The other animals

The pets page is the file's domestic sheet. pets.html pointed at eight photographs under pet/: boubou.jpg, boubou2.jpg, boubou3.jpg, fish.jpg, kitten.jpg, parot.jpg, parrot2.jpg, and frankie.jpg with frankie2.jpg. A register of one cat breed would find the kitten a fellow subject; the pets page is where this kennel kept the animals that were not exhibits.

Boubou and the misspelled parrot

Boubou earned three photographs, more than most show dogs got, which the bench reads as the household favorite. The parrot's files are spelled parot.jpg and parrot2.jpg, two spellings for one bird, the small human inconsistency a hand-maintained site always carries. Frankie appears here too, a male with a show-dog page and a pet-page presence, which suggests the dogs lived as house animals first.

What the page did for the site

A pets page softens a breeder's site. It told visitors the kennel was a home with animals, a fish, a kitten, a parrot, not only a production line of litters. On the bench it is the page that keeps the breeders' household, the only sheet where the animals are subjects rather than drafts.

What the record does not keep

The photographs' contents and the page's captions do not survive readably. Whether Boubou was a bulldog, a rescue, or another species entirely is not recorded; the name and the three frames are all that remain.

The household inside the kennel

The pets page is where the file stops being a stud book and becomes a household. A fish, a kitten, a parrot and a dog photographed twice under his pet name rather than his page name, these are animals kept for company, and their presence on a breeder's site did a particular kind of work: it told visitors the kennel's dogs were raised among other animals, in a home, by people who kept pets as well as breeding stock. For a buyer of a bulldog puppy that is not decoration, it is information about how the puppies were raised.

Frankie's double life

Frankie appears in this file twice: under males/frankie/ with a show-dog's page, and under pet/ with two home photographs. The overlap is the best single detail on the sheet, the point where the roster and the household are provably the same animal. The bench files it as evidence that the kennel's dogs were house dogs, that the drafts went home at night.

The fish, the kitten, the parrot

Three of the eight pet photographs were not dogs at all. fish.jpg, kitten.jpg, parot.jpg and parrot2.jpg make the page a small menagerie, the breeders' whole household laid out for visitors: the dogs they bred, the dog they kept, and the other animals that shared the rooms. For a bench that reads sites as records of how people presented themselves, this page is the kennel's self-portrait in miniature, and it is the only page where the breeders' life, rather than their program, is the subject.

The limits of this sheet

The bench cannot say which species Boubou was, nor caption a single photograph from the eight. What it keeps is the shape of the page, a menagerie inside a stud book, and the one proven overlap, Frankie, where the show file and the household file describe the same dog.

How the bench files it

The pets page is filed as the kennel's home life: eight photographs, one misspelled parrot, and the favorite who got three.