We don’t have posted comments guidelines now. The software is set to moderate the first post anyone makes, and it will also grab for moderation any post with more than two links. This is mostly to catch automated spam, and people who are paid to post links and run.

After someone has had a first comment approved, he or she is generally unmoderated.  Usually commenters stay that way unless they’re banned, which we’ve had to do maybe 20-30 times in the last four years.

The things what will almost certainly earn someone a trip to Automatic Comment Vaporization Land is the persistent inability to discuss the issues. Repeating talking points over and over is pretty much a three-strike-and-you’re-out affair: We give you a couple of chances to catch on and engage your OWN brain, and if you can’t, you get the boot.

It’s not about agreeing with the bloggers here. That’s not necessary at all to get along here. But we do want the discussions to be discussions, not dogma yelps, and we want discussions to advance so everyone can get something out of them.

A couple of people have been thrown out of the game after a single pitch, but as was documented in “Bull Durham,” if you launch profanity-laced inventive at the umpire, you’re gone:

.
We need something clear and short. Toss your suggestions into the comments.

I won’t be around here much today. I have picked up a virus or something, and I’m heading back to bed … so toss in your suggestions and I’ll work out something when I feel better.

By the way, I almost certainly will be watching “Bull Durham” today. I always do when I’m sick. :)

By the way, we have almost 57,000 comments on this blog, on some 3,500 posts.

One more point: Sometimes the software has a mind of its own, and snags even our own comments. Usually when comments don’t show up, its because the spam filter grabbed them for whatever tomfool reason its little computer brain has cooked up. Lose a comment? Drop us an e-mail and we’ll fish it out of the spam folder.

Tomorrow, we’ll be announcing another new member of the Pet Connection team.

Stay tuned …

***

In non-pet-related news: Morgan Ong, our Pet Connection Director of Photography, got married on Monday (but just broke the news last night). I’ve known Morgan for 30 years, consider him one of my brothers. I couldn’t be happier for them both.

Anyone who has seen me covering a convention or trade show has met Morgan, as hasl anyone who has been the focus of a PetConnection newspaper page feature.  We’ve always been lucky to have him around to shoot the occasional assignment. Morgan has a long and storied career as a photojournalist and editor  with stints at a handful of notable newspapers, the Associated Press and at the former Knight-Ridder-Tribune bureau in Washington, D.C.

The recessiondepression has our finance folks turning grayer, every day. And they’re certainly not alone. Sacramento has a lot of, uh, “challenges” now, more than many other places, perhaps.  The sub-prime “correction” has been rough for the former booming housing market here (my house “appreciated” $130K in 15 months, and then “depreciated” $150K in 10 months), and we sure haven’t nailed the landing yet. (Hello, Captain Sully? Help to ditch this bird? We have a river. And a spare river.) And then there’s the state government, melting down before our eyes and ready to issue IOUs, never a good thing in a “company town” like Sacramento.  But I digress, as my very funny boss is fond of saying (and doing).

Because of all this, I’m highly sympathetic to the folks out there who are being “paid to blog” by writing comments that are somewhat on-topic yet include an “unprompted” endorsement and link to a retail site.

But … we not letting these through, so go find some other blogs to clutter.  Ain’t happening here.

First-time posters are always moderated, as are any posts with more than one link (that’s why some of the regulars’ comments get delayed from time to time). In the last two weeks, I have deleted great many of these “pay to blog” promotion posts, a huge increase, in fact. A few I’ve let go through after deleting the pitch and link because the person who posted had something helpful to say before putting in the “unprompted endorsement.”

We welcome comments. In fact, I have to say that even though I’m one of the “experts” here, I know I have learned as much as I’ve shared, if not more.

Join the discussion if you’re new here, but we can tell the difference between “pay to blog” comments and real ones. Save yourself the time if you’re coming here for the former. They’re not going through.

(Image shamelessly ripped off from Terrierman.)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to caution consumers of a potential association between the development of illness in dogs and the consumption of chicken jerky products also described as chicken tenders, strips or treats.  FDA continues to receive complaints of dogs experiencing illness that their owners or veterinarians associate with consumption of chicken jerky products. The chicken jerky products are imported to the U.S. from China.  FDA issued a cautionary warning to consumers in September 2007.

