First, the Pedigree portion of this post. I promise you, it will make you feel good because you’ll be donating food to shelter dogs with a few clicks, even if you don’t have a blog. If you do… well, I’ll get to that. Here are the details: •Each year, more than 4 million dogs end…
Road Trip to Umbria & Denmark (Dogs Beware)
Perfect timing: My return from the BlogPaws pet bloggers conference and its concomitant flurry of catch-up activities coincides with the publication of a guest post about the book Marcus of Umbria that I wrote for A Traveler’s Library, a site you should check out even when I’m not on it. In case you were wondering…
A Leap of Faith
One of the best things about blogging is the virtual community you join. Its members include not only fellow pet bloggers, but also readers who want to communicate because you’ve struck a chord with them. Some of their stories and concerns are sad, including the one I recently posted about pet loss. But some, including…
Breed vs Rescue? No! Breed Rescue? Yes!
I got this email the other day from a friend who had told me she was getting a new dog — in response to my query: What kind? We’re getting a yellow lab. We went back and forth on purebred vs. rescue and it was a really tough decision. My dog is a rescue and…
Friday Focus: Making Rescue Less Necessary (or How to Avoid Internet Puppy Mills)
The question this week was How do you define rescue? Plenty of people provided excellent definitions in the comments section. And others admitted to having fallen short of the ideal. So the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how defining the term isn’t useful. This site is about education, not recrimination.…
Friday Focus: Dog Rescuers, Defined
This week’s question was inspired by my friend Clare — well, actually, more or less demanded by her. It started when an acquaintance of Clare’s who had initially expressed interest in rescuing a dog ended up buying one from a Pomeranian breeder with this over -the-top website. Clare joked, “I usually don’t approve of buying…
GREY2K USA: Meet two dogged board members
Readers of this blog have already met these tireless advocates for animal rights, Twig Mowatt in a guest post on how to photograph your dog and Karyn Zoldan… well, she and her diva greyhound Lily have turned up here many times, most recently for Lily’s 12 1/2 birthday party. So far, Karyn and Twig have…
Friday Focus: BSL Bites
I try not to get political in this blog, but when you live in Arizona, it’s hard not to think about how one might determine whether or not members of a particular group might be illegal. Which in turn makes me think about how everyone in my family in Austria was declared illegal in the…
Friday Focus: Breed Specific Legislation
First things first. Having chosen the name Friday Five for this series, I was tying myself into knots trying to come up with five links, initially, and then five headings for every topic I decided to explore. But it’s tough enough figuring out what I think without worrying about a quintuplet presentation. So it’s buh-bye…
Girls – & Greyhounds – Just Wanna Have Fun!
Greyhound rescue is often a grim business. My friend Karyn spends endless hours unearthing the conditions under which racing greyhounds labor — caged most of the day, fed decayed, steroid-laced food, discarded like trash after their working days are done — to provide ammunition to reporters like Tim Vanderpool (here’s his latest on the topic)…