A while back I wrote about the growing market for special products to help senior dogs. Our pets are living longer and just like people they're spending more of their lives dealing with senior ailments. Pet suppliers are just now catching onto this trend and giving people the tools they need to help older dogs stay more active and comfortable.

Back in May I was still on a quest to find the most important piece of equipment for a senior dog -- or at least a senior dog who lives with stairs. That's a harness. As dogs get older, especially certain breeds and mixed breeds like shepherd or lab, they often lose muscle and nerves in their back end. (And these dogs, my vet tells me, don't suffer a lot of pain because they've lost some feeling.) Others have it worse with arthritis or hip dysplasia.

Whichever condition your dog has, odds are he's going to need help getting up the stairs.

Since May I've tried all the different kinds of harnesses. I'm sure each dog has his own preferences and special conditions, but here's what I found:

This week eBay announced it would stop selling ivory products -- even antiques. The idea is to make sure there's less of a viable market for ivory -- and help cut the demand that leads to more elephant killing.

The decision comes just before the International Fund for Animal Welfare issued a report Killing with Keystrokes that shows how illegal trade in animals and animal parts goes on right in the virtual public square -- online auctions.

IFAW looked at 183 publicly available websites in 11 countries for six weeks and turned up
7,111 online auctions for species that shouldn't be traded. The vast majority were for trade in endangered species, specifically elephant ivory, but also included live birds and some other animal products.

The Obama family has officially announced that they'll be getting an all-American mutt -- or at least a rescue dog. After Barack Obama and his wife Michelle made a public promise to their daughters to get a dog after the elections, animal groups got really excited. Since the Obamas don't have pets now, it seemed likely they could be swayed into one of the warring dog camps: those who buy purebreds and those who rescue mutts (and also purebreds) from shelters.

The American Kennel Club launched an online poll asking which breed they should purchase. More than 42,000 people voted and they chose the poodle, with the wheaten terrier coming in second. The AKC had narrowed the field down to breeds that don't cause allergies because one of the Obama girls is allergic to dogs. (And I think the poodle won because the other breeds were either small, creepy or both (like the Chinese Crested, which is mostly bald.)

Meanwhile, 50,000 animal lovers signed a petition from the Best Friends Animal Network, urging the Obamas to adopt a shelter dog. That doesn't necessarily mean they're getting a mutt. According to the Humane Society of the United States, about one-quarter of dogs in shelters are purebreds.

New Orleans residents all did better this hurricane, including the dogs and cats. What happened last time around during Katrina to animals and their owners inspired some great changes.

During Katrina animals weren't allowed in shelters or buses leaving town. That gave pet owners two awful options: abandon their animals or wait out the storm with them. Thousands of dogs and cats were abandoned. Many drowned. A lucky few were plucked from top shelves or chained inside houses. Saddest of all, some people who stayed to protect and comfort their dogs ended up dying alongside them.

After Katrina emergency workers owned up to the idea that since pets have become part of people's families, they better come up with a better plan than just leaving pets behind. In 2006 the federal Pet Evacuation and Standards Act required disaster plans to "address the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals following a major disaster or emergency."

This time around it seemed to have worked. Petfinder.com, which is kind of like an eBay for homeless animals, polled the local rescue groups and found things went off pretty well. Small animals were just allowed on the evacuation buses, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Officials ordered up 150 semi-trucks to carry out the bigger dogs, the Kansas City Star reports. When people checked in, they would also check in their dogs, then get a tracking bracelet. The dogs' temporary shelters were next to human shelters so families could visit.

The Environmental Group WildEarth Guardians says an anachronistic part of the Department of Agriculture spent $117 million last year to kill 2.4 million animals. The Wildlife Services has changed names plenty of times, but dates back to the days when the prevailing wisdom was just to wipe out any animals that got in the way of people. In its defense, the agency says it saves up to four times what it spends in agricultural losses. Of course, those would be private losses and we're spending tax money.

The agency just agreed to start putting out its data in a readable form after pressure from WildEarth Guardians. Meanwhile the animal group estimated that about half of those exterminated were starlings (an invasive bird) but 122,000 were carnivore mammals (like coyote and bear). The Wildlife Services program accidentally knocked off reindeer, pronghorn sheep, foxes, and bald eagles, says WildEarth Guardian's Wendy Keefover-Ring. Their sloppy application of poisons has killed off pet dogs, like Jenna, a lab mix poisoned while hunting rabbits. Most tragically, 10 people have died in aerial shooting programs.

Sure, some ranchers should be compensated for wildlife losses. The government should cooperate so frustrated ranchers don't take matters into their own hands. But the wildlife bureacracy has spread to cover all kinds of entrepreneurs from the cost of doing business. They also kill bears to protect logging companies (bears like seedlings). Federal agents bumped off 300,000 blackbirds who's big crime was eating sunflowers grown for birdseed. Fish farmers get protection from birds, too.

