pet connection

OK, I’m officially excited.

I never really go anywhere except for business. Now, I love the work I do, but it seems I’m always getting on a plane for a pet-related trade show, veterinary conference or a meeting with editors either at Universal Press or our book publisher, HCI. And since I’m getting on a plane, I’m not taking the pets.

Not this time. We’re going. We’re all going. Well, me and the dogs, anyway. The non-canines will stay behind with the house-sitter and my neighbors Judy and John to look after things.

Drew is going to stay with my parents (they love him like the child they never had, the good-looking one who always does what you ask him to). Pip is going to stay with his foster mom at German shepherd rescue. And all the retrievers are jumping into a Honda Element and we’re off to Oregon on Sunday.

Why? The Flat-Coated Retriever National Specialty, which is kind of Super Bowl just for Flat-Coated Retrievers. Puppy Otter will compete in puppies. McKenzie will compete with the grown-up girls. Woody will compete against other hunt-titled retriever boys.

And Heather … oh, Queen Heather. My darling heart dog, my 11.5 year-old queen of the world (just ask her) will compete in 11-and-older veteran girls. This is special, because she is the Queen here, and because she has previously placed in two national specialties — as a puppy, and as a 7- to 9-year-old veteran girl.

You know what? She has never looked better. But I may be a little biased. I love this girl, and I don’t really care what happens up there. I am just so happy she is still with me, healthy and as full of her own fine self as ever.

We’re going to hang out with lots of other people who love the smell of wet dogs and talk about … wet dogs! Retrieving! And dogs! Dogs!

Even better, Honda just confirmed that they’ll be sending me on the road trip in our 2007 Best In Show DogCar of the Year, the Honda Element. I just ordered stickers to tape on the car, and everyone I meet with an Element will get one for FREE.

Wait … there’s more!

On the way back, I’m doing two book-signings and readings. The first:

An Evening for Pet Lovers
On Saturday, April 12, at the Del Norte County Library, beginning at 7 p.m.

The evening, sponsored by the Del Norte County Library and the Del Norte Literary Coalition, will bring rare, personal appearances by two of the most authoritative and entertaining pet writers working today: Gina Spadafori and Christie Keith.

Gina and Christie will make lively and informative presentations, offer for sale and autograph Gina’s books with additional participation from the Del Norte County Animal Shelter and the Humane Society of Del Norte.

You can view complete details of this unique and free event in the attached brochure that you may also download and print.

For those not familiar with California, Del Norte’s county seat is in Crescent City, which is about as far north as you can go and not be in Oregon and as far west and not be in the Pacific Ocean.

The day after, I’ll be a little further down the coast in Arcata, at Arcata Pet for another book-signing.

The books’ll be for sale and signing — we’re just going for $10 a book, to make it easy — but the publisher has sent a couple of cases of FREE bookmarks, and everyone who asks me will get one.

I don’t really like public events. But I’m doing these because Pet Connection readers Russell and Nadine Long and Susan Fox asked me to. And because Christie promises to cut my hair while we’re both in Crescent City.

Of course, I’ll be blogging the road trip. Four dogs and up to a dozen baby chicks (my new pet chickens!). In a car. For a week. Stay tuned.

We work very hard to be fair here at the PetConnection. We have our opinions — and are entitled to them, by the First Amendment — but we’re also about the facts and about our readers’ opinions, too. That’s why we not only allow but also encourage comments.

I guess PETA isn’t aware of that, since instead of commenting on my recent post that mentions them, they decided to e-mail, fax and certified mail me a letter. In the interest of fairness, I want to make sure that letter gets read.

In it, Jeffrey S. Kerr, the PETA Foundation’s General Counsel and Vice President of Corporate Affairs, takes issue with my wording indicating that the pets who end up at PETA are looking for new homes. He says the animals who end up at PETA are not adoptable, and that PETA’s 97 percent kill rate in 2006 — as reported to the Commonwealth of Virginia, click here to see — is because PETA is giving these animals a kind way out of this world.

Since the animals in question are no longer alive to be evaluated by independent veterinarians and behaviorists, we’ll have to take Mr. Kerr’’s word that:

The animals that you are referencing were not brought to PETA to find new homes. These animals were brought to, or picked up by, PETA because they were unadoptable for a variety of reasons, and had been surrendered precisely because they were not adoptable. Many of these animals were sick, and euthanasia brought them a peaceful release from the suffering that they endured.

Thank you for that clarification, Mr. Kerr.

Here’s the entire letter.

***

Meanwhile, up in the Seattle area, the fight over the King County Animal Control shelter is getting louder and nastier. Don’t miss the comments on Christie’s post yesterday.

For the three months, we’ve quietly been working behind the scenes on a pretty big Web project: Developing a complete and completely searchable archive of years of pet-care articles. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, but I didn’t have the technical skills and time to develop a searchable database myself, or the money to have someone else do it.

When Dr. Marty Becker and I wrote our first two books together (”Why Do Cats …?/”Why Do Dogs ..?”), we knew we had something good going. We loved working together and we never fought about anything. So we joined forces officially, with him dropping his Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) newspaper column to join me at the world’s biggest and best provider of syndicated content, the Universal Press Syndicate. (Not to mention the nicest: I love the folks there, especially my gifted, long-time editor, Greg Melvin.) Dr. Becker brought with him behaviorists Susan and Dr. Rolan Tripp, and I dragged the incomparable Christie Keith along with me — a kind of pet-care Brady Bunch, if you will. (We’ll have more top pet-care experts joining us soon, too!)

