pet connection

There’s something fun about an idea that takes on life of its own. That’s why the DogCars.com award for “Dog Car of the Year” is so special.

Not only do we offer assistance for dog-loving folks who are looking for vehicles that fit the needs of their four-legged family members, but we also are helping automakers understand the value of this “niche” market. Actually, with more than $43.4 billion being spent this year on pet products, it’s hardly a niche. More like a Great Dane in a doll house. But we digress.

When Honda learned that its versatile Element had been honored as the first-ever “Best in Show” DogCar of the Year, the marketers were taken by surprise. Up to that point, the Element’s advertising campaign was targeted at male 20-somethings who spent more time at the beach or on the slopes than at dog parks or agility trials.

So, after being named “Best in Show” as DogCar of the Year, Honda shifted its advertising campaign to include some witty bits with dogs in them. They are quite funny.

Now we are proud to announce that Honda has shipped out these nifty posters (above) and window clings to their dealers nationwide. Again, they are quite funny and the best part is the DogCars.com “Best in Show” logo in the bottom left corner of the poster.

Want a “Best in Show” sticker (or 50) of your very own? Here’s how you can order them.

Gina, ask and ye shall receive. I’ve been looking into dog theft recently. The American Kennel Club sent out a press release in April suggesting that dog theft is on the rise, based on the number of news reports they’ve seen about it this year. More than 30, so far, compared to 10 in 2007.

Now, there’s no way of knowing whether dog theft is really on the rise. No one keeps track of how many dogs are stolen each year, and in many cases there’s no way of knowing whether the dog was really stolen or just strayed away. The Newport Beach Police Department web site has a press release about three stolen Bulldog puppies, but officer John Lewis says it’s not really a common crime in the area. The Beverly Hills cops say it doesn’t happen much there, either.

Nonetheless, based on a totally unscientific Google search, there are certainly quite a few “stolen dog” stories out there: thieves walk out with puppies from pet stores and kittens from shelters, they break into cars and homes and take dogs, or they walk off with dogs tied up outside coffee shops or stores. And then there are the people who find lost dogs and simply decide to keep or sell them, despite knowing that someone is looking for the dog (see last week’s The Ethicist in the NYT magazine).

On the rise or not, to me it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about ways to protect dogs from loss or theft and ways to get them back, and to my editors it seemed like a good commentary on the tanking economy, both subjects discussed in tomorrow’s column. Here’s a bit of a preview.

Microchipping is a given. None of the people I spoke with actually got their dogs back because of the microchip, but it’s a way to drive down the dog’s black market value, and it’s proof of ownership in the event of a dispute.

Kit Lofgren, whose 4-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog was stolen from her front yard last year, was able to access a list of Bay Area veterinarians and ask them to scan any Berner puppies brought in.

Make the theft or loss common knowledge. With the help of friends, Lofgren was able to blanket the Bay Area with flyers and posters. Friends who were driving north and to the East Coast put up flyers at every rest stop. She posted the information on lost dog web sites and Berner chat lists.

We killed his market value through exposure. There were two Berners his age that lived close to us and one of them took to wearing a sign saying ‘I’m not Kit Lofgren’s dog.’

Weed out crank calls by withholding certain identifying information. Unlike most Berners, Heikki didn’t have a lot of white on his feet. Lofgren never published any photos showing his feet, so when people called in the middle of the night claiming to have her dog, she had an easy way of knowing whether they were legit. Heikki was returned two weeks later by someone who claimed to have found him.

Barb Schaefer, whose Siberian Husky Gateway was stolen from a van in Utah and found running alongside the freeway a week later, used similar tactics in her search for him. Now when she travels with dogs, she carries a large folder with a pre-made “lost dog” flyer, a photo of each dog traveling with her, and each dog’s tattoo and microchip numbers.

I don’t count on the tattoo or microchip to get my dog back, but I count on it to be able to verify to someone that that is my dog.

Use common sense. Don’t take your dog with you on errands unless he can go inside with you (the dry cleaner and the bank, yes; Starbucks, the grocery store or Costco, no).

Don’t leave your dog alone in the car, especially if your car also contains other valuable items that might attract a thief’s attention.

Don’t answer questions about your dog’s value. I haven’t come up with a snappy response to that one yet, but I don’t care for the one that’s sometimes suggested–He’s priceless to me–since that might encourage someone to steal the dog and demand a ransom.

What’s your best advice for preventing loss or theft?

Gratuitous Cavalier blogging: I’m so excited! I finally have a dog who responds without hesitation to the Come command (not always something you can count on with a birds-on-the-brain spaniel, which is why they’re usually leashed). We were at Cavalier park day yesterday, probably the only place my dogs are allowed to play off leash. A Soft-Coated Wheaten Terrier came walking through, also off leash, and Twyla–who thinks that she is some kind of huge guard dog–took off after her, closely followed by Harper. I called Harper to come and she immediately stopped and came back to me. Yesss! The even more amazing thing is that Twyla followed her. Good girls!