The worst thing we saw last week in the bigfoot press conference was the absolute decline of American hucksterism. Two Georgia men, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, and Tom Biscardi, an oily California bigfoot seeker, unconvincingly explained how they had found a yeti corpse and live family of bigfoots in roughly the area where the movie Deliverance was set. Even the cryptozoologists, who want to believe in these things, were appalled at the lack of evidence.

We can celebrate how sophisticated we now are in detecting hoaxes, but we should also lament how our country's long history of finely crafted spectacles has been lost. P.T. Barnum wrote a book debunking what we used to call a "humbug." That was after he did a few himself, including presenting a slave named Joice Heth as the 161-year-old nanny to George Washington, according to Matthew Goodman's The Sun and the Moon, Goodman's fascinating book is about a newspaper convincing New Yorkers that an astronomer found prancing creatures on the moon.

To anyone who has an alien cadaver in their fridge or chupacabra in a kennel, here are some hoaxing tips.

1. The first rule of making money off a mythical creature is not to talk about making money off the mythical creature.
Reporters asked how much money they expected to make off the corpse. Biscardi replied: "As much as I possibly can." Later Rachel Maddow asked the finders if that gave them pause or if they had the same goals. Instead of backing out, they agreed wholeheartedly. Much better was their purported desire to save the species.

2. Don't maintain a website that contradicts your own backstory.
The men claim they weren't bigfoot hunters at all, that they just stumbled upon a clan of bigfoots. But they kept up their old website Bigfoottracker.com that offered four-day $499 tours to look for bigfoots. And claimed they originally saw big foot on a mountainside near Helen, Georgia. They seem to have taken the site down, but I saw it up there yesterday.

3. Don't be so sure that merely being interviewed will dispel all doubts.
It must seem that reporters will believe anything. But that can't be your only strategy for a press interview. Call it the lesson of John Edwards. Sometimes if you show up with a flimsy story, people notice. Confidence men have to induce confidence in others, not just have inflated self-esteem and confidence in themselves.

BioArts International, a California-based biotech start-up, is hoping to kick-start commercial dog-cloning with five successive daily auctions for the service starting July 5.

The opening bid is $100,000 for the first auction, with a 10% buyer's premium. In each of the successive auctions, the opening bid goes up by $20,000. So by the last auction on July 9, you'd need $180,000, plus 10%. Talk about inflation:

Plus you have to either pick up your puppy in Korea, or pay to have him shipped home.

The same guy ran another genetics company (Genetic Savings & Clone) a few years ago and offered cat cloning for $32,000. (That company went under in 2006 after cloning two cats.)

Before we talk about the fascinating peculiarities of this process, I do feel like I have to point out that we're not exactly running out of dogs here. We euthanize nearly 10 million dogs and cats a year. On the other hand, I understand the desire. My dog Jolly is a grumpy 14 years old. As I always tell him, he is the best dog in the world: loving, loyal, clever, funny, brave, silly and handsome. I would do practically anything to extend my time with him. I'd love to be able to see Jolly as a puppy since I adopted him when he was past two. But this isn't that magic opportunity. For starters I don't have $110,000 to spare. But more importantly what makes Jolly Jolly is his life and experience, as lousy as that might have been to start (he was found in a drug dealer's backyard.) A clone would only get me a handsome dog, not Jolly.

Ok, enough about the serious implications. Let's get to the grotesque details. First the financials. You have to have cash or credit of $250,000 just to sign up to bid. If you win, you have three days to put the money in a Wells Fargo trust. They only take the money out if you accept a healthy puppy -- except for some deposit fees.

Friday June 20th is the 10th annual Take Your Dog to Work Day, a totally made up holiday, but a fun one. Pet Sitters International started celebrating in 1999, six years after the Ms. Foundation started bringing daughters into the workplace.

The purpose is entirely different. The daughters and sons are supposed to be learning about work world opportunities. On Dog Day, or TYDTWDay, as Pet Sitters calls it in shorthand, the dogs aren't supposed to learn anything (though I do think they're curious about where we go all day.) Instead it's your co-workers who are going to have their minds blown. The idea, according to Pet Sitters, is to encourage people to adopt dogs from shelters by showing them how much fun your dog is. Or, as they put it, "people without dogs will see the loving bond their co-workers have with their pets and will consider adopting orphaned pets for their own."

Sounds a little flimsy, but I still love it.

The similarities between the holidays don't end there. Answering understandable complaints for boys' parents, in 2003 the Ms. Foundation officially changed the holiday to include boys. It's now the Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. Cat people didn't want to be excluded either, so now Take Your Pet to Work Week expands the holiday from June 16 to 20 (in case your office has something serious going on Friday). The kid holiday is somberly always on a school day, a Thursday, so that kids can go back and talk about what they learned on Friday. The dog holiday is the Friday after Father's Day, probably because it's a pretty casual time and nice weather.