Australian news organizations report the University of Sydney is also investigating an association between illness in dogs and the consumption of chicken jerky in Australia. At least one firm in Australia has recalled their chicken jerky product and the recall notification stated the chicken jerky product was manufactured in China.

Here’s the rest.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 …

I do. Because I blogged it. And then didn’t stop working for the next eight weeks.

A lot of people will be spending the weekend thinking about their dead pets, caring for their sick ones and wondering if it could ever happen again, in pets or even in the human food supply system. The answer?

From Christie’s piece just posted on SFGate.com, on this sad anniversary made even sadder because little has changed when it comes to our government’s lack of ability to protect the food supply:

I didn’t guess when I began covering this story … that it would turn into the largest consumer recall in history, trigger an international trade scandal, launch congressional hearings and proposed legislation on food safety, and result in the indictment of American and Chinese businesses owners. I couldn’t have foreseen that the incident would put a spotlight on Chinese imports that would eventually reveal lead in children’s toys and toxins in toothpaste and prompt a recent recall of the drug heparin.

But it’s equally hard to believe that after all that, the answer to the question “Could it happen again?” is probably “Yes.”

The reason is simple: None of the changes that might prevent a repeat have been implemented. Inspections of pet food plants haven’t improved; the patchwork of state, federal and industry manufacturing standards and regulations haven’t been overhauled; transparency and accountability haven’t increased – not even something as simple as printing the name and contact information of the actual manufacturer on pet food labels – and pet food labeling laws haven’t been revised. The FDA still does not have mandatory-recall authority.

Here’s the rest. I hardly remember those weeks now (they’re just one big, sad blur) except to be grateful to all the people who helped, who supported each other and shared what they knew. We couldn’t have done what we did here without the people and pets we did it for. And I couldn’t have make it through without Christie, without Dr. Marty Becker, without Dr. Paul Pion of VIN and our Web team at Black Dog Studios. And many more people, too.

I know Kim is writing a piece for MSNBC.com and we’ll put that up, too, when it’s posted.

Me? I have never, ever been so bloody keen on anniversary pieces as the rest of the media is. I’ve sighed every time I’ve been assigned one, and I’ve never assigned one to anyone else, either. So this weekend I’m not going to think about tens of thousands of dead and sick pets, a government that let us down (and still does so) and a media that with very few exceptions (USA Today and the L.A. Times, most notably) never realized the implications of the import mess. (And still doesn’t, preferring to cover the details of hiring expensive call girls instead of the sorry state of our nation’s food supply.)

Instead of writing about the one-year anniversary, I’m going to finish writing the first of our three new books, which is technically due in the morning but will really be at the publisher in full on Monday. I like writing. It gets me through the rough spots in life. I’m happy to have to be writing about something else this weekend, instead of revisiting such overpowering sadness.

Kim promises to blog about the new puppy, and Christie is supposed to be home from South By Southwest Interactive sometime today. They’ll have some good stuff to write about, I hope, because I have got to be dedicating my typing somewhere else for the next couple of days.

Please feel free to remember your pets in the comments here — I want to see some names, I want to read those names — and know I am thinking about them all this weekend. And you, too.

That’s it for me until Tuesday. I gotta book to finish.

Update: O, Canada! Geez, at least the U.S. regulatory agencies pretend to care. From the Canadian Press:

After the recalls started last year, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency began a review of its responsibilities to pet food and, according to their website, “determine if room for improvement exists within the Canadian system.”

On Friday, it appeared as though nothing had changed.

“We don’t have a regulatory role – that’s the bottom line,” said Marc Richard at the CFIA’s headquarters in an interview.

“We’re the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. We deal with food – and food is for humans.”

Considering the point that has been made time and time again (including by Dr. Nestle in the previous post) that the human and pet food supplies are interconnected, this seems to be as bone-headed a point of view as can possibly be imagined.  This man needs to find another job … forcibly, if need be.

About the image: Do you remember this kitten? She oversaw our recall coverage from start to finish, mostly on our PetConnection.com home page. Just a stock photo, and probably an old one, but this little cutie’s face is burned into my memory forever. I hope she had a good life.