I am currently in the process in building a website for the local animal shelter/humane society and am having trouble with the "helpful links" page. I figured that there was no better place to come than an internet savvy pet loving forum so could you guys point me in the direction of some helpful pet related internet sites?

Thanks!

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000

Answers

Hi!

You might want to check some existing shelter sites. The Placer County SPCA page, which is put together nicely, has a great links page (you can find it at http://spca.quiknet.com/linked_sites.html) which generally links to other shelters in Northern California. You could take into consideration some animal care sites, or Yahoo! categories on cats and dogs. A couple months ago, Access Magazine had a review section for sites about dogs, and when they did their "allergies" reviews they included a site about animal allergies (what animals are allergic to) which was pretty interesting.

I haven't looked at anything like DogFancy.com or CatFancy.com, but I'm willing to bet they have some exceptionally helpful information archived or right there up front. And if you're willing to navigate Discovery.com, they also have some great info for you.

Happy hunting!

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000

The House Rabbit Society(new window) is a great one for rabbits - tonnes of links to places all over North America, lots of great advice, etc, and they are known primarily for rescuing bunnies, which fits the whole "humane" concept.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000

If you want to see another sample site, SPCA of Texas is http://www.spca.org/

If you're going to link to commercial sites (I can see both whys and why nots on that), I believe both Petopia.com and Pets.com offer extremely cheap tags (Petopia charged me shipping-only, and I got 5 tags), which is a good thing to promote.

http://www.traveldog.com/ and http://www.indogswetrust.com/ are about traveling with dogs

http://www.workingdogweb.com/ about working breeds

http://dir.yahoo.com/Health/Emergency_Services/Search_and_Rescue/Canine_SAR_Organizations/ lists Search and Rescue Dog sites

http://www.petsitters.org/ National Association of Professional Petsitters

http://www.petsit.com/ Pet Sitters International

http://www.kittencare.com/ Kitten Care

That's sort of a start. I found most of those through searches. Just think about the kinds of things you'd want to know if you were the kind of person visiting a shelter website. If that shelter has non dog-cat adoptees, like reptiles or birds, include some sites about them as well.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000

Wow, thanks a lot for the awesome links. I've never actually looked at much animal info on the net, so you guys sure saved me some time. If you would like to see where your links are going, the url for the page is http://www.freespeech.org/hsbc Right now, loading time on pages with pictures is very slow, I'll have to figure out how to fix it. Keep those links coming and once again, thanks a lot.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000