Before we start, let's have a quick question and answer session. You can be in bold.

Why do a dog group test if there's already a review of dogs on the site?

Although we agreed wholeheartedly with many of the points made by Aran in his review of the dog, we (and many of you) felt that perhaps more than any other animal, dogs cannot be given a single 'blanket' score - there's just too much variety within the species. Size, shape, temperament, digging skills, personality, haircut. These are just a few of the things that can vary massively between one type of dog and another, and it would be wildly unfair to down mark a fantastic dog (whippet) for the transgressions of the yorkshire terrier, and vica versa.

Naturally, the intimate relationship between human and canine is responsible for this perceived duty to examine the dog in more depth. As Mike from Orlando so astutely pointed out - most of us have little if nothing to do with sloths on a daily basis, and so extended classification (and evaluation) within the species would be entirely superfluous. Because many of us have dogs as pets though, we feel duty bound to do justice to 'man's best friend'.

Why do an A-Z?

A few weeks ago I started putting together a few ideas about doing a list of short but sweet dog reviews. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. It wasn't.

Here's a diary extract written whilst I was just getting started:

"I’ve got 36 breeds of Dog written down on pieces of paper here, all colour coded by size. Small dogs are yellow, medium dogs are red and the big ones are blue. Some of them I've marked with a black pen. I don't recall why. I thought that going by size would help me get started, but it hasn’t. I've now got three groups instead of one."

About a week later I had another go:

" I've decided that the prospect of trying to review dogs is not unlike going to the supermarket after work. It's a hideous nightmare.

Picture the scene: you’ve had a typically draining day at the office, what with a long lunch, checking your six hotmail accounts every twenty minutes, and casually surfing the internet for cheap flights and ebay bargains. You’re knackered. You’re on the bus or driving home or something, and you know you need to pick up a couple of things from the supermarket. Nothing major – some coffee, a pint of milk and a bag of toffees. But you just know that once you’re inside, it will be a full 45 minutes until you leave.

The problem is the coffee. Milk is easy – it’s just milk. Toffees are slightly more tricky, as there’s a choice of perhaps two or three brands, but nothing you can’t cope with. The coffee is a totally different story altogether – and this is where it all ties in to dogs. The choice you are given when you want to buy coffee is simply frightening. Differences everywhere. Decaffeinated or Caffeinated? Do you need the beans, the powder or the vile freeze dried stuff that tastes like poo? What about strength? We stock a range of flavour intensities ranging from the offensively tepid level 1 through to the throat skinning level 5. And would you care for Fair-trade or Economy? Oh, and what about Country of origin? Kenya? Columbia? Costa Rica? Java? The moon?

After you’ve finished flipping out, you regain your composure and wipe the foamy drool from your chin. You skip the coffee altogether and focus on the Cornettos. But the damage is done.

Sometimes too much choice is worse than none at all. Which is pretty much how I feel about trying to review dogs. Dogs. Canis Lupus Familiaris. Where am I supposed to start? It's not even fun anymore. There are TOO MANY.

Anyway, I’ve decided to start with A and see what happens"

There was more, but I'll spare you.

Why isn't it finished?

You'll see from the next page that the list is woefully incomplete. In fact, we've only got as far as D. But this is actually a good thing, because it means that it's not going to end up as our list. It's going to be *the* list. You see, as much as we try to be objective about all of our animal reviews, like anyone else with half a brain, we're always going to prefer big woofing dogs to small yapping dogs. So if we then went on and wrote all the dog reviews, the outcome would be unbalanced.

Basically, by opening it up we feel that there's less chance of the marks being overly... dogmatic.

Any chance of you getting on with it then?

Yep - click the doggie's little nose below to start.

Or here.