Frances Jeanne and Dolan have decided that, hey, maybe dogs aren't so bad after all!

My feline pair got a blog shout out from Lulu and Lolly, the road-tripping Maltese pups whose Rescue Dog Rock video we featured on SSS! last Friday.

And I got an interesting e-mail from Cynthia Miller, Lulu and Lolly's mom, who has novel ideas on marketing animal rescue to teens and young people. This photo from the 2009 calendar says it all.

But more on that in a minute.
First, here's Lulu and Lolly's post to my kitties!

Thanks to Dolan, a 12-year old feline food-aholic, and Frances Jeanne, two cats who have an outstanding life, for encouraging their human, Diane Lade, to put our video on the Sit, Stay, Speak at Sun-Sentinel.com! Diane has said that Dolan and Frances Jeanne "refuse to get good-paying jobs," to which we say, "OF COURSE they refuse to get good-paying jobs" -- work (werk? sp?) is a disease. You should have a CAREER, which Dolan and Frances Jeanne have: their career is eating. But not a JOB. Love, your career-oriented paLs, LuLu and LoLLy!

The 2009 LuLu and LoLLy calendar, featuring fun photos of these girls doing everything from motorcycling to skydiving, is available now for $13.99. Click here for ordering info. Proceeds go to different animal welfare organizations. The one being featured for the next six weeks is Animal Rescue of New Orleans.

Your pets can converse with L and L as well through their Dog Blog -- or, as they say, their "Dlog." Click here to sound off. You can send photos, too.

As for Cynthia, who lives in Austin, TX and says her "real job" is producing political media:
She got interested in promoting pet adoption -- and getting the word out about puppy mills -- after she got Lolly from a rescue. But wanted to try something fun, lighthearted and catchy. And she wanted to get the attention of younger women, the ones more likely to buy the designer dogs favored by celebutants.

Keep reading for her take on marketing animal rescue to young people.

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Lou Hawthorne is back. He's the former CEO of Genetic Savings & Clone -- remember them? They made headlines a few years ago as the first commerical "pet cloning" venture but shut down in 2006 after they couldn't make a go of it.

Lou Hawthorne and three clones.

Now Hawthorne is head of the Best Friends Again project -- kind of a clone of Genetic Savings. Next month, the California company plans to hold an online auction, raffling off cloning rights to five dogs. Starting bid: $100,000.

Two caveats (well, there probably are more than two, but we will leave it there):
* Genetic Savings had to give back "pricey refunds" earlier, Hawthorne said, when it failed to clone cats "because the technology was not refined."
* Best Friends is partnering with Hwang Woo Suk, a South Korean scientist who made headlines in 2004 when he falsely claimed to have cloned human embryos.

Click here for the complete New York Times story.

I've asked this question before and will again:
If money wasn't an object, would you want to clone your pet?

Me, I don't want a duplicate of my animal friends. They can't be replaced or replicated. Just like my human ones.

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