pet connection

Our Dr. Marty Becker will be visiting Sacramento for an event at the VCA Sacramento Veterinary Referral Center on Sunday, Oct. 18. His talk will focus on what pets do for us. He calls it “The Bond,” and there’s plenty of peer-reviewed evidence of all the ways that having pets makes our own lives better. Come find out!

Dr. Becker and PetConnection executive editor Gina Spadafori will also be signing copies of their latest best-sellers, “The Ultimate Cat-Lover” and “The Ultimate Dog-Lover.” The VCA folks will have free refreshments and tours of the facility.

The schedule:

2-3 p.m.: Tours of the VCA Sacramento Veterinary Referral Center. Free refreshments.

3-5 p.m.: Hear Dr. Becker and get your book signed. Bring your own copies of his books or buy them there.

The VCA Sacramento Veterinary Referral Center is at 9801 Old Winery Place, Sacramento 95827. Phone: 916-362-3111

Click for a map

Click to download the flier

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?

Book Expo America is the nation’s biggest publishing industry trade show, second largest in the world. This year it’s in Los Angeles, and it starts today. Our publisher, Health Communications, Inc./HCI, has a big booth, of course, and the focus of their efforts this year is the “Ultimate” book series, which include the three books Dr. Becker and I have been working so hard on this spring, along with our co-authors. (The publisher has a bound galley of the dog book ready for the show, along with “samplers” of the other books.)

I was planning to fly down this morning, but I am fried. (We finished the books around 6 a.m. on Tuesday.) So I’m going to spend today hanging with the pets and leisurely doing a little laundry and then pack to go.

With my flight canceled, I’m choosing to drive tomorrow instead of fly today. Maybe crazy, but I wanted to switch. I’ve logged a lot of sky time in the last couple years, and it’s ugly up there. Volkswagen gave me permission to take this week’s DogCars.com test car, the Jetta SportWagen, on the road trip. (Usually reviewers have the vehicle for a week, and are not to put more than 500 miles on it.) I’m hoping the drive will be a little mental “reset” button for my tired mind, and I’m grateful the Jetta is pretty fuel-efficient.

It’s six hours door to door, which means eight hours with traffic, probably. I’m having lunch Friday with my college buddy Russ Stanton, who’s now the editor of the Los Angeles Times. (I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around that. I mean, he was always smart, hard-working and talented, but Editor of the Los Angeles Times? Wow.) Then I have to run to the first of the book-signings in the L.A. Convention Center, one on Friday and two on Saturday.

This is just for the industry … like everyone else, we’ll be trying to impress the buyers from bookstores and from the big retailers like Target and Costco.

Signings late Saturday afternoon, and then if I have any energy left, I’m going to drive home Saturday night. More realistically, I’ll crash in the hotel room the publisher has provided and drive back early Sunday morning.

And then … I swear … no travel for a long, long time. I wanna stay home with my pets and my garden!

Pupdate: I just found out that my friend Teresa is competing all weekend at an agility competition in Pasadena (Teresa has Jazz, written about here, and also Sprint, the fastest agility dog in the world and sister to my girl McKenzie.) So … looks as if I’ll be spending Sunday morning at the park next to the Rose Bowl!

Tip of the hat to Pat for pointing out this AP story on behaviorist Dr. Emily Weiss of the ASPCA and her work trying to “cat”-egorize felines into personality types:

“People come in and say, I had a black and white tuxedo cat before, so that’s what I want,” says Jim Monsma of the Washington Animal Rescue League in Washington, D.C. “But cats are not all the same. They have widely divergent personalities.”

That’s why the shelter is now using the Feline-ality program, developed by behaviorist Dr. Emily Weiss of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Part of the ASPCA’s Meet Your Match program, which also includes Canine-ality for dogs, the program assesses a variety of behaviors in individual cats. It rates the animals on confidence and sociability, which Weiss’ research has shown are independent of each other.

The program then tallies those assessments to place the cat into nine personality categories, which can be matched with a family’s situation and desires. [...] The program is used at 45 shelters, with additional facilities preparing to use it.

Our Pet Connection behavior team, Susan and Dr. Rolan Tripp, just wrote a piece (coming out next week) for our newspaper clients on how to judge personality types in kittens.

Cats aren’t as diverse in their personalities as dogs are, but certainly the person who wants a quiet lap-cat isn’t going to be happy with an adventurous, always in motion go-kitty. And of course the person who wants a playful, engaged cat will find the lap-kitty too boring.

I’m glad shelters are trying to look at feline personality types to help people make a better match.

Completely unrelated: Check out the lattice mane braid (click the image to see it larger) done and photographed by the amazing Sarah K. Andrew, lead photographer for our Ultimate Horse Lover book. Sarah, you rock! (I also like this picture revealing the secret of the equine photographer: Who needs a tripod when you have a quad-pod?)

More completely unrelated, but way cool: Thanks to everyone who sent me this one:

When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught – recite his name and address to a stranger willing to help.

Police rescued the African grey parrot two weeks ago from a neighbor’s roof in the city of Nagareyama, near Tokyo. After spending a night at the station, he was transferred to a nearby veterinary hospital while police searched for clues, local policeman Shinjiro Uemura said.

He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet.

“I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

Not just “Yosuke Nakamura” but “Mr. Yosuke Nakamura”! Ha!

Everyone who reads this blog even occasionally knows the three fall books are due to the publisher on Monday. I put in a lot of hours and thousands of words today, and I’m pretty fried at the moment, soon to be off to bed.

Not so fried, however, that I can’t snap a picture of my two favorite cats getting along better by the day. I need regular reminders of how important the subject matter is to me! I wonder if I could put in this much effort or interest writing on anything except pets.

I’ve been leaving the door to the attached garage open just enough for Clara to get away from Ilario, who tries to follow her everywhere. I also put a fresh second litter box just for her under the work bench. Today, Ilario figured out how to get over the box I had blocking his path, and right into the garage he went.

She didn’t seem to mind too very much that he shared her patch of sunlight.

This so pleases me that every day she accepts him more — and sometimes even seems to like him.

Thursday, by the way, he’s off to get “tutored.” I figure after he comes home smelling of the veterinary hospital she’ll be all hissy again for a while. But she’ll get over it soon enough.

Here they are earlier today yesterday afternoon:

This morning, triumph! They are cats united in demanding justice: Why do the dogs get to go outside and not the cats?