Rescue Dogs in Training

When we went for breakfast in Brampton yesterday (that sounds rather like the title of a smart New York novel, doesn't it?), we wandered round the closed-for-Sunday town and noticed women in hi-vis jackets with three dogs. They told us that they were training them to be rescue dogs, so they could find lost people with dementia, for instance, and showed us the way they let a dog sniff a piece of cloth that smelled of the person they they were looking for. The dog then searched, pulling their walker along by its lead. False alarms... and the dog realised and turned back.

Later, they bounced past us in the distance. 'She did it!', they shouted. 'Good dog!' from us. The dog perked up it's head, ears alert, and wagged her tail. She knew what those words meant.