Fashion & Style | Noted
The Dog of the Day Site? I’m Obsessed, and Here’s Why
Bogie
is athletic. She likes to walk, about four miles a day. She loves
tetherball too, though she broke her leg in a recent game. Bogie can be
shy and doesn’t always do well in group situations. She enjoys chewing
on the head of one of her friends, who is a cat.
I discovered Bogie at Dog of the Day,
a website that publishes reader-submitted biographies and photographs
of endearing pooches. The site, along with its taxonomic brethren Cat of the Day and Pet of the Day,
was founded in the late 1990s by Karen Watts, a Belmont, Mass.-based
graphic designer and illustrator, and her husband, Paul Watts Jr., an
information technology specialist. They were two 30-somethings with a
computer and a dream: to build a website “that people would visit every
day that was not pornography.”
A
friend introduced me to Dog of the Day in 1998, when I was staring at
the cubicle walls in my first corporate job. The charming canine stories
and photographs guided me through those dark years, to a happier job
and happier days. And the thanks I gave the website? I forgot about it,
like a half-filled journal left to gather dust in the better times.
That
is until one day late last year, when that same friend and I were
sighing over a recent wave of bad news — personal, geopolitical — and
she paused and asked me: Whatever happened to Dog of the Day?
Continue reading the main story
Absolutely
nothing, thank God (or Dog). The site and its siblings look much as
they did at the turn of the century. And each day’s homespun story of a
beloved pet, whether from Wailuku, Hawaii, or Turner, Me., or most
anywhere in between, is as lovely as those I remember.
As
I’ve fallen in love with Dog of the Day in a new phase of my life,
though, and reached out to talk to Ms. Watts, I’ve realized that what I
like best about her site — its deep, seemingly easy reserves of
animal-inspired goodness — is in fact an enormous labor for her, one
that offers a window as much onto the complexity of human relationships
as onto the simplicity of animal ones.
Take
factionalism, in this age of it. Each day, Ms. Watts says, Dog and Cat
of the Day duke it out for traffic stats. One day, virtuous Dog triumphs
(hurray!). The next, treacherous Cat claws its way back on top. The
only rule in this ancient struggle is that Pet of the Day — a sort of
D.M.Z. where Ms. Watts attempts to interest readers in such charmers as Spike,
a porcupine from Edmonton, Alberta, who “has no idea what a threat is
and therefore his quills are always laying flat on his back” — never
wins.
With pets, as in politics, ours is a two-party system.
While
Ms. Watts navigates the partisan shoals of Cat and Dog (she won’t take
sides, though she did say she has a “sadly genetic” cat allergy), her
inbox forces her to confront other, even more dispiriting aspects of the
human condition.
Take Queen Lizzy,
a Rottweiler/Labrador mix from Butte, Mont. Her owner found Lizzy at a
shelter, a year after losing her previous dog to cancer. The pre-shelter
story of Lizzy — starved, abused, locked outside — raises some of the
biggest questions and perhaps answers them, too. “I don’t know who could
hurt her,” writes Lizzy’s owner, who also doesn’t think “that’s for us
to figure out. She is now in a loving, warm safe home forever, and she
seems to know it too!”
Rescue
stories like Lizzy’s are common. Yet some of the most dramatic tales
involve not humans who have gone bad, but pets. One owner submitted the
story of his dachshund who had the habit of sleeping on the owner’s bed.
One night, the dog ate his owner’s toe. “I’m guessing he had some
neuropathy or something,” Ms. Watts said. “It was just too awful to
publish.”
The tale of Mancha the llama,
savaged by another pet, was also a tough editorial call. It eventually
ran with a disclaimer (“This is an exceptionally sad story”) and on a
weekend, so that “anyone who viewed it didn’t have to get weepy at
work,” Ms. Watts said.
The
saga of Mancha — so strong, yes, but also so lucky — reminded me to ask
Ms. Watts about how she handles submissions for deceased pets. Many
readers of her websites are children (teachers have reported that puppy
stories are helpful in coaxing otherwise shy children to read aloud; and
then there’s the appeal of geography lessons along the lines of
“Yesterday’s dog is from Slovenia. … Can you find Slovenia on a map?”)
With an eye toward such young audiences, Ms. Watts restricts memorial
posts to Sundays, when there is a better chance a parent or guardian can
field questions about why “doggies don’t live as long as people do.”
Her
three sites also have a large contingent of elderly fans, many of whom
have been forced to leave their homes and their beloved pets. It turns
out that these readers are one of the main reasons Ms. Watts largely
retains the fin-de-siècle look of the websites. “We want to keep it
simple, for people in nursing homes or people on modems,” she said.
In
between the young and the old, of course, are those of working age,
which raises inevitable, if lighthearted, questions about the sites’
impact on economic productivity. Thursdays and Mondays are the
highest-traffic days, Ms. Watts said, and there are telltale spikes most
weekday mornings at the start of United States and European working
hours. Ms. Watts argues — and what would Karl Marx make of this? — that
she builds “happier workers, because people who are overwhelmed by
things can just come and look at a bunny.”
In
the spirit of her friendly websites, Ms. Watts tries to answer everyone
who contacts her, even if it’s only to explain why a submission isn’t
suitable. For example, she occasionally receives a touching story
accompanied by an image of what she presumes is the pet, lying on an
identically colored piece of furniture. “We can’t tell if there’s a dog
in that photo,” she’ll reply politely.
Then
there are the rules about what, or who, is eligible for nomination. You
can’t nominate a co-worker, however beastly, as Pet of the Day. You
can’t nominate a younger sibling, no matter how strong a case you make.
You’re not allowed to nominate a wild or zoo animal, though Ms. Watts
once made an exception — who wouldn’t? — for Takara, a killer whale that meant the world to a cancer patient.
It
seems that with her sites, Ms. Watts isn’t trying to distract us from
the sadness of the world. Rather, she is suggesting we see life’s trials
as surrounded by unconditional love, of the sort we find in the stories
she curates for us.
It’s
hard to know what more we could ask of a website, or of its co-founder,
whose husband, Paul, died suddenly in May 2015. As the online universe
of pet-related diversions continues to expand, Ms. Watts is carrying on
the work the couple started nearly two decades ago, and remembering.
When we spoke, she described Tigger,
a tarantula that appeared on Pet of the Day. “My husband did not like
spiders,” she said. “That’s why it was good there was two of us. We did
it together.”
Mark Vanhoenacker is the author of “Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot.”
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A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2017, on Page ST6 of the New York edition with the headline: Every Dog Has Its Day.
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