Freud, Yofi and a mystery Chow

Ok, so the title of this post is a tad deceptive: Sigmund Freud’s talking cure never went entirely to the dogs. (Update: And, as has been called to my attention, it’s also a tad confusing:  this post has nothing to do with curing barking in dogs.) But the father of psychoanalysis’s close relationship with the canines in his household did carry through to his practice — and to that of his daughter, Anna.

In Part 1 of this series, I explored Freud’s late life case of puppy love. Here I discuss the impact his bond with dogs had on his treatment sessions.

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The Freud Family Dogs

First, a disclaimer: I have no primary sources for this story; it comes from Allan Showalter — aka Dr.HGuy — who heard it from his teacher, Roy Grinker Sr.  Grinker was analyzed by Freud from 1933 to 1935 and founded the psychiatry program at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.

According to Showalter in Freud and His Damn Dog:

Freud and his daughter, Anna (also an analyst), both kept dogs (Freud had a chow named Yofi and Anna had a giant wolfhound) that had the run of the offices and shared waiting room. Both dogs would start barking whenever anyone rang the doorbell. The wolfhound… would immediately start sniffing Grinker’s genitals. Grinker reported that, as a consequence, he always entered Freud’s office ‘with a high level of castration anxiety.’

Further:

At Freud’s seminar, the wolfhound once lay next to [Grinker] and barked, causing Anna Freud to tell him that the dog was ‘perfectly safe.’ After a pause, she went on to point out that, of course, when the dog was younger, he had a habit of eviscerating sheep. Then she repeated that now he was perfectly safe. Finally, she advised Grinker to pull his tail to make him stop barking. Grinker opted not to follow that suggestion.

I’m a little dubious.

The barking — sure. What dog doesn’t bark when people come through the door? The genital sniffing is not uncommon either. One thing that makes me suspicious about this description, however, is that Anna Freud’s dog is described as a “wolfhound.” As I mentioned in my last post, Anna’s dog, beloved by her father, was a German Shepherd named Wolf; you can see his photo hanging in Freud’s office. So we’re starting with a likely case of mistaken identity. And if Anna did make the sheep joke, it doesn’t sound like a convincing one: where would an urban Viennese dog get a chance to disembowel sheep?

Still, it’s a funny story.

Freud’s Canine Timekeeper

The notion that Freud kept Yofi with him in the office while he was seeing patients has several sources.

According to the London Guardian:

Analysis became wearisome for Freud as [his jaw] cancer took its toll but Jofi sat with him, a patient listener but one with an eye on the clock, signalling the end of every session with copious yawning and stretching, never allowing Freud to exceed the statutory hour by even a minute.

Stanley Coren, a psychologist who writes often about dog behavior and intelligence, says in an excerpt from What Do Dogs Know:

Freud felt that dogs had a special sense that allows them to judge a person’s character accurately. For this reason his favorite chow-chow, Jofi, attended all of his therapy sessions; Freud admitted that he often depended upon Jofi for an assessment of the patient’s mental state. He also felt that the presence of the dog seemed to have a calming influence on all patients, particularly children.

More recent studies have shown that Freud was correct. Physiological measures show that petting a calm and friendly dog actually reduces stress (as shown by reduced muscle tension, more regular breathing and a slower heart rate). There is even some evidence that people who own dogs are likely to live longer and require less medical attention.

Freud’s dog Jofi would alert him to any stress or tension in a patient by where he lay down during the session. He lay relatively close to calm patients, but would stay across the room if the patient was tense. Jofi also helped the great psychoanalyst determine when a therapy session was finished by unfailingly getting up and moving toward the office door when the hour was up

And from Grinker via Showalter again:

Yofi…would sit alongside Grinker’s couch and, as dogs are wont to do, eventually scratch at the door to be let out. Freud would let the dog out, and, on his return to his chair, note that Yofi hadn’t thought much of what Grinker had been talking about. When the dog would later scratch to get back in the office, Freud would comment that Yofi had decided to give Grinker another chance.

In another episode, Grinker was emoting with intensity when, as Grinker explained it, “The damn dog jumped on top of me.” Freud immediately responded — by commenting that Yofi was excited that Grinker had discovered the roots of his anxiety. During this interpretation, Grinker, by his own report, lay quietly with eyes closed, as one is taught to do when, for example, attacked by wild bears.

So as not to spread misinformation here: According to How to Survive a Bear Attack, that is only accurate if you encounter a grizzly bear. An attack by a black bear, in contrast, “means it wants to EAT you. If you were to ‘play dead’ in this situation you would look up to find the bear happily feasting away on some very important body part that you, no doubt, are very fond of. The best defense with a black bear is to go on the offensive. Fight for your life!”

Perhaps Freud would have preferred a bit more spunk in his patient too.

Coming next: Dogs in Freud’s final years.

