pet connection

I’m off to San Diego, a little baseball, a little horse-racing and lot of driving.

Kim’s catching up with me at Del Mar, so it’s just Christie minding the shop for most of the weekend.

Don’t anyone tell Kim, but there’s a chance that we’ll meet up with Kristin Mulhall, who is the youngest trainer ever to have a horse in the Derby, in 2004 when she was 21. I’ve had a passing acquaintance with her for a couple years now, since she bought a racehorse with the intention of retiring him, a former Breeders Cup runner I’d been a fan of, Bluesthestandard. Poor boy made a lot of money over his career, and he was being run as a cheap claimer when she stepped in and said, “enough.”

I’ll find out more about Blue if I can catch up with her Saturday. Last summer he was enjoying his retirement at her place very much. His story is in our “Why Do Horses Sleep Standing Up?” and last summer I gave a signed copy to Kristin for letting us share it.

I keep up with her because someday I hope I will have property, enough room for a forever home for a couple of the old racehorses Kristin works to get off the track and into retirement.

Back Sunday, which just happens to be the day Derby and Preakness winner (and noted Belmont what-on-earth-happened-we’ll-never-know? horse) Big Brown is expected to return to racing, in the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park in New Jersey.

If you’re prone to playing hunches … the Mini Cooper Clubman I’m test-driving this week has New Jersey plates. Not sure what that would suggest a hunch bet for, though, which is why I don’t gamble.

Over on our DogCars.com site, editor Keith Turner had earlier mentioned a media release touting hotels that put out the welcome mat for pets. Pet travel expert Marjorie Darby took issue with some of the hotels, in an extended comment that offers some additional suggestions. It’s well worth a read if you’re planning to head out with your pet on a trip any time soon.

Watch this space: Adding notables from here and there … the Massachusetts state Legislature voted unanimously to outlaw “pet rentals,” and may other states follow suit. (If you want a part-time pet, how about volunteering at a shelter or fostering?) … California legalized pet trusts, although it’s still better to count on friends and family, not the law, to protect your pet if you die. … Factory farm interests pour big money into defeating the most basic anti-cruelty measures for food animals.

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.)

Walking around the parking lot of the dog show in Pasadena yesterday, I was as always struck by our “gang signs” — bumper stickers, magnets, license-plate covers and, of course, vanity license plates.

To the right is a picture of what you can find on the back of my ‘98 Plymouth Voyager minivan. I also have a pair of dog silhouette magnets and a bumper-sticker for Bark magazine.

Of course, in this craziness I’m in good company. My favorite “capture” in the parking lot of the dog show was a white Toyota Sienna van with magnets and a license plate that made it no doubt — without actually saying so — that the van was a DogCar for border collies. (Well, that and it was parked next to the agility rings!)

Check it out over on DogCars.com and see why.

And if you have a mind to, send our DogCars.com lead blogger Keith Turner a picture of your vehicle, with bumper sticker, tags, license plates or whatever it is that lets others know where you’re coming from, in DogCar-ese. He’ll put it on the DogCars.com blog.

On the way up I-5 coming home yesterday, I even spotted vanity plates referring to Dutch Rabbits. I don’t remember the exact lettering — something like DTCHRBT — but the van also had a bumper sticker that proclaimed them to be fans of the black-and-white lagomorph.

I’m so happy I decided to visit with friends at dog show/agility trial this morning in Pasadena before driving home from the publishing industry convention. It got me back in my “happy place,” where I don’t have to dress up, care about make-up, deal with crowds or have to “sell” myself. I could just be plain ol’ invisible me!

Best of all, I got to see a whole lot of really cool dogs and visit with my friends Teresa and Debbie. Teresa’s girl Sprint (who is my McKenzie’s sister), got her first championship point. Not that Sprint cares. She’d rather run agility (she’s already a MACH — an agility champion) and she IS her registered name, Windfall’s Made to Run. She ran clean twice in addition to the show-ring ribbons, which made it a pretty nice day all around.

Teresa’s other dog, Jazz, I’ve written about before. She was given a few weeks to live more than a year ago, and look at her go! Look at the picture I took this morning: Does this look like a dog with cancer? Not at all! She just keeps living her life the way she loves it.

Jazz is one special, special dog. (By the way, we put the story of Jazz in the new book.)

Hard to pull myself away, but with a six-hour drive ahead of me, I had to. That was a 825-mile roundtrip “weekend getaway.” Zounds, that’s a lot of driving! But I loved the Jetta SportWagen, so I’ll be writing a good review for DogCars.com. Nimble, comfortable and economical. Pretty darn cute, too.

Speaking of pretty darn cute, what about this quartet of Smooth Fox Terriers?