All in the Family

Handy – my relatives are “dog people,” too!

Most of the photos in WDJ run without credits because I take most of them and I don’t need credit. A few come to us from our article authors, such as herbalist Greg Tilford, who is a talented photographer and has an extraordinary collection of herb photos. Like other authors who have written about health conditions suffered by their own dogs, Maureen Finn, a writer whose first contribution to WDJ appears in this issue, sent along photos of her own dogs, one of whom has epilepsy, the topic of her piece.

But this month I have to give credit to one photographer, my brother, Keith Kerns. He got a new dog last year, a few months after he purchased a very nice, high-end digital camera, and the three of them (Keith, Hannah, and the camera) have been spending a lot of time together, with sometimes hilarious results. The photo of the dog biting the watermelon on the cover of this issue is Keith’s, and that’s Hannah. I haven’t met her in person yet, but I can tell from all the pictures Keith has e-mailed me that she’s a real character.

That’s also Hannah in the "Hot Dog" sidebar, sensibly wearing a WDJ-approved life jacket as she romps in the snowmelt Yuba River in the northern California Sierra Mountains. She’s been one of the lucky recipients of quite a bit of loot left over from WDJ’s product reviews, so she often appears in the pictures that Keith sends me wearing our favorite gear, such as the SENSE-Ation harness (Keith has found it very helpful in teaching Hannah not to pull), or carrying our recommended chew-resistant toys. I’m lucky to have her in the family, because she’s turned out to be quite a proficient product tester. And she’s yellow! – the best color for canine models, especially when their photos are reproduced in black and white.

Hannah’s first snow.

Article scheduling snafus
On the back cover, I always list a few articles that are coming up within the next few issues. I usually list a couple that I expect to be in the next issue, and a couple that I have scheduled for the issue after that, but I don’t usually say which articles will run in which issue.

Sometimes, this makes people impatient; they want to know how long they may have to wait before they read about some topic or another. So last month, for the first time, I indicated which articles would run in which of the next few issues.

That was a big mistake! Immediately, certain events occurred to seemingly conspire against the publication of most of the articles that I wanted to run in the next issue; other articles came in ahead of schedule. Even I had to reschedule an article that was supposed to go in this issue (a review of healthy dog treats), after losing the better part of a work week to spend a few days in Boston dealing with a family emergency. (At the risk of tempting fate, I will say I anticipate having it be ready for the next issue.)

I sincerely apologize for the inconsistency, and hope this has not caused anyone any inconvenience.

 

-Nancy Kerns

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