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.

This is Day Four of one of these crappy, bad-air-quality summer stretches where I’ve been pretty much physically incapacitated and exhausted by a run of breathing difficulties. Yeah, life’s a bitch, and my earliest memory is my dad carrying me into the ER struggling to breathe, back in the bad old days when good asthma drugs were pretty much non-existent.

Generally, my asthma is under pretty good control, which is a long way from the situation a decade or more back, when I nearly died twice in the ER, and once spent six days in the hospital and six weeks off work recovering from a freaking asthma attack. After that, I got smart and found a good pulmonologist and an even better drug regimen. I got my life back, 95 percent of the time. But that other 5 percent … geez, can I just breathe a little, please?

You’d probably thinking breathing is the only thing on my mind this morning. But you’d be wrong. I’m also overwhelmed with Dog Guilt.

See, three of my dogs are field-bred retrievers. A couple days of doing nothing and these work-minded dogs are climbing the walls. A long stretch (48 hours in dog terms) of not getting wet and/or utterly exhausted and they are giving me sad, reproachful looks.

This is Day Four, and even though they are trying to be understanding, they know in their doggy hearts that they won’t be going to the river today or getting any training today, and they are not happy about it.

In the short term, I gotta ride it out. In the longer term, I gotta move. As the population continues to grow here and climate change seems to be kicking off fire seasons earlier every year, living in a valley full of smoke, heat and exhaust just isn’t cutting it for my lungs — or my dogs.

After I finish our syndicated pet-care page for the week, I’ll be looking at real estate porn, at small pieces of acreage in other states, in places that are less crowded and certainly have better air quality. (This is a long-term project because I just happen to live in a place where you couldn’t currently give a house away, No. 5 on the foreclosure hit parade, with one in 50 homes on the way to being owned by lenders.) And then, exhausted and feeling very sorry for myself, I’ll be napping.

Enough whining … these bad-breathing stretches come and go, and they’re just part of life for me. Honestly, I find them more frustrating than worrisome, because I have a lot of things I’d like to be getting done. (Including taking the dogs out, of course!)

Side benefit of a slow economy: Direct-sale internet puppy-millers seem to be reducing prices because “stock” just isn’t moving anymore. Maybe they’ll get into another line of work! One of the dirtbags who always shows up on my gmail account ads is reducing prices by half to dump the three litters of “doodles” she has. She is also selling her “proven stud” and one of the crank-’em-out girls who “throws nice puppies.” Ugh.

Male “enhancement” pills: Maybe her “proven stud” just needs some help! Ever wonder what’s in those “male enhancement” pills? Why, so does the FDA:

Jack Distribution, LLC, 1501 Green Road Unit C Pompano Beach, Florida 33064 and its wholesale distributors G & N works, Inc., and Devine Distribution, Inc., announced today that they are conducting a voluntary nationwide recall of all lot numbers of the company’s supplement products sold under the brand names Rize 2 The Occasion and Rose 4 Her. New lots of Rize 2 and Rose 4 her (not subject to this recall) will contain lot numbers beginning in “BL”. Jack Distribution, LLC, is conducting this recall after being informed by representatives of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that lab analysis by FDA of Rize 2 and Rose 4 Her samples of random lots found the product contains potentially harmful, undeclared ingredients.

No it’s not pet-related, just weirdly amusing in my oxygen-deprived state. As you may have gathered from past postings, I watch a fair amount of Thoroughbred horse-racing, mostly on the weekends when the top-level horses are running in stakes races. Because of this, I also see a lot of “male enhancement” advertising.

See, the ads on the horse-racing networks (really, the horse-gambling networks) seem mostly to be for “male enhancement,” hair enhancement, money lending and debt relief. I’m guessing I’m not the networks’ target demographic …

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!

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):