In order to promote their fine work, the folks at the Dog Trick Academy (www.dogtrickacademy.com) have created a spooky 3D dog illusion you can print out and construct yourself:

1) Download the template here:

http://www.dogtrickacademy.com/3Ddog/3Ddog.pdf

2) Print it out. Color works best but being a stingy Yorkshire git I just printed mine in black and white and as you’ll soon see, it worked perfectly well.

3) Cut out the dog shape and carefully follow the instructions in the template to construct it. Just remember that a lot of the folds involve folding printed side to printed side, which is sometimes counter-intuitive.

4) To view the illusion, close one eye, hold the dog at eye level and rotate it from side to side. For some reason, placing the dog behind a sheet of glass also activates the illusion.

So, here’s the finished article (you’ll notice I also used a sliver of sticky tape to hold the head section together)…

And here is the illusion captured on film. Watch it.. if you dare..

For a while now we’ve been looking for a field to rent or buy so that we have a controlled environment for training Beanie and Biggles.

We would need to securely fence the field (sheep fencing should be fine) and for that to be affordable and maintainable it would need to be not much more than an acre.

We’d need a flat area for practicing agility etc but the rest could be flat, hilly, wooded….it doesn’t really matter.

Our dogs will bay if chasing each other or following a scent, so it’d need to be a reasonable distance from houses or any livestock that might be stressed by this. And just in case one of our dogs suddenly developed a newfound jumping ability it’d be best if it wasn’t near busy roads or anything where a dog could do damage or cause distress to people/animals.

If anyone knows of anything, or knows of someone that might be able to help please contact us. If anyone already has a securely fenced field and wouldn’t mind letting us use it for an hourly rate that too would be of interest.

The Royal Army put on a recruitment show at one of our local parks this morning, so we took Beanie and Biggles along to investigate. Several displays were running throughout the day, and our walk lasted just long enough to see the White Helmets motorcycle stunt team in action. Here are a few pics..

Yes it’s battle-hardened, but I wonder how long those chunky tracks would stand up to professional Beagle chewers?

Being part of the British Army, the White Helmets use British bikes made by Triumph. Seeing all that smoke belching out, maybe they should go with BMW or Kawasaki instead..

The display gets under way…

Four wheels, but he’s only using two so I guess it still qualifies!

When you’re having to do this to get all your passengers on board it’s time to swap the bike for a car

Disassembling a formation takes as much effort as putting it together!

And it’s over..

The show was very, very professionally done though I don’t think Beanie & Biggles appreciated it – they just kept trying to pull Susan towards the fast food trailer the whole time :)