Dr. Becker and I merged forces on Jan. 1, 2007, and we’ve never looked back.

But what about those articles? I still dreamed of making them available to people who needed help — and not just the advice, but also things like Christie’s transcripts of interviews with important people in the animal world. A few months ago, Dr. Becker was kidding me about what I wanted for my 50th birthday, and I told him: A searchable database! He thought I was kidding, but … it’s really what I wanted most.

So now we have one.

We have a lot of companies asking to buy sponsorship banners on PetConnection.com and DogCars.com, but we turn most of them down. For one thing, we don’t want to clutter up our site with a ton of little junky ads. And for another, we’re not about to be giving space to puppy-mill retail sites or outfits pitching snake oil to desperate pet-lovers. So we’ve entered into sponsorship agreements with a handful of companies we respect, and made sure those companies understand that they are not buying us or our content — they get a banner to reach our readers.

One of those companies we decided to work with was Pfizer, and when we asked them to underwrite the development of the searchable archives, they eagerly agreed. Our Black Dog Web team drew up the prototypes and the behind the scenes interface, and we hired top pet-care editor Phyllis DeGioia to handle the difficult task of editing and inputting thousands of articles.

She’s about halfway through that job, with more than 2,000 articles in the database, so we’ve launched it to see how it works as she continues to add another couple thousand more.

Check it out and let us know what you think. You can get to the article search from the Pet Connection home page or from any Pet Connection page by clicking on “Article Search” in the top navigation.

We’re considering this a “soft-roll” beta version and will continue to tweak it until it’s exactly best for helping the most people and pets. And if you don’t find something you need an answer to, let us know. That probably means we need to do an article on it for our newspaper feature. Or maybe it means Phyllis hasn’t gotten to it yet!

***

Did you miss Dr. Becker?

Last week he was all over the media. We now have all the links so you can watch online

ABC News Now:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4517525
Pudgy Pooch? Best Doggie Diets!
Learn how to alter your dog’s diet to get your overweight pet back in shape.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4517547
Fido Fitness Unleashed!
Help your dog put their best paw forward with the latest walking accessories.

XM radio 155:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4480429

Good Morning America video:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4480189

Good Morning America article:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/AmazingAnimals/story?id=4475252&page=1

For the rest of the week, you can watch the clips from “The Martha Stewart Show.” Go here, click on March 24 and then go to the second set of videos on the right — “Pet Emergencies” and “Giving Medicine to Pets.”

Every day seems to bring a new pet Web site, their operators apparently salivating over the more than $40 billion Americans spend on their pets every year. Problem is, they all seem to have the exact same ideas for content — a few articles written by a veterinarian, a few other pet-care articles, maybe a blog that never takes on any hard-edged topic or allows comments (wouldn’t want to annoy any advertisers!) and so on. All this and puppy mill ads, too!

What they also all have in common is they all send me e-mails wanting us to write about them here or in our syndicated newspaper column. (Or worse, “trade links,” how very 20th century!) It’s like they all went to the same “make a million dollars with a pet Web site” seminar.

Suddenly, they’re also all having photo contests. All of them! I kid you not! That must have been last month’s memo from the consultants.

Official Pet Connection Notice: We’re not writing about your new dopey “content-lite” pet site, and that would be true even if we weren’t all cranky-like from book deadlines. That’s Thing 1. Thing 2: Everyone who trots over from those Web sites and makes a dopey comment (a/k/a “viral marketing”) on a blog post here just to get a link to your site in the comments section on the PetConnection blog will  immediately have your comment mocked and the Web site you’re trying to market put on our comments blacklist.

So take your puppy-mill ads and your lame, predictable content and go away. Kthanx.

I make joke: It’s not mine. But here I am on the very last day of my book deadline (first of three this spring) and the media review coordinator drops off a Lexus RX 4ooh hybrid. (Motto: “Spoils the driver, not the scenery.”) And did I mention it’s a perfect spring day, great for a drive up to the foothills for lunch?

Ah, well, there’s always the weekend. I test-drive each DogCars.com vehicle for a week so I have this one until next Tuesday.

Some cars are very easy to give back at the end of the week. I’m guessing this one won’t be. Some cars make it very, very hard to drive my own 1998 Plymouth Voyager SE minivan. I’m guessing this will be one of those cars.

Christie is continuing to recover from her trip to South By Southwest in Austin and reports via e-mail that she has gone to bed with some tea. (Rule of thumb: Christie requires 1.5 days of rest for every day she is away from home before she can function fully. I’d laugh, but I require two days of rest for every day away from home, and my choice isn’t tea, but Xanax.) Kim is on deadline.

And our Dr. Marty Becker, of course, is on his way to New York City, for a long day of media appearances, starting with “Good Morning America” tomorrow. Catch it!

Update: By popular request! Our graphic designer Jay Gavron has now produced a DogCars.com Best In Show sticker for all you Honda Element owners. Here’s where you can get one. Thanks, Jay!

Update: I just took the Lexus hybrid to Woodland, which is on the other side of the county line from Sacramento … about an hour round-trip on I-5. Yes, I will ache when I have to give this car back. Responsive, powerful and the gas tank needle didn’t move off “full” for the whole trip. That, and the quiet at low speed was about the only way you could tell it’s a hybrid. Zow-ee. Too nice for a serious DogCar, though, at least with the ivory-colored carpets …