Hope For Paws at BlogPaws!

Eldad & Audrey Hagar

Most of my regular readers and pals know about Eldad and Audrey from Hope for Paws. Mom interviewed them at their home, helping me with an article about them for The Anipal Times in 2010. 

At that time, they had just rescued a now famous little blind dog named Fiona. You've probably seen her video. It's completely viral - tons of newpapers, magazines, and TV stations have picked it up and run with it the last few weeks. I'm such an insider - I had such a jump on Fiona's story, her video wasn't even ready in time to be included in the article - but I did talk about her!  ; ) 

Eldad, Audrey and Fiona

Eldad showed Mom a video he was editing of a little dog he'd just rescued. She didn't realize until he mentioned it halfway through, that the little blind dog in the video was sitting on her lap. If Fiona's video affects you, imagine watching it with a clean and happy, but still blind Fiona licking your face. 

I was Editor-in-Chief of The Anipal Times, and we organized a Twitter Party (#ATPawty) with Hope for Paws as its beneficiary. We raised over $2000 in 24 hours towards Fiona's eye surgery to restore her sight in one eye. Yay!

Now, as a Special Projects Manager at BlogPaws, I'm very excited to have arranged for Eldad and Audrey to be at this year's BlogPaws Conference in Salt Lake City in June!

Eldad will be joining My Favorite Pup Jasmine and Paige the Border Collie (and their moms) in a presentation about "The Power of YouTube."

Lauren Girard and Paige the Border Collie

My Fave Pup Jasmine and CJ Jackson

And this is just ONE session of One day. Check out the conference program for info on all the awesomeness that is this year's BlogPaws!

You won't have a better (certainly not a more fun) educational or networking opportunity if you're in any way involved or interested in animals, animal products, or pets in social media - or even if you just want to hang out with us wild and crazy animal lovers and meet all your online pals!

I'll even make it even easier for you -- > Use this code for a 20% discount on your BlogPaws registration: BlogPaws2012-Cokie

And you can bring your pets! 
It's a no brainer. See you there!

Cokie

Anipal Photo Hunt #16: My 2nd Job

Well, this Anipal Photo Hunt's an easy one for me... Aside from taking care of Mom and Him, which takes a LOT of time and effort, not to mention PATIENCE, I've also been the Editor-in-Chief of The Anipal Times since its inception in April of 2010 - a job I'm very proud of.

In case you don't know, The Anipal Times is an online newspaper by and for anipals and their humans. We have a staff of over forty volunteers - managers, writers, editors, cartoonists, advice columnists - from all around the world, whose goal is to publish a quality online newspaper for the animal community, or as we prefer to be called, anipals.

We publish new content every day: Real animal related news, online Twitter, Facebook, and blogging anipal news, announcements, book and movie reviews, interviews, health stories by our two resident veterinarians, Dr. V. (@pawcurious) and Dr. Peter Wedderburn (@petethevet), and really, you just have to go to www.anipaltimes.com and check it out to see what all we have. There's a lot!

We raise money for animal charities with our advertising revenue. All ad fees go to designated animal charities via the FirstGiving.org widget on the front page of The Anipal Times. No money touches our paws. We all work very hard and we do it all for the animals and for the anipal community.

We also have a monthly free drawing for our readers, in which companies donate animal related prizes valued at $50 or more, with winners chosen by www.random.org. All have been really great prizes!

As much as we love our jobs, it's all the more worthwhile when we can raise a good sum of money for our charities. This month's charity is www.hopeforpaws.org, and our donations have helped pay for surgery to help this sweet little blind dog see again:

Check out the before and after youtube videos!

Fiona before: http://youtu.be/4ZDY3F89z50 

Fiona after: http://youtu.be/iDK1_7fXsk0

Fiona Before - Blind

Fiona After - Sighted

If you'd like to support what we do, spread the word about us, tell the merchants you frequent about advertising in the AT, retweet and forward our articles, drop a dollar in our FirstGiving.org tip jar, comment on our articles, or write a letter to the Editor (me!)

If you want to advertise, via inexpensive donations to animal charities, to our animal loving demographic, please contact me at cokiethecat at anipaltimes.com. You can also place very inexpensive classified ads with announcements, items for sale or trade, etc.

I'm very happy to be part of such a wonderful pack, and I hope you enjoy reading the AT as much as we enjoy bringing it to you!

Yours truly,

Cokie the Cat
Editor-in-Chief
The Anipal Times