On our DogCars.com Web site, we review vehicles with an eye to their suitability for the safe and comfortable transportation of dogs and their gear. We’ve been doing this for a couple years now, and towards the end last year, we decided it would be fun to select “the best” in each of a half-dozen categories, along with a Best In Show DogCar overall.

The vehicle we chose for our Best In Show was the Honda Element, which caught Honda by surprise. See, Honda had been marketing the Element to outdoorsy young men, the kind who are into surfing, snowboarding and mountain biking. The fact that the Element was represented in numbers far exceeding its distribution in the larger population in any agility trial or dog park parking lot had gone pretty much unnoticed by the company.

But not for long.

Honda soon asked us if they could use our logo in a sales campaign, and we loved the idea. The posters hit the Honda dealers this week, along with window clings of the DogCars.com Best In Show award for dealer giveaways. (Poster pictured at right, and I’ve clumsily circled the DogCars.com Best In Show logo.)

Pretty cute, huh?

Honda sent me a few hundred window clings and 100 posters, all of which hit my front porch on Friday. Not sure what I’m going to do with 100 posters, but I know I’ll be framing one for the office, giving one to Jay Gavron, the friend and graphic artist who created the DogCars.com logo and award (as well as the design for PetConnection.com and DogCars.com), and one to the folks at Black Dog, our Web team.

The timing of the posters was perfect, because today for our syndicated pet-care column Dr. Becker and I (with help from DogCars.com editor Keith Turner) are wrapping up a piece we’re calling “5 and 25″ — five dog-friendly vehicles that are less than $25, 000 and get around 25 mpg. It’ll hit our client newspapers and Web sites around mid-August.

Woof-woof and vroom!

Christie’s back! Haven’t talked to her, but I hear rumors she’s home. Glad to hear it, since I’m not intending to blog from Del Mar. I’m hoping this week we can get Kim to contribute something to the mix, too. Plus: A new blogger will make a debut soon. Who will it be? Who?

Elsewhere: The only thing I don’t like about Luisa’s Lassie Get Help blog is that she doesn’t write often enough. Today: Media criticism. She makes the point in passing, but I would make it more strongly: Most newspapers’ pet-related Web logs are nothing but fluff along with ill-informed, poorly reasoned and inexpert commentary. Now, I got nothing against a little fluff, but the media’s non-stop offering of it where pets are concerned (offset only by pit-bull hysteria) is continued proof that those working in the mainstream media generally consider those of us who care about pets to be mostly bubble-headed idiots, to be treated as the same. Click on any of the blogs on the left to see that couldn’t be less true.

Completely unrelated: In the upper-left of the image, you can see a picture of one of my grandfathers. The poster is blocking the picture of my other grandfather. Here are both pictures. Can you guess which grandfather is a McMullin and which is a Spatafore? Not hard, is it? These pictures always make me smile, since my grandfathers are young men in them, such perfect examples of backgrounds, place and time. Granddad McMullin is on a survey team in the California desert, and Poppa Spatafore is in a photographer’s studio in San Francisco, spending the money from a boxing match on a portrait for his widowed immigrant mama. (Side note: “Spatafore” is the Anglicized spelling of “Spadafori.” When I was 13, I started using the older version.)

I can’t believe little Ilario is already five months old and looking so grown-up (by the way, taking this picture is just about all I’ve accomplished today):

I was sitting there stewing about how I might have to refinance my home in order to pay for gas on an upcoming road trip, when I came across this article in the Taipei Times. It reports about how a group of dedicated dog lovers were able to charter a special portion of a train so they could ride with their dogs rather than pack them like luggage into the cargo hold.

The result was called the “Pet Party Express” and it led to plenty of smiles and warm wishes from nearly everyone involved. Here’s how the writer described it:

A group of dog lovers and their pets boarded a train for Hualien yesterday on the country’s first train travel package allowing pet owners to take their furry friends.

The group traveled on an express train from Taipei yesterday in a charter “pet party” carriage for dogs and their owners.

The Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) launched a three-month trial period on July 1 to allow passengers to bring pets on the trains.

Liu Chu-mei (劉淑美), assistant manager at the Taipei-based travel agency that organized the tour, said the “very important dogs” traveling with the group would not only accompany their owners on the train, but also stay in their owners’ hotel rooms and eat at the same restaurants.

The dog-friendly train cars are equipped with individual ventilation systems and are cleaned extra thoroughly after every run, but otherwise they are pretty much the same as the “human” train cars.

We said earlier that almost everyone was happy about the special puppy car. In fact, someone has already filed a lawsuit.

While pet lovers applauded the policy, some passengers were not happy about the change. One person has filed a lawsuit in an administrative court, arguing that the rights of passengers were being ignored.

Those with health concerns in particular should not be “forced to sit together with pets,” the complainant said.

Let’s see. It’s perfectly OK to sit with coughing, sneezing and wheezing humans, but don’t force us to sit with pets.

With the continued surge in the price of gasoline, it’s only logical to consider trains and buses as resonable alternatives to driving — as long as we can bring our entire family along for the ride.