Thanks to everybody for your kind words and especially to Bud for the heads up on the special collars - I will be looking into this as a priority.Copper escaped again a few days later but this time we were able to track him down within ten minutes as my wife had remembered that he had been showing particular interest in the front garden of a house in the next road to us (and thankfully still our side of the two main roads nearby) which has a habit of leaving it's rubbish out all week. Unfortunately, Copper is a complete sucker for a black bag with food waste in it.Retrievers of all stripes are known for their 'affinity' to food but Copper especially so as he suffers quite badly with epilepsy because the drugs that he has to take for this leave him feeling permanently hungry.I'm sure he thinks we underfeed him but, as his recent routine visit to the vet's last Monday confirms, at 36.2kg he is the 'perfect' weight for a goldie.When he went for his very first visit to the vet as a new puppy I asked for advice on what I could best do to look after his health and what the vet said was "the very best thing you can do for him is to look after his weight". Well, four and a half years later we continue to succeed on this front but Copper has never been convinced that what I am sure he sees as a regime of "half rations" is quite the right thing to be subjecting him to.In a way I am quite grateful to the house that keeps its rubbish in the garden because without that magnetic lure it is quite likely that Copper would have crossed either the Uxbridge Road or Drayton Green Road on route to one of his regular walking locations in Walpole Park, Deans Gardens, or Drayton Green and, as regular readers will know from the tale of his recent brush with death when he ran out in front of a car exiting the Waitrose car park a few months ago, he has absolutely zero road sense.Why it is that he is capable of treating a carrier bag being blown about by the wind with the utmost circumspection and yet be completely oblivious as to the dangers of hurtling chunks of metal on the roads is a mystery to me.[BTW, for those of you wondering why we do not simply take more care to keep the front door closed my wife's email address is available by request. :-) ]
Tony Colliver ● 4570d