He didn't lick it off the cobbles . . . 'Bobby' is owned and trained by Gerry Cott, former guitarist with The Boomtown Rats.

Back then, Cott was all aviator shades and attitude; now he's a country gentleman with "35 acres of a very nice piece of Surrey". He's also a professional animal trainer who services the film and television industry. Remember the pig in A Private Function? The pampered cows in the Kerrymaid ads? The dog in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Gerry Cott, former punk rocker.

He preempts the obvious question: "how does a Boomtown Rat turn dog whisperer?" Brought up in rural Kildare before his family moved to Sandycove at the end of the 1960s, he says he always loved being around animals. "Some people just have a natural empathy with animals, they don't get uptight around them. I never minded rolling my sleeves up and getting dirty and I inadvertently picked up things that I didn't realise I was picking up."

He was the first Rat to desert the Boomtown, quitting the band in 1981, four years before Bob Geldof called it a day. It was, he says, "a bit acrimonious . . . because you're saying you don't believe in this music anymore". Until two years ago, he hadn't spoken to Geldof since.

They're now occasionally in touch, though only when the business of re-issuing and compiling calls for it. "But in retrospect, I think all the conversations I had with Bob in the band were business conversations. Our relationship was always on a need-to-do basis."

He never bought into the excesses of the music business, he says, and was always happy to come home to Cathy, whom he married in 1976. She was raised around horses in (then) rural Tallaght and when the Rats hit boom time, they bought their home in Surrey "with a horse and a Jack Russell and a border collie. So when I wasn't out with the band, I was out with the dogs and the horse. By 1981 I had a life that was very rural."

Still, he fell into his new career wholly by accident. A friend in advertising asked to borrow Marley, Cott's border collie, for an ad for Pedigree Chum dog food.

Then the calls kept coming . . . a horse for Lloyd's TSB, dogs for commercials . . . "so that by 1985, 1986, I hadn't been involved in music for five years, but I wasn't starving. I'd inadvertently changed professions."

When he got the script for Greyfriars Bobby. . . based on the true story of a terrier who kept vigil at his master's grave for 14 years . . . he decided his own West Highland pup, Billy, would be perfect as Bobby, and trained him up to rival the film's two-legged stars, amongst them Ardal O'Hanlon, Gina McKee and Christopher Lee.

Cott also worked with 60 horses, cattle and sheep for the film. "We had the premiere this week and they opened Edinburgh Castle up for us. Now that is a big deal."

He has "intermittent contact" with his other former band mates but even though reunions are all the rage, there will be no more Boomtown Rats, says the Dog Whisperer.

"It would be irrelevant. It would be sad, preposterous to do it again. I really can't see it ever happening."