I recently did a series about how the Shelter Pet Project is working to change the image of shelter pets. As discussed  in the final installment — see Shelter Pet Project Pt. 3: The Future –  that’s only one part of the equation: In order to promote adoption and end the killing of healthy animals, the shelters need to step up too. This post, adapted from an article I wrote for Your Dog, the newsletter for the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, discusses these issues from the veterinary perspective.

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Increased public awareness of shelter dogs’ value is matched by a growing concern among veterinary schools, including Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, about the animals’ unique health issues from communicable diseases to behavior problems — both often exacerbated by their confinement.

Why Now?

“We’re moving away from the model of animal control where dogs were kept for seven to ten days and euthanized if they didn’t find a home,” says Annette Rauch, DVM, an interim director of the school’s Shelter Medicine Program. “And because many dogs are staying in shelters for a longer period of time — that is, until they’re adopted — we need veterinarians who can provide input on shelter policies, from basic things like how to design facilities, so that they’re not overly stressful to the animals to how to have the staff clean them so that pathogens are not transmitted.”

There should be no problem filling this need, according to Martha Smith, DVM, director of Veterinary Medical Services at the Animal Rescue League of Boston. Volunteering at shelters inspired many young people to decide on a veterinary career in the first place, Dr. Smith says.

In addition, like the dogs they treat, shelter veterinarians have gained a newfound respect. “Shelter medicine used to be a refuge for veterinarians without people skills,” she says. “Now shelter vets are in great demand and they’re very well regarded.”

While the recent spotlight reveals that shelter medicine is thriving, it also illuminates the fact that the discipline is still finding its way. “This is a very new field without established national guidelines,” says Miranda Spindel, DVM, former president of the Association of Shelter Veterinarians.

Statistics about — and from — shelters are hard to come by. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimates some 5,000 community animal shelters exist in the United States. And although the names of these diverse shelters may include terms such as “SPCA” or “Humane Society,” those are generic labels. They don’t indicate affiliation with either organization. No centralized agency sets guidelines for shelters or collects data about them.

Shelter medicine itself is not yet recognized as a board specialty. The Association of Shelter Veterinarians has been trying to change that since 2005, but it’s a long process, says Dr. Spindel. “We hope to have it accomplished in the next decade.”

In the meantime, the association is working to standardize the six residency programs in shelter medicine that are already established — at Purdue, UC Davis, Colorado State, Auburn, Cornell and the University of Florida. It’s also becoming actively involved in the less formal certificate programs. Luckily, given all that’s on the agenda, the association is growing. It has 19 student chapters at veterinary schools, with more than 750 individual members at last official count.

If some of its practices and methods of data gathering are still being established, the importance of shelter medicine itself is not under dispute. It’s not only the directly affected animals who benefit. A ripple effect can take place from the spaying and neutering programs at shelters affiliated with veterinary schools. Dogs who undergo the procedures become more adoptable because potential owners have one fewer expense — and one less dog-related chore — to worry about. Adopters can also feel good about being socially responsible.

The difference

Shelter medicine differs from other veterinary practices in several essential ways, including the unknown origins of most of its patients, the group environment where they’re forced to live and the need to overcome these circumstances to enhance adoptability. Among the key challenges shelter veterinarians face:

•  Solving medical mysteries. The millions of dogs brought to shelters by animal control — about half of the total intake, according to the ASPCA’s 2005 survey — as well as the many others delivered with only sketchy information from their owners need to be thoroughly examined. With no medical histories and often spotty or nonexistent care, the shelter staff must estimate the dogs’ ages and evaluate their general health to make such pressing decisions as what vaccinations to administer and when.

•  Crowd control. Instead of focusing on the health of individual dogs, shelter medicine deals with the prevention of infectious diseases such as kennel cough, distemper and intestinal parasites in groups of dogs with a wide variety of backgrounds. It’s the same type of problem that’s encountered with cattle — or humans — in confined spaces. “Any time you have animals, including humans, in a limited area, you have an increased risk of disease transmission,” Dr. Rauch says. “If one person comes on a cruise ship, say, with a norovirus [a virus transmitted by fecally contaminated food and water, and by person-to-person contact] which spreads like wildfire, you can get a third or half of the people on the ship sick for two or three days with vomiting or diarrhea. It’s happened many times.”

• Environmental improvement. Dogs are social animals, and the shelter environment can create problems where none existed before. “If you stick a dog in a cage, and it just sits there month after month with no one talking to it, and no one walking it, it will become more and more isolated and depressed. Such dogs can develop behavior problems — and won’t end up making very good pets,” Dr. Rauch says. Dogs who might have entered a shelter housetrained but aren’t taken out to urinate or defecate as frequently as in the past might forget their training, and even the slightest tendency toward resource aggression can be exacerbated in a shelter setting.  Some dogs if housed improperly can also become more aggressive towards other dogs.  What’s more, the stress of being in a shelter makes dogs even more susceptible to disease.  Because of all these factors, it is critical for shelter veterinarians to implement programs –both medical and behavioral- to keep shelter dogs healthy and ready for adoption.

Veterinarians and shelter staffs are only beginning to address these challenges on a large scale. But identifying them is the first step toward creating shelters that are healthier, more cheerful, and — building on the many spaying and neutering programs already in place — less densely populated.

