” category, which includes bulldogs, miniature poodles and Dalmatians, rather than the more traditionally favoured terrier, hound and working dog classes, were shortened from 13-2 to 1-2 after a flurry of large bets.
Rupert Adams, spokesman for William Hill, said: “There must be an exceptional dog out there that we have not heard about.”
Owners can put their dogs forward for additional competitions, such as the international obedience, agility and heelwork to music competition. Dog dance teams performed yesterday to the strains of theFlashdancetheme.
Some dogs are just there to show off. Scooby the dog posed at the PDSA Pet Fit Club stand yesterday to share her weight loss secrets. She had lost 5.5lb (2.5kg) after the fish and chips, curry, pizzas and ice-cream that her owner used to feed her were cut from her diet.
A PDSA spokeswoman said: “Now she enjoys a balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle, which has much improved her quality of life and will no doubt mean she’ll live a lot longer than she would have done if she had remained dangerously overweight.”
About 153,000 visitors are expected to attend Crufts this year. The whole event occupies almost 20 acres, including five halls, two pavilions and the main arena.
With a startling rate of up to half of all females that are obese in high school when compared to non-obese girls not attending college, they are found in a downward spiral of obesity, health problems and low income. It is well documented that low income lifestyles also increase the likelihood of obesity, magnifying the current problem. If a move is not made in American schools to help the growing waistline in females, the statistics will only rise and we will find ourselves with an ever faster growing obese population.
The complete study carried out by Crosnoe used data that was tabulated on around 11,000 adolescents from 128 schools and was completed for the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The goal of the research was to study how obesity predicts maladjustment and how that same situation predicts whether the teens attend college. After the study was completed it was lauded as the most comprehensive study completed on teens from middle school to high school.
A study done by the National Institute of Health in 2004, which you can read here, found obesity rates among girls that are 15 years old are 15.1 percent. As you go up in age the figure climbs to 17 percent of girls in high school. Boys were not left out of the study and were found to have obesity rates of 13.9 percent at age 15.
A quick look at obese adolescent boys in the University of Texas study found that there were no significant changes in their likelihood of college attendance. Researchers feel the lack of effect to boys was due to public images and pressure on girls to be thin and the media presentation of beauty in young girls and women. “That girls are far more vulnerable to the non-health risks of obesity reinforces the notion that body image is more important to girls’ self-concept and that social norms have greater effects on the education of girls than boys,” Crosnoe said in reference to the study.
Business Shrink radio show listeners and blog readers, what do you think the solution is? Do you feel money should be allocated into programs for better health education and tolerance curriculum’s? Is this a chain that can be broken? We’d love to hear what your thoughts and solutions are to this growing obesity epidemic that is creating more problems in all areas of adolescent girl’s lives.
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Created by perfumer Antoine Lie for rebel fragrance line Etat Libre D’Orange, Sécrétions Magnifiques features the four “S’s” of raw sexuality: Sperm, Sweat, Saliva, and Sant (French for blood).
If you could smell it with a French accent, it’d be erotic, provocative, sensual, and dirty (in a lacey French way). In plain English, it’s gross. Gross … but also genius.
Etat Libre D’Orange wants to rock the fragrance world with their liberal, subversive, and edgy fragrances, and rock the fragrance world they will … if they take it just a little step further.
Sure, it’s provocative to suggest actually smelling like the essence of a good old nasty roll in the hay with a sweaty business man, but the thing is I don’t want to smell like any old sperm, sweat, saliva, and blood—I want to smell like celebrity sperm, sweat, saliva, and blood (and actually I wouldn’t mind a few little tears thrown in too).
Celebrities have been trying to sell us sex with their overthought fragrances for years now, but imagine if they actually sold us their secretions?
Last year Britney Spears outsold everyone else in the extremely lucrative celebrity fragrance market. You’d imagine people would pay to be pungent like Posh or Paris, or sweetly scented like SJP, but no, they want to smell like Britney.
Well, give the people what they ask for I say with “Sécrétions Magnifiques de Britney.” (They could have a whole series of fragrances to go with her mood and career swings.)
Smells like a good idea to me …
Sécrétions Magnifiques is available exclusively at Harvey Nichols in UK and Henri Bendel in U.S.
