The Yorkshire Vet: The weird and wonderful at Crufts - Julian Norton

For those who show their dogs, it’s the highlight of the year and we always share in their excitement before and enjoy hearing about their successes afterwards.

I’d been invited by a company who make travel seats for dogs, designed to keep them safe in the car.

The carrying contraptions are robust and very much like baby car seats. They attach via the Isofix points in the back of the car in the same way and can even be turned into a buggy if your dog isn’t up to a walk.

In return for my ticket, I’d agreed to spend a couple of hours on their stand, talking to dog owners about in-car safety and share some of my experiences tending to dogs who had been injured after car accidents. It seemed a fair swap, although I didn’t really know what to expect.

It was an early Sunday morning start and an uneventful journey (the highlight of which was finding the perfect parking spot with a charging point for my car).

The NEC is huge, so I followed the signs to the main entrance. As I got closer, dogs began to appear, walking or trotting in the same direction as me. But this was not a normal collect of dogs, certainly not like those I would see on my morning dog walk at home.

There were no scraggy terriers, no fluffy poodle-crosses happily charging about in the mud. The first dog I caught sight of, in fact, was black and completely devoid of any hair.

Had this dog been waxed or shaved in preparation for today’s show? I wondered. Or was it naturally bald?

Either way, his testicles stood out more dramatically than any dog I had ever seen before.

The next dogs I came across were quite the opposite: so hairy that you couldn’t see the dog underneath, and were being transported in a metal trolley, which seemed to be part supermarket trolley, part wheelie bin.

I wondered why they couldn’t walk themselves.

Inside the halls, things became even more strange. I met with my hosts who briefed me on their (very safe) products and showed me video footage of the RTA crash tests which they perform using “crash test dummies” in the shape of a dog.

I shamefully admitted that, over the years I have transported my own dog in a less-than-perfectly-safe fashion whilst travelling with me in the car. Not anymore though!

Their stand was pretty spectacular and stood out from the rest, partly because most of the other trade stands were selling dog food, variously processed, cooked or not.

One place offered, by the kilogram, beef lung, beef trachea, rabbit ears (with and without fur), chicken necks and even “puffed chicken feet”. They looked like Cheesy Wotsits.

There was everything for dog fans and aficionados, but plenty of non-dog things too. You could buy leather cowboy hats, shoes and even have your eyebrows shaped, though it was unclear to me why this would be necessary at a dog show.

I circumnavigated the halls and found some pleasure in watching the smorgasbord of breeds, all of which appeared to be having a whale of a time.

I discovered the hairless dog I had seen earlier was a Mexican Hairless dog, so it hadn’t been depilated on purpose.

Apparently, this breed is one of the longest living breeds, often surviving to twenty years old. Who knew?

I searched for old friends on the judging panel or in the ring, but didn’t find any. And more disappointing: no sign of Peter Purvis!