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Note: One of the programs that is helping shelters become more hospitable is Open Paw, discussed here.

Sigmund Freud and Jofi/Yofi. Funny, he doesn't look Jewish.

You knew it was just a question of time, didn’t you, before I found a way to connect my two interests, my current and future projects? You’d be amazed at how easy it was!

To recap: I recently discovered that my great uncle, Siegmund Kornmehl, had a kosher butcher shop in the same apartment building where Sigmund Freud lived and saw patients in Vienna. A picture I spotted in a photography book devoted to that apartment building inspired this new series, which will explore everything from Freud’s love for dogs and the role they played in his practice, to the claim that psychoanalysis can be useful in dog training, to the dog paintings of Freud’s grandson, Lucian, to… well, we’ll see.

Anna Freud gets a dog

I thought I’d come to dog love late in life, but Freud had me beat by many years. According to an article in the London Guardian:

For over 70 years Sigmund Freud’s life was devoid of canine companionship, but all this changed when, in the mid-1920s, his 30-year-old daughter Anna, wanting a companion for her long solitary walks, became the owner of Wolf, a magnificent and intelligent German Shepherd.

Exposed to the joy of a dog for the first time, Freud fell wildly in love. So much so that in 1925 Anna, in a fit of jealous insecurity, wrote, “I did not give Papa a present for his birthday because there is no present suitable for the occasion. I brought only a picture of Wolf that I had made as a joke, because I always assert that he transferred his whole interest in me on to Wolf. He was very pleased with it.”

The picture of Wolf was still hanging in his office in 1938, when Freud was forced to depart Vienna. In the wonderful book of photographs taken just days before he left, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938,  an explanatory note to the picture of a display case filled with Freud’s exotic artifacts reads:

Hanging on a bookcase to the left of the cabinet is a moving personal note among these impressive surroundings: a photograph of Anna Freud’s dog, “Wolf.” Miss Freud recalls that on each birthday, Freud would be presented with a celebratory poem from “Wolf,” which she had written in honor of the occasion.

Anna Freud was in her 30s, her father in his seventies. It’s sweet, but a little, um, unusual. Analyze that!

Sigmund Freud gets a dog too

In 1928, a close friend of Anna’s gave Freud his own dog, a chow named Lün-Yu. According to The Guardian story, Lün-Yu was run over by a train 15 months later. (I’m having trouble trying to figure out the logistics of this; was someone walking her? Did the dog wander off?) Freud was devastated, and grieved for seven months before he was able to welcome Jofi, Lün-Yu’s sister, into his home.

As anyone who has seen a picture of Freud’s office knows, the father of psychoanalysis was fond of Middle Eastern and Asian tchotkes. It is therefore possible that he gave his first dog the name Lün-Yu, after 論語, a collection of sayings attributed to Confucius (you didn’t know I spoke Chinese, did you?).

And it might be easy to mistake the name of Freud’s next dog for a similarly esoteric nod to Eastern religion. Not so, according to an article in the Forward magazine (which is otherwise about Albert Einstein being a lousy sailor):

Freud had a dog named Yofi — or Jofi, as he would have spelled it in German, except that you won’t find Jofi in a good German dictionary…. Yofi does, however, mean “beauty” in Hebrew (in Israel today it’s a ubiquitous word meaning “great” or “terrific”), and there’s no doubt that Freud, who had a far better Hebrew and Jewish education as a boy than he generally cared to admit in later life, got it from there. Yofi was thus a Jewish dog.

He might have been a kosher dog too. According to The Guardian:

Freud always fed Jofi choice morsels on his own plate and, as he often experienced pain when eating due to his diseased jaw, Jofi often ended up eating all his dinner, a factor that no doubt contributed to the dog’s roly-poly figure.

I like to think those “choice morsels” included meat from my great uncle’s kosher butcher shop, and that Jofi often frequented my relative’s premises.

As I announced at the end of this year’s Pet Blogger Challenge, I’m going to be less active than I have been on this blog because of an exciting new project. And I’m giving up my extracurricular blogging activities.

Last Thursday I handed over the reins of the Pet Travel Book Club to Pamela Webster of Something Wagging This Way Comes. Today, I’m saying my fond farewell to Animal Cafe. In an interview with site founder Mary Haight of Dancing Dog Blog, I give a bit more detail about the new project and how it came about. I also talk about a couple of things I’m planning to do on Will My Dog Hate Me. As I said, you haven’t seen the last of me.

As you’ll hear, Mary and I did a lot of laughing.

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By the way, it’s not like my blog hasn’t been getting any feedback as I’ve been winding down. My latest Spam Saturday post has been extremely popular — with spammers. Rather than creating a new spam cubed post (as AJ of IStillWantMorePuppies.com described it), however, I decided to approve most of the comments — stripping out the linking urls, of course — so you’ll know just how brilliant people think I am at compiling spam. I urge you to check the comments out, starting from January 4; they’re pretty funny.

