Hello!
Hello and thank you so much for reading our dog blog. We love dogs and consider ourselves absolute dog bores so it’s nice to have a space to witter on about dogs knowing that if you’re reading this then you probably love dogs too. If you hate dogs I think you may need to hit the back button now because you’ve definitely come to the wrong place. Move along you weirdo!
We are identical twins Joanne and Julia who have grown up surrounded by many animals. Dogs, cats, rabbits and a very bad Billy goat as well as many an injured bird or hedgehog that needed nursing back to health. We were influenced from a strange combination of an ex-farming Dad who respected animals as important workers and Dr Doolittle as a Mum whose animal whispering was truly remarkable. I’ve never met an animal who didn’t like my Mum. She freely admitted she liked animals better than humans and her only real friend as a child was a dog so really this obsession we have was inevitable.
Us and Wendy. We knew then, as we know now, how to rock a sleeveless cardy.
We spent a childhood outdoors playing in the countryside with each other and our dogs Wendy and Barney. We were a very close pack and got up to allsorts together. We made dens, ran away from the goat and got stuck down holes (Barney the Wonderdog saved the day!)
Barney the Wonderdog with Wendy (right) and Ebony the cat in the middle, who clearly had taken ownership of the ball. Great photography.
As we got older and distracted by boys our Mum’s only real advice to us was to never go out with someone who doesn’t like dogs. So, any boy who got brought home to meet the parents had to face the Petra test. Petra was a golden retriever and was the loveliest girl in the world so if she tried to say hello and it wasn’t reciprocated then it was a very bad sign. Even worse if Petra didn’t like them it was all over!
There were one or two boys that didn’t pass the Petra test but overall, we did okay really. I think we knew instinctively if someone didn’t like animals so we avoided those people anyway. The kind of person who doesn’t say hello to a puppy walking past them is not the kind of person we want in our lives!
Both of our future husbands Dean and Tony passed the Petra test with flying colours. Mum even said that when Tony went travelling after going out with Julia for a few months (it’s a long story – he’d already booked it when he met her!) Petra sensed it and seemed very sad indeed. Not as sad as Julia though!
Petra. A tough test for any potential boyfriend.
Nowadays we live next door to each other (which is very confusing for the neighbours) and have passed on our love of animals to Joanne’s children Leah and Jack. Leah is very soft with animals and feels so much empathy for them that we think she takes after her Nana and may be a dog whisperer, whereas Jack is more confident and playful with them just like his Grandpa. We all think he may be a vet when he is older as he is so good with them, firm but fun.
We set up Release the Dogs simply because we wanted a safe space to walk our own dogs, do some training with them and let them run wild without worrying about them running off or onto roads. We thought other people would like to use them too because there are so many people who have anxious, reactive dogs or dogs that will run away off the lead or rescue dogs that may need their own space. There are a lot of reasons that people may find these types of secure dog exercise fields useful and we hope you will enjoy them as much as we do. Give us a wave if you spot us there – you might not know which one of us it is but it’ll be lovely to say hello!