Yeah, I do my turtle’s PR

Harold, basking in his moment in the spotlight. Next thing you know, he'll be asking for champagne and caviar.

As many of you may know — friends that is, or other fans of Harold — my turtle Harold was treated to an article in Toronto’s daily newspaper, The Toronto Star this weekend. It was very exciting.

Since many people have expressed their curiosity as to how Harold achieved such notoriety, it went down like this:

When I saw that the Star had started the Condo Pets column, I thought ‘hey, I live in a condo and I have a pet’ so I wrote in to the email address listed and pitched Harold as the topic of a future column. That was the PR part of it.

The column’s author, Janice Bradbeer, replied and said they would indeed like to feature Harold in the column, as they hadn’t done a turtle before. She sent me an e-interview to fill out, which I did joyously and wrote far too much. Hey, I always do the interviewing, not the interview-filling-out. Which brings me to another point: It was really interesting to be on the other side of the media equation.

It really is a bizarre experience reading your own quotes in a story. I now understand why people will often ask me ‘Did I say that?!?’. Because when your quotes are pulled from the greater point you may have been making, it just sounds weird, even though it’s perfectly correct. It makes you feel a little self-conscious.

So, Harold got his time in the spotlight, and I got to learn what it’s like to be interviewed and quoted in a story. All in all, a successful experiment in pet PR!