What Pets Do While You’re At Work

Be careful what you wish for.

I love reading, and I love new products, and I’ve always wished that publishers and pet product companies would send me stuff to review.  At SuperZoo, I made a point of going around to all the book publishing companies, giving them my business card, and requesting review titles.  I get quite a few books to review via our website about author Dan Brown, but they don’t interest me nearly as much as books about animal issues.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I was thrilled when Simon and Schuster contacted me a couple of weeks ago and asked me to review their new title, What Pets Do While You’re at Work (written by Jason Bergund and Bev West).

Now, I could write a “best case scenario” review and make the book seem like something you should buy for yourself, or for someone else, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favours.  I’d just be doing myself favours, and hoping I’d get more books to review.  The fact is, this book just isn’t very good.  It’s designed to take advantage of the popularity of other really good titles, like Bad Cat, but the premise is kind of weak, and the authors struggle to stick to one consistent theme.  Sometimes there are funny photos captioned with things that your naughty pet might do while it’s home alone, but other times the pictures are just of cats or dogs sleeping, or sitting around, the captions try too hard to make the picture seem hilarious.  Lots of the book just isn’t funny.  Some of the photos are tightly themed, like, ‘While Bob is out flipping burgers, his dog Chuckles is...”, but other photos seem completely irrelevent to the concept that the pets are supposed to be home, alone, unsupervised.  Some of the pets in the photos are captioned as if they’re speaking the photographer, which kinda spoils the “home alone” effect.

The most disappointing thing about this book is the photos.  I assume the authors recruited pictures from people via the Internet, and given the available pool of pet owners, the photos are surprisingly poor.  Many are poor quality—blurry, shot with a camera phone, etc.—but others are shameless ripoffs of common photos we’ve all seen as avatars, or passed around through email messages.  Uncredited photos used in this book included the well-known ”sniper kitten”, and ”cat with grapefruit (or other citrus) peel on head like a hat”.  It’s pretty lame to use those photos in a professionally published book, especially when the photos aren’t attributed to any particular photographer or graphic artist.  If you ask me, you shouldn’t profit off photos if you haven’t obtained permission to use them.  And were those photos absolutely necessary for inclusion?  They’re funny, but they don’t add much to the theme, and I’d rather see more candid photos of real pets than posed shots, or Photoshop fakes.  There are a couple of Photoshopped pics which use the same original cat picture, fer cryin’ out loud.

I really do enjoy funny books about animals, and I’m looking forward to the print version of I Can Has Cheezburger whenever that is released.  They’ve got a clear-cut theme and hundreds of photos to choose from, and I really hope they’ll publish the best ones.  As for Simon and Schuster, I recommend their upcoming title, ”Old Dogs are the Best Dogs”.  It’s going to be a photography book of senior dogs, and even though I haven’t seen it, I know it will be better than “What Pets Do While You’re at Work”.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/23 at 10:54 PM

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