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Animals have plenty to say on the Web

BY ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ

Columbia News Service

HUNDREDS OF PET BLOGS HAVE APPEARED IN THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS

Like most bloggers, he writes about his daily activities and observations about life. But for Max, a 6-year-old black-and-white house cat, that often means recounting the joys of coughing up fur balls and climbing into boxes.

Max writes "PsychoKitty," a 4-year-old blog typed by his owner, Karen Thompson of Vacaville, Calif.

"I had been blogging for a little over a year and was having fun with it," said Thompson, 46, a novelist who has also published two books based on the blog.

"PsychoKitty," which Thompson said gets between 200 and 500 hits a day, is part of the growing ranks of hundreds of pet blogs that have sprouted up in the last five years -- narrated by cats, dogs, horses and even hamsters. The pets add one another to their blog rolls, leave comments for each other, and are loath to admit that the writers are, in fact, humans.

It could be an inevitable progression of other ways owners have always found to treat pets as humans, like dressing them in designer outfits and feeding them dog biscuits fashioned after petit fours.

The urge to blog as our pets is "just a natural extension of anthropomorphizing them in every other way. 'They're little humans, so why don't they blog?' " said Alexandra Horowitz, who teaches psychology at Barnard College and is writing a book on what science reveals about a dog's point of view.

Horowitz said pet blogging also comes from the tradition of writing animal memoirs. The most popular, "Black Beauty," played a part in improving equine welfare by making people more sympathetic to horses.

Cat and dog blogs have also created species- and sometimes breed-related online communities. Having noticed the volume of cats with blogs, Robyn Harton, 43, who makes jewelry and sells it online, started Catblogosphere.com.

The site, which Harton, of Richmond, Va., said averages about 10,000 visits per month, is the hub of cat blogs, where about 100 bloggers post their latest news. It also brings cat bloggers together; they've held raffles and auctions to help each other with large vet bills in the past.

In "Roxie's World," a 14-year-old wire fox terrier writes eloquently about the presidential election, basketball and feminism and draws readers who are interested in those topics as well as in terriers.

One of Roxie's owners, Marilee Lindemann, an English professor at the University of Maryland, started the blog two years ago to update friends and family about Roxie's then-flagging health. But after a few months, she began to explore the possibility of using Roxie's voice as a literary device to express her own views. Lindemann said the blog brings her closer to the real Roxie. That could be true for many pet bloggers, Horowitz said.

"Those people might be becoming better observers than somebody else who doesn't write a blog about their pet -- I mean, who doesn't have a pet who writes a blog?"

Got a dog blog?

Does your pet "write" a blog? Or do you have a blog about your dog, cat, hamster or other pet?

Tell us about it on our WichiTalk blog (written only by humans) at http://blogs.kansas.com/wichitalk/.