Carly the Digital Dog
(and Sophie too)

The Story of Carly, a Tricolour Cavalier King Charles Spaniel

	Amanda & Carly

Of course we all took loads of photos of her. I wanted some for the root window of my Sun 3/50 (eee, them were 't' days) and so on 24th August 1990 I posted to comp.graphics and eunet.micros.acorn asking for scanning friends.

The first reply came from Sophie Wilson, deity of the Acorn world since her involvement in the design of the BBC Micro and the ARM chipset. I said Sophie could use the pictures for anything she liked. Around September '90 I posted the images to alt.binaries.pictures, from where they started to turn up on ftp sites around the world.

Meanwhile, Sophie put Carly on her own backdrop (and she's still there after six years!) Carly also turned up in the Acorn RISC OS 3 User Guide, and thanks to Acorn's links with education, on a technology demonstrator CD-ROM made by Hitachi and distributed to every secondary school in Britain.

From that CD, this picture of Carly (and Amanda) was used in Longman Logotron's Revelation ImagePro brochure. (Another of my pictures, of an otter, was taken from the CD and used in Acorn's CD-ROM technology brochure).

Although she was left behind the first year, Carly holidayed with the family from then on. At a campsite in Yorkshire in 1993 a small child was "playing" with her and poked her in the eye. A local vet said not to worry, take her to the vet when you get home. At home, the infection was such that the vet worried that Carly might lose her eye - but don't worry, the other eye will be OK. Treatment with steroids began. Carly got worse. She might lose both eyes, but don't worry, she'll be OK.

Shortly afterwards, Carly was referred to the national Animal Health Trust near Newmarket in Cambridgeshire, where they diagnosed systemic diabetes, which because of the steroids they were unable to treat. Carly was put down the following day, 3rd September '93.

Archimedes World magazine printed Carly's obituary, headed with her GIF, in the November '93 issue. In their May '94 issue, Acorn User published my !Notify program on the cover disc, with Carly's picture "trojaned" in the application resources :-). (Their CD-ROM with the April '95 issue also carried !Notify).

On 20th April '94 I emailed Carly's GIF and story to BBC's The Net. Within a week Sophie and I were being filmed with Carly's picture (this time in 24-bit glory on one of the first Risc PCs, loaned by Acorn). The item was broadcast on BBC2 as The Digital Dog on 4th May '94.

In June '95 I sent pictures of Carly and Sophie to Mike Buening's Dog Picture Archive. Carly's picture on that site was linked to the Cavalier Breed FAQ on the rec.pets.dogs home page, and then on 14th July '95 this Web page opened with my collection of Carly pictures from Photo CD.

Finally, on 23rd September '96 Acorn Risc Technologies began shipping the StrongARM card. On the accompanying CD-ROM, Carly's picture was included with Sophie Wilson's !Picture application.

Sophie

Sophie with brother & sister
27-Apr-94, the day Sophie and I were filmed for BBC's The Net in Carly The Digital Dog
	Sophie & Adam

Cavaliers are a fragile breed, and Sophie has not been without problems. After her first season she became deaf (we thought she was just being naughty!).

After that, strange things happened. Sophie's hearing seemed to come and go, and we eventually noticed that her hearing would return almost completely when she was in season and fade away afterwards. The vet was very excited about this and referred her to a dog deafness researcher in Newmarket, but the researcher was disappointingly uninterested and virtually accused us of imagining it. (The lack of curiosity of those in the medical profession astounds me. I would have thought a link between hormones and deafness would be extremely exciting to a researcher, but she seems to have such a closed mind ...)

Sophie was often sick, and eventually died of a brain tumour in September '01 :-(

The fragility of cavaliers is certainly due to some irresponsible breeding. Both Carly and Sophie's pedigrees show the same dogs in many parts of the tree. This started when cavaliers became very popular a few years ago and unscrupulous breeders started doing bad things to "meet demand". The Kennel Club are accomplices in this (they seem to be more interested in breeders' welfare than in dogs' welfare) because they refuse to publish information on hereditary afflictions which would allow these problems to be bred out. In Scandinavia the kennel club does make this information available and in-bred diseases are radically reduced ...