Hound Hike for Heroes is a charity dog walk event in place to raise funds for the charity 'Hounds for Heroes'. The Hounds for Heroes charity's purpose is to provide specially trained assistance dogs to injured and disabled men and women of both the UK Armed forces and Civilian Emergency Services. 

The unique mental attitude of serving personnel and those in the emergency services means that only a handful of those injured so far have chosen to have an assistance dog provided by the civilian offerings. The dog owners of you out there will know just what a difference a dog can make to your life, the loyalty they show, the calming affect they can have on you. Hounds for Heroes plan to train dogs to problem solve and be intuitive to their owners needs, to help remove the sense of disability and replace it with a feeling of ability.

Initially Hounds for Heroes intends to raise £100,000 to buy 5 Labradors. These dogs will be carefully selected for all the qualities needed to produce excellent assistance dogs and the Charity will carefully select puppy parents to start with this very essential part of their training. After around 15 months the specialist training will start, with a combination of puppy parents and the new owner. All the time the puppies will be meeting on a weekly basis to carry out socialization and specialist training. When the dogs are fully trained the ownership will be fully transferred to the new owner. Please use the link to visit their website and see the amazing skills that the dogs will be taught.

Our walk is to try and help raise funds for this goal. The walk is to take place at 11:00 am on Sunday the 10th of April 2011 at Sutton Park, near Birmingham.

The route is approximately 3 km and should take around 45 minutes to an hour to complete, depending on the size of your dogs legs. The route chosen follows the paved roadways into the park starting near to the Town Gate, to allow anyone, of any ability to take part. But if you wish to deviate off the route please feel free, Sutton park is a beautiful vast open space, perfect for dogs to run around and cause mischief in. The goal of the day is to raise both funds and awareness for the charity, as the park is very popular with dog walkers and our presence there is sure to raise interest.

To take part in the event please use the link to donate whatever you can afford to the charity. During the donation process you will see a box which asks if you wish to make any comments or remarks. If you could please enter your dogs name into this box, as the whole idea of the day was for dogs to raise money for dogs, so it would be great to know the names of all of those hounds involved.

Not got a dog? You can still take part. Please donate as above, but enter into the comments box 'homeless dog'. We plan to contact local dog shelter centers and utilize your donation to have one of their dogs take part in the walk. The hope behind this is that someone at the event will fall in love with the dog and adopt them, plus they get a nice walk in the park with a load of other friends. And you can still turn up for the walk, I'm sure the dogs there will show you just how glad they are to see you.

So come on, its a Sunday morning, you've got to walk the dog anyway, might as well do some good at the same time. And we all know the chaos of all those dogs in one place will be a sight to see!

Thank you,

 The Hound Hike for Heroes Team. 

***Please note the route has been chosen to allow as many people, whatever their ability, to take part. The route follows the paved roadways and paths of the park. A small section of this roadway (around 200 meters) at the start of the walk is open to traffic, although there are traffic calming measures in place and it leads to a dead end. Plus the route does pass a section of open water.

The parks rules state that dogs do not have to be on leads as long as you are in control of them. No one knows your dog better than you, so please use a lead if you feel it is needed.

And don’t forget your poo bags!!