A couple of (particularly) scary laws have been introduced in Congress that will affect all of us. The one in the House of Representatives is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA); the one in the Senate is called Protect IP Act (PIPA). Both are ostensibly designed to help copyright holders like musicians and filmmakers from being ripped off, but in fact they are far more likely to enable corporations and the U.S. government to censor websites they don’t like.

I’ve heard rumblings about all this but I have to admit I never really understood what was at stake until I heard about tomorrow’s internet strike and started reading up on what’s behind it.

Here’s a video explaining PIPA:

My pal Pamela of Something Wagging This Way Comes, who urged several of us to take part, explained it to me in terms that are easy to understand. I posted a video in my Pet Adoption Videos that Don’t Make Me Want to Kill Myself series with Abba music in it.  The video was pulled because the shelter didn’t have permission to use the song. Ok.  But the new law, if passed as written, would allow Abba’s publishers to sue You Tube for hosting the video to begin with and could shut down my blog for reposting it.

Like I said, scary.

Here are just a few of the participants in tomorrow’s strike:

• Reddit
• Mozilla
• Wikipedia
• WordPress

The Stop American Censorship site is an excellent source of information about all the issues involved, providing a series of actions you can take. It also provides the code that you can use to black out your site tomorrow. I tried it. It’s very cool.

Take a break from blogging. Speak out against censorship. Be cool.

What’s not to like?

“Our goal is to end the euthanasia of dogs and cats in America that are healthy and treatable. To do that we have to place 2.7 million more dogs and cats this year than we did in the previous year: that means 4 more adoptions per week per animal organization in the United States. We think that’s a very doable challenge.” — Rich Avanzino, President of Maddie’s Fund

This is the third and final installment of the three-part series exploring the Shelter Pet Project, a joint effort of the Ad Council, Maddie’s Fund, and the Humane Society of the United States  to end the euthanasia of healthy animals.

In Part 1, I covered the first phase of the Shelter Pet Project, which produced and distributed a series of videos aimed at changing the perception of shelter pets as being inferior. The message: Human problems lead to pets being sent to shelters, not problems with the animals.

In Part 2, I discussed how the project came under the aegis of the Ad Council, and the importance — really, the awesomeness — of getting the Ad Council involved in this cause.

I conclude this series with the latest series of videos, and a discussion of the role that the shelters and the American public need to play in order for the campaign to succeed.

I thought it would be fitting to end on a day that a group of pet bloggers are highlighting other worthy campaigns and causes in the Blog the Change for Animals blog hop. Earlier this week, in the Pet Blogger Challenge, a number of them told us about their hopes for the future of their blogs. Here they talk about their hopes for the future of animals — and the inspirational things that many wonderful people and organizations are doing to bring that future to fruition.

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The first series of ads how animals often end up in shelters; here you take a different tack, showing animals in homes observing humans. Could you explain the different messages?

The newest creations, like the first ones, are clever; they just shift perspective. We talk about the quirks in animal behavior,  but looking through the eyes of the dogs and cats out there, it’s clear we’re sort of odd ourselves. I think that when people see the newest commercials there’s going to be a smile on their face and maybe an awareness that this bond that provides us with such love and joy comes with the mutual understanding that we’re different species but that just makes things interesting.

My expectation is that over the years we will have a variety of different messages, because there’s no one size fits all, but all have the central theme that shelters and rescues are the best place to go, that these animals make wonderful companions, and that a person is the best thing in a shelter pet’s life. We want you to be that person and adopt.

What role do the shelters themselves play in the campaign?

Part of the overall effort is to make shelters destination points. If people encounter smells and noise and poor customer service at shelters that’s counterproductive.

We need to put pressure on the institutions and the agencies and the animal organizations to get their act together. If we drive traffic to the shelters and the rescues organizations and they don’t accept the new public  interest with open arms or don’t return the phone calls to people who’ve seen a pet on PetFinder or seen it on the search engine for the Shelter Pet Project, then we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. Sure we have to drive the traffic, but after the traffic gets to their doorsteps, potential adopters have got to be welcomed, brought into the fold. The shelters and rescues have to be there to facilitate that last step in the lifesaving effort.

How do you see that coming to pass?

In many ways. We need to build shelters in more desirable places, not near dumps. The politicians and general public haven’t gotten outraged over the inadequate performance of the institutions that are supposed to protect animals when they don’t work. That’s understandable. A lot of politicians do what their constituents want. We need to make it clear that animals can alleviate other societal problems, help us overcome our maladies, drug addition, depression, etc.

When animals are no longer considered disposable commodities, when we’re not killing 2.7 million dogs and cats and every life is precious and dear and as important to us as our kids are, then you will see them moving up on the priority scale. Animals should be at the top of the list alphabetically, but they’re usually at the bottom when it comes to distributing tax dollars.

The American people say pets are family members on four legs; 60% of us are animal lovers. When asked would we rather be stranded on an island with a two-legged or four-legged being, 60% of pet owners say they’d rather be with their dog or cat. We just haven’t done enough to convince them that the shelter pet is every bit as loving, as joyful and as important in your life as purebreds.

