SAT nav is the latest must have accessory for dogs. About time they joined the 21st century.

Growing up, we were viewed with suspicion for our love of gadgets. While ma and pa were happy to invest in a Speak n Spell to keep their little nerdling happy, in truth they secretly feared the device, somehow contriving to break it soon after it arrived. A microwave oven appeared on top of our fridge some five years after it became commonplace in the homes of more up-to-date friends. The cordless phone, with its mystical capacity to retain contact with a caller even in the garden, never materialised. The telephone belongs in the wall. Why? Because that's just how things are.

Of course, the sheer brilliance of today's technology has won over the majority of modern homes. While mother uses the iPod to provide the soundtrack to her aerobics, grandma sits in the conservatory keeping her brain in shape with a Nintendo DS. Meanwhile father sifts through his favourite documentaries on Sky Plus while young Timmy, already a whizz kid, uses the family computer to talk to strange men. It's a picture perfect scene, apart from one person. The dog. Because while everyone else is enhancing their life with the latest circuitry, dogs just don't give a damn. All they want is a ball, a source of food and the ability to go in and out of the back door hundreds of times a day. Put a PDA in front of the average pooch and it would sniff it, perhaps lick it once, then turn away like the Luddite it is and find some poo to smell. Stupid thing probably can't even type.

All is set to change, however, with the unveiling of the greatest technological advance in the canine world since the identity chip: sat nav. The Retrieva collar, which attaches to your dog in the manner of a standard collar, is full of exciting gubbins which allow you to pinpoint the precise whereabouts of your adventure loving chum by logging onto a website. Admittedly, your dog remains loyally affixed to your person 99 per cent of the time, during which the super-collar's locating capacity is effectively gazumped by a quick downward glance, but on the nightmare occasions where the pesky pet has buggered off on some ill advised jaunt, you will be mere clicks away from tracking it down.

Whether this means we'll see an influx of dogs rat-running through Britain's villages like furry four-legged HGVs is yet to be seen. It's surely only a matter of time before they work out how to use it to navigate. Before you know it sav nav will be mandatory in all dogs, and in ten years we'll be surfing the internet on them. About time they did something useful.