pet connection

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.

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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!

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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 …

Do you remember where you were when the first of the Friday night dump-and-run pet-food recall notices were dropped on a Web site?

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, (more…)