Our hearts as a people are strong and compassionate. We have to work with that instinct within the American people to make for better conditions for animals. I think that will lead to more contributions, to more volunteers, more foster care — and reducing the cost to the taxpayers of killing.

It’s got to be a trickle up, grass roots movement. I don’t see it being forced from the top down. I think the institutions, whether municipal governments or boards of directors, are going to rally when they see people demanding these things.

Are you optimistic for the future?

Oh yes. We as a nation killed 24 million dogs and cats 40 years ago. It’s now down to 3.4 million. In the midst of a recession, we increased the number of animals who got saved last year. We’ve gone from a 27% market share of shelter pets in households to a 29% share in these awful economic conditions, just in the last two years. We reduced euthanasia by 10% in the worst economic conditions of our time in our nation.

There’s great hope on the horizon. All we need is four more adoptions per agency per week. It’s very doable.

When I first got Frankie, I had fantasies about taking long contemplative walks with him, during which I would ponder my surroundings and the nature of the universe and after which I would transfer my deep thoughts to paper.

Aside from the fact that Frankie has little, short legs and follows close behind me rather than leading me to explore new territory, I found that I had little to say about my surroundings, which pretty much stayed the same, and that I preferred listening to books on CD or walking with other people to contemplating the universe.

Luckily, John Zeaman, with the help of his long-legged, inquisitive dog, Pete, and his ability to look at nature with an artist’s eye — he is both painter and art critic — has done the job for me in Dog Walks Man: A Six-Legged Odessey, and far better than I could have. Which relieves me of guilt and pressure. At least about this particular thing.

Zeaman also has the ability to look at the world of dog people with gentle satire and at himself with self-deprecating humor. Although he often compares himself with Henry David Thoreau because of his interest in the outdoors, I think he’s far more akin to Jane Austen, a keen observer of society (this is high praise; hate him, love her). I’ll spare you the rant. I mention Thoreau only because, if you feel the same way as I do about that humorless pontificating hypocrite, I don’t want you to be put off Zeaman’s book.

Its title notwithstanding, this book isn’t all that focused on dogs — or, perhaps I should say, it would be easy to enjoy even if you’re not canine oriented. But the astute observations about Pete and his kind are a bonus. (By the way, Pete, like John Steinbeck’s Charley, is a standard poodle. There must be a subgenre of meditative-men-and-poodle literature.)

For example, Zeaman does his research and knows about dominance theory but rejects it from a common sense perspective:

I never bothered with the “alpha-dog” theory. I don’t think Pete saw me as a dog, much less a subordinate one, or that we were in any kind of power struggle for hierarchy points. Pete could be pretty stubborn, and there were times when he questioned my judgment. But so what? There were times that he was right…. He could have been more mindful of me, I suppose, but then again it was never Pete’s idea — or any dog’s — that he be tethered to me and coordinate his movements, like a partner in a silly three-legged race.

Zeaman never romanticizes Pete or the activity of dog-walking; he calls himself, and the other suburban fathers forced to take on dog-tending duty, “a dupe.” His recognition of the nature of their relationship is clear-headed, and it’s one of the many joys of the book.

Spoiler alert: Don’t read the next two paragraphs if you haven’t finished Dog Walks Man.

There is only one part, towards the end, when I began getting mighty irritated with the narrator: He begins forcing the aging Pete to walk up ramps and take car rides and walks against his will. But to his credit, Zeaman comes to acknowledge his selfishness with brutal self-examination and honesty:

I had told myself that [walking] was some important purchase on life for him. The walk! To walk was to be alive!… But I was beginning to think that I hadn’t been doing it so much for him as for myself. It was me. I had become the one who needed to go on walks. We had reversed roles.

I further realized that on some childish level, I had been angry with him for not wanting to go anymore.

It’s the rare dog lover who doesn’t see her dog as a reflection of herself; it’s the rare writer who acknowledges that fact and expresses its pitfalls so articulately.

In the end, the book is not about dogs or about man and nature, but about being fully engaged, about observing and celebrating and mourning growth and loss and change.

If there happens to be a dog or two as part of the process, all the better.

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To see what I had to say about the book’s literary aspects, and particularly its setting in the Meadowlands, New Jersey, please go over to A Traveler’s Library and read Pet Travel Book Club goes to the Meadowlands.

I’d love to know what you think of the book on both sites — dogwise here and literarily there. Or mix it up. My pal Vera Marie Badertscher and I are open to any opinions except rude and hostile ones. And we usually even allow those because it’s the commenters who look like jerks.

Haven’t read the book but want to now? You still have  a chance to purchase signed copies of the paperback and the hardcover editions of Dog Walks Man at a discount, including shipping charges. To order these signed, discounted copies directly from the publisher, contact Amy Alexander at 203.458.4541 or e-mail Amy.Alexander at globepequot.com. Signed hardcovers are $20, signed paperbacks are $15, and prices include tax and shipping.

