Cats and Dogs.

I wasn't going to blog today, but then I visited Welsh Blog Index only to find that I was 'Blog of the Week'. This is my first ever 'blog award' and puts me under pressure to speak. But about what? What does a prizewinner blog about? After all this rain, I can only think of cats and dogs. And I did Oscar the cat yesterday. So it should be dogs today.

You might remember that Oscar was the moggy, all over last week's papers, which stalked an old people's home in the US, and on the last 25 time he'd sidled up to one of the residents, death had followed within 4 hours. Amazingly, the manager of the home adopted a policy of calling in the relatives to say their goodbyes, rather than simply getting rid of the cat. Today, I've been reading about Portuguese water dogs (and Labradors) which can detect lung and breast cancer more effectively than the best up-to-the-minute screening equipment.

It seems that there are chemical 'markers' in the breath of cancer sufferers which Portuguese water dogs can identify - and its a more effective diagnosis than mammograms and CT scans. I would never have believed this if I hadn't seen a Spaniel sniffing out Semtex at a demonstration put on by the Police last year. At the time, the Police were trying to persuade the National Assembly Government not to introduce legislation banning the tail docking of such. And to think of the NHS budget squillions that has gone into developing all this scanning equipment - when all we needed to do was let Portuguese water dogs breed and produce an endless supply of cancer spotters at almost no cost at all.