pet connection

The Associated Press offers a look at how the legal status of animals is evolving:

Fido is getting a new name — several, in fact: “plaintiff,” “trustee,” “beneficiary” and even “defendant.”

Dogs, cats and creatures of all sorts are being redefined in an emerging area of legal practice known as animal law. Once considered mere property, animals are being invested with legal standing as they’re increasingly being named as partial beneficiaries of estates, subjects of lawsuits and victims of abuse.

As animals rise in the law, so does the profile of animal lawyers, or lawyers who practice animal law.

Ninety-two of the 196 law schools in the country approved by the American Bar Association now offer courses on animal law, up from the nine that offered classes in 2000, according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

“You’re seeing this real snowball effect,” said Pamela Alexander, director of the defense fund’s animal law section.

Part of the push has come from animals’ rise in prominence in people’s lives, with owners routinely spending thousands of dollars to give a cat chemotherapy and sending dogs to day care, therapists and groomers.

Here’s the rest. By the way, would it be possible to have just one story without a patronizing, “cutesy” reference to “Fido” and “Fluffy”? Every time I see this unimaginative and frankly idiotic phrasing in story after story after story, it makes me wanna hurl.

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Elsewhere, a picture of the times: I have some 40,000 images on my big storage drive. You read that right: 40,000. And I bet 90 percent of them are of pets. I also have a full-on (and full-price) version of Photoshop, because a certain number (read: a very, very small percentage) of my images end up in our syndicated newspaper feature or in one of our books and they need to be ‘Shopped.

But what if you want to fix a pet picture without tossing down a few Benjamins for Photoshop? There’s always Photoshop Elements (a/k/a “PS Lite) and a few other bits of software. And Google’s Picasa software lets you fix a few things (while also helping you to organize it all). The New York Times has a blurb today on Adobe Photoshop Expressions, and online program that is pretty darn full-functioned:

After signing up for the free site at www.photoshop.com/express, members can upload their images and then edit them with Adobe’s simplified set of point-and-click controls for red-eye removal, cropping, exposure, saturation and other functions. Users can group images into Web albums and post them to popular social networking sites, all from within Photoshop Express.

Each basic account at the site, which is still in a beta test version, gets two gigabytes of online storage, although Adobe soon plans to offer more services for a fee.

The screen grab to go with the story? A beautiful landscape? A pretty model? Someone’s grandbaby? Nope, nope and nope. It’s a Boston terrier.

Pets rule.