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So — as I wrote at the end of my Pet Blogger Challenge post, I’m wrapping up my involvement in the Pet Travel Book Club and other regular features on this blog to start on another project. But I don’t want to let the Pet Travel Book Club meet an untimely demise. I’m not going to divulge any details — because I don’t have any yet — but look for its reincarnation on one of my favorite blogs as well as on A Traveler’s Library.

Update: I was waiting for both parties to sign off but it’s official: Pamela Webster of Something Wagging This Way Comes is going to be taking over the book club. With a punny literary name like that for her dog blog, it was clearly meant to be. And I know Pamela will do such a terrific job, you’ll forget you ever knew me.

But you commenters are pissing me off. You’re putting in such interesting, intelligent comments that I’m starting to regret that I’m leaving. Can we please lower the level of this conversation? Talk about Kim Kardashian, maybe?

It’s what you’ve been waiting for — the Pet Blogger Challenge! If you’re here and you’ve already written a post answering the questions that Amy of GoPetFriendly.com and I posted on December 20, simply add the url to the Linky tool, below. If you haven’t written it yet but are inspired to do so, get cracking. You have until 11:59 PM Mountain Time tomorrow (1/11) to add your link.  Otherwise, don’t blame us when you have an entire year of coulda shoulda wouldas.

For those who participated last year:

1. Provide a link to your post from last year’s Pet Blogger Challenge so we can refresh our memories.

Here you go:  The State of the Blog 1/10/12:

2. What do you consider the most important goals you set out in last year’s post?

It was pretty much my only goal: To make my blog a vehicle to promote past and future books.

3. Have you made progress toward those goals, or have your goals changed over the past year?

In some ways I have, although blogging didn’t keep AM I BORING MY DOG from semi-going out of print. On the other hand, I decided that I wanted to write a pet travel book. It seemed like a natural to mix my experience as a travel writer with my experience as a pet writer. To that end, I decided to “brand” myself (ugh — how did that term morph from its association with cattle?) as a pet travel expert by joining the Animal Cafe team as the pet travel correspondent; by starting a regular pet travel feature on Thursday; and most recently, by starting a pet travel book club here and on A Traveler’s Library, which also tied in my literary interests. A trifecta! I was planning to advertise the book club with a badge and a newsletter. I also bought a startlingly good domain name for the new pet travel blog I planned to start.

I even got the impetus to begin the book last fall by enlisting two of my virtual friends, Pamela of Something Wagging This Way Comes and Leo of Kenzo the Hovawart, into an accountability committee. I sent them a chapter outline and the first chapter for comments and they were amazing: Thorough, insightful, helpful, honest and encouraging. I couldn’t have asked for a better accountability committee.

The only thing they couldn’t do was help me to muster real enthusiasm for the book.

4. Has your opinion of blogging on a schedule or as the spirit moves you changed? Which are you doing now? Do you still worry about lost traffic, momentum, etc?

The affiliation with Animal Cafe meant that I blogged once weekly about the interviews that were posted there — a pleasure, given the quality of the interviews by Dr. Lorie Huston, Kelly Dunbar, and site founder, Mary Haight; with A Traveler’s Library there was the addition of a regular post each month. And I made sure to blog at least four times a week.  Over the year, my traffic grew slowly but steadily, and I reached the goal of 10,000 page views a month back in November.

5. Are you generating income from your blog? Has this changed since last year?

I am getting more offers than last year for paid links, hosted content, and for ads. It’s not enough to live on, but it’s always a nice surprise when it works out.

Every now and then I get an offer for an ad that doesn’t make sense (I’m not talking about something offensive, like links to puppy sellers on eBay, though I’ve gotten those too). One time, for example, I got an inquiry from an addiction support site, and I suggested that maybe WMDHM was not really a good fit. Recently, I got an offer for an ad from LaCoste — you know, the French shirts with the little alligators? I decided that if they wanted to put an ad on my site, who was I to argue with them — alligators, dogs, hey, they’re all animals. So I quoted what I thought was a high price and they didn’t bat an eyelash, which made me think I should have quoted an even higher one. But I was excited.

Loading the ad on the special site was a bit complicated, but I did it and waited for final approval, which would accompany payment, from the client… which never came. Finally, I was told that my site had been rejected by LaCoste because they already had enough content for this round of advertising…

I think they discovered WMDHM was a dog blog.

6. Have your likes and dislikes about blogging changed since last year?

Not really. I still find it an obligation that is made worthwhile by my ability to express my opinions, unfettered, as well as by the wonderful community of pet bloggers who provide support and, often, wonderful conversations

7. Overall, are you pleased with the progress you made in 2011?

Yes and no. My blog has succeeded in many ways in spite of the fact that I haven’t treated it as a business or “monetized” it, to use another word I loathe almost as much as “branding” (moo!) But if you make your living as a writer and you are spending a lot of time writing and not getting paid for it and you’re not excited about the goal you claimed for it, i.e., getting established as a pet travel expert, you have to wonder if what you are doing makes a lot of sense.

