About Mentions, Giveaways and Reviews

Mentions:

The Lifestyle Section will have Pet Gear posts with favorite new products on it, with a link, picture and brief description. If you have a pet item you’d like for me to consider feel free to send me an e-mail with the details. Submission is not a guarantee of a mention.

Giveaways:

I’ll do giveaways on occasion if they are something I think would be pertinent to the pet loving community. A few things to consider:

• Giveaways are live between 7-14 days
• I use rafflecopter to select a winner at random
• The company providing the item will be asked to ship the item to the winner unless otherwise arranged in advance.
• If you would like me to consider your item for a giveaway, please send me a note through the contact form or at drv (at) pawcurious.com with your company name, details about the product, and any relevant pictures.

Media Tours:

If you would like for me to attend an upcoming media event, please send a note to drv (at) pawcurious.com with the pertinent information about logistics and what is and is not covered for the tour.

Brand Ambassadorships

Interested in having me as a brand ambassador? Everyone loves a veterinarian- well, unless you’re a cat or a dog and you’re about to get your temperature taken. Drop me a line if you are not the latter and we can talk.

Reviews:

Here’s the thing about reviews: One, they take an awful lot of time to do properly. Two, I’m not only reviewing items as a blogger, I’m reviewing them in a professional capacity as a doctor of veterinary medicine. For this reason I do not review vitamins, neutraceuticals or medical devices.

Seriously though, I really do love to shop. Always have.

A note to PR Reps about reviews:

Writing reviews, at least the way I do them, is a great deal of work. I don’t usually agree to review an item if I don’t feel it is going to be a positive one, though I am honest. In short, I usually end up writing a testimonial so you can go back to your website and post about how veterinarian and pet blogger Dr. V wrote a thorough and thoughtful endorsement of your product.

Bloggers would do these things for free because we either wanted the item, or…well, I don’t know why else we do it. So now I have a closet full of $15 items I really never needed or wanted and I spent 500 hours away from my other work writing about them in great detail in order to have the privilege of putting them in my closet. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best use of my time.

At this point, unless it’s something I really and truly want, or unless I am compensated for the hours it usually takes to do a review, I’m probably not going to review it.

Disclosure Statement

You like that? I made it really big so the FTC won’t say I’m hiding it in small text. I guess despite the fact that bloggers aren’t considered reliable enough sources of information to count as official ‘journalists’ and be afforded certain protections granted to same, we are on the other hand reliable enough sources of information to be held to the same disclosure statements and standards when it comes to the possibility of disclosing sources of bias. Who knew. So here you go. This is standard blahdiblah disclosure text but I also provided helpful translations.

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact me through the Contact Page. (This is stating the obvious, but OK.)

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. (This makes it sound like this is a regular occurrence, which sadly it is not. Were I to rely on this blog for my children’s food we’d be living in my car.)

This blog abides by word of mouth marketing standards. We believe in honesty of relationship, opinion and identity. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post will be clearly identified as paid or sponsored content.

(Translation: Ad spaces are taken up by paid ads. If a post is sponsored it will say so. Assume all giveaway items were provided by the company. Until such time I receive enough compensation to actually be able to buy things to give away, that is.)

The owner(s) of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

(Translation: I am not going to tell you to go out and buy some dangerous looking thing just because the company waved a free one at me. Trust me, I get them from time to time, and they don’t make it to the blog. When it comes to product reviews, the only thing I will take in order to review it is the product itself.)

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest. (I am not on the board of anything I am recommending.)