8. How do you see your blog changing/growing in 2012?

Oh dear.

When Amy and I decided to co-host the Pet Blogger Challenge again last month, I had no idea I was going to say this, but I’ve decided to wind down Will My Dog Hate Me so I can devote my energies to writing a book that has nothing to do with dogs.

I’ve alluded to the topic in a couple of recent blog posts — the discovery that my great uncle’s butcher shop was part of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. I want to research my background, to find out what pre-war life in Vienna was like for my family and maybe even discover some living cousins. For the first time since I started writing AM I BORING MY DOG,  I’m really excited about the prospect of a new book. So I’ve got to do it.

I don’t know what winding down means yet. I’m going to finish the Shelter Pet Project series I started. I have a cache of “Pet Adoption Videos that Don’t Make Me Want to Kill Myself” that I’m going to share. I’m reviewing DOG WALKS MAN on Thursday.  And I can’t imagine that I won’t occasionally want to write something about Frankie; he’ll still be the center of my life, and the little publicity hound will not want to stay out of the public eye. And I’m not going to give up having opinions about dogs.

It’ll also free me up to read up my favorite pet blogs and not panic when someone has covered a topic that I wanted to write about.

And who knows… maybe I’ll miss pet blogging so much, I’ll change my mind. Blogs are strict task mistresses but they’re also forgiving. At least I’m hoping mine won’t hate me forever.

We’re less than a week into the New Year and I’ve already had three major “Duh!” moments, realizations that I’ve been missing the obvious in spectacular ways. I’ve been looking for zebras when there were horses right in front of my face.

But rather than slapping myself upside my head in private, I thought I’d share my lesson: That a simple shift in perspective can make all the difference in solving a problem.

Example one: Plumbing the depths

This is the dumbest and the most embarrassing example of not being able to see the obvious. I called a handyman yesterday to help me with some small problems, a broken faucet and a clogged bathtub drain. When he came over and I mentioned the bathtub issue, he asked, “Did you try plunging it?” Now I know toilets and bathtubs get clogged on the same principle: Too much stuff in the pipes. And I have a plunger in my bathroom. But somehow it never occurred to me to try to plunge the bathtub. Sure enough… problem solved.

Example two: Bad medicine

You didn’t think there wouldn’t be a Frankie story somewhere in here, did you?

Last week, in the post Year End Musings and Newsings, I alluded to the fact that Frankie had begun to have hypoglycemic attacks every time I took him for a long walk. It didn’t make sense; I was adjusting his insulin based on  his urine blood sugar tests as I always do. He was also shivering a lot, and putting a sweater on him didn’t seem to help.

I was becoming resigned to the notion that he was getting old and that maybe he wouldn’t be able to exercise as much. I didn’t think Frankie would mind terribly if I never took him by car to our usual walking route — he won’t walk in the neighborhood, which is too long a digression for me to explain here — but I would miss my friends on the trail. Walking without Frankie would be depressing, and I’d have to keep telling people why he wasn’t with me.

But of course I needed to confer with my vet before I made any life-changing decisions. He was away last week but he got back after New Year’s and I left a message for him to call. Before he could phone me, however, it suddenly occurred to me: Urine tests notwithstanding, maybe the insulin I was using was bad.

Sure enough, when I checked my records, I saw that Frankie’s problems were concurrent with my having started him on a new bottle of Caninsulin (the Canadian form of Vetsulin). My vet confirmed: The reason that Vetsulin was taken off the market was inconsistent formulation of the medication. Just because I’ve been lucky for a long time, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues.

I’ve just started Frankie on another bottle and so far, so good. Whew.

Example 3: Ich bin travel writer

In the same post I referred to earlier, Year End Newsing and Musings, I also alluded to the fact that I had recently discovered my great uncle’s butcher shop is now part of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. Naturally I have been dying to get there to see for myself, but I can’t really afford it. I’d been wracking my brain and burning up the internet trying to find research grants when I got an email from a friend asking me to be part of an anthology that gives advice to aspiring travel writers.

This reminded me: I’m a travel writer, who continues to write about Tucson and southern Arizona for outlets like Sunset magazine, even if I don’t do much overseas traveling these days.

The Freud connection is a good hook to a travel story.

Simple shift in perspective.

A semi-gratuitous bit of advice

While I was writing this post, I got an email press release titled  “Three Top Things to Avoid at Restaurants.” Aside from the odd fact that the author only offered two things to avoid, the advice was pretty obvious — substitute veggies for fries, water for soda — and unremarkable until the last paragraph caught my eye:

These two simple substitutions save at least 400-900 EACH TIME YOU DINE OUT (depending on drink refills and fries portion size). And you’re avoiding the most harmful foods to your body as well by avoiding the trannies and high fructose corn syrup.

It had never occurred to me that hanging out with transvestites could be fattening, though most are far thinner and more glamorous than I am, thus possibly making me look fat.

Oh, by trannies you meant trans-fats? Um, I’m a food writer too and I didn’t get that. Perhaps you’d better spell it out to avoid confusion.

At least that wasn’t MY Duh! moment.

I love being able host deserving guest bloggers — emphasis on deserving. What better than to provide good content to my readers without doing much work? I’m especially pleased to share information about a useful new book without having to put in the time doing a book review.

I’m never going to be less busy, so I’ve decided to make 2012 The Year of Delegating Responsibly.

Without further ado, I’m turning my blog over to Kristen Levine, author of  Pampered Pets on a Budget, available in paperback and Kindle versions.

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Greetings and Happy 2012 to pet parents everywhere!

I don’t know about your pets, but mine are very happy the holiday season is over and things and routines are getting back to normal. Chilly, my two year old lab impersonator (mixed breed extraordinaire) and I just returned from a long road trip from Tampa, FL to Denver, CO — 4,423 round trip miles to be exact!  See, I like to visit family in CO for three weeks each Christmas, but I certainly won’t leave Chilly behind for that long, and I wouldn’t dream of putting him in cargo on a commercial airliner!

Fortunately, I am a proud member of Toyota’s P.E.T. (Pet Expert Team) — which means I travel the country in my Toyota Sequoia educating pet parents about pet safe auto travel. Here’s a recent article I wrote about pet travel safety for Petside.com.

What does that have to do with the book I just published, Pampered Pets on a Budget: Caring for your pet without losing your tail? It illustrates that we pet parents are willing to go to great lengths to make sure our pets are safe, comfy, and having fun.  And that we spend a lot of money doing so.  Sometimes, more money than we should, or than we have.

A Pet-Aware Budget

Many of you may be thinking about your 2012 household and lifestyle budget at this time of year.  If you are, did you factor in pet expenses?  You’d be amazed at how many people I’ve spoken to have a family budget, but forgot to include their pets.  According to a recent survey of pet parents by the ASPCA, on average, it costs $1035 per year to care for a cat, and $1300-1900 a year to care for a dog (depending on size). Clearly, that should be factored into a family budget.  Incidentally, I think those numbers are low, and as an avid pet blog reader, you may be, like me, a pet over-spender.

So, here are some ways you can save on your pet budget for 2012, without compromising the care of your BFF.

First, an exercise…

Need vs Want

1.  Make a list of your pet’s “must haves” and their associated costs, (food, vet care, supplies, grooming, etc.)
2.  Make a list of your pet’s “nice to haves” and their associated costs, (toys, doggy day care, grooming, treats, etc.)
3. Now, add the totals up from the “must haves” column and go line by line to see where you might be able to save (see Savings Tips, below).
4.  Add up the totals from the “nice to haves” list, and depending on how much money you want to save or need to save, start eliminating!  Take the items that remain, and think about how you can save there too.

Savings Tips

1. Talk to your veterinarian about exactly what you can expect to spend on wellness/preventative care for your pet in 2012. (Do NOT skip your pet’s vet visit to save money. This may cost you financially and emotionally in the future, if your pet becomes sick and you skipped the preventative or early treatment opportunity.) Once you have that “expect to spend” figure, set aside that money now, or a portion of it each month so that you will have it available when your pet’s vet visit happens.  You might also look into pet health insurance as an option to cover you in the event of unexpected illness or injury to your pet in 2012.
2. Purchase the best diet you can afford, in bulk.  Bulk buying will save you money, approximately 20-25% on average. Store dry food in a sealable plastic container to keep it fresh.
3. Shop dollar stores!  During my research for the book, I found the following items at my local dollar store, litter box liners, litter scoop, plastic cat food dishes.
4.  For those costly one-time purchases of crates, pet carriers, airline kennels, cat condos or scratching posts, try shopping garage sales, flea markets, eBay, Craigslist or your local shelter if they have a retail center.
5.  If you’re adding a new pet to your family in 2012, adopt a pet to save big money! Pet adoption can cost anywhere from $25-$250 depending on the shelter or rescue group.  Usually, adopting fees include spaying or neutering, vaccinations and a microchip.  Purchasing a pet from a reputable breeder will undoubtedly cost you a lot more–hundreds of dollars for the pet (if not over a thousand) and $200-$500 for the initial veterinary care.

The bottom line: When it comes to your health and well-being, you can’t afford not to have a pet.  Pets give us so much joy on a daily basis and caring for them confers a dozen or more benefits to our health on us.  So if you’re smart about your planning and purchasing you’ll be pampering yourself as well — on a budget.

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Bio: The founder in 2002 of Fetching Communications, the nation’s first marketing and public relations firm dedicated to serving the pet industry,  author Kristen Levine is also a popular columnist for NBC Universal’s Petside.com and the Tampa Tribune newspaper. She has logged over 1,000 live television and radio interviews, including appearances on “Good Morning America” and ABC News Radio, and is frequent contributor to national pet and veterinary trade magazines. She is married and lives in Florida with her dog, Chilly, and a pair of miniature donkeys, Izzy and Willow.