Those were the days, weren’t they?

A time when the official publication of an international organization would include an advertisement for dog model kits that a kid could assemble, paint, and the results would be like “real dog champions” (like a dog champion was a good thing) and the editorial staff didn’t worry about push-back from animal rights and/or adopt-don’t-shop hardliners. It’s unlikely that such an ad would appear today outside of a dog fancier’s magazine, but when Dwight Eisenhower was president, we bet the editors of Boys’ Life, the official youth publication of the Boy Scouts of America, didn’t think twice about accepting this ad.

We were a little surprised to learn that Boys’ Life is still published, perhaps because it doesn’t seem as common or cool to join the Boy Scouts of America anymore as it once was (we hope we’re wrong). Boys Life, however, isn’t just still being produced, it garnered four Distinguished Achievement Awards conferred by the Association of Educational Publishers in 2017.

The magazine’s target readers have always been between the ages of 6 and 18 (it’s published in two demographic editions to be age appropriate for each audience), and as far as we can tell, the topic of dogs still appear in its pages. Recent pieces included the 141st Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, dogs that sniff out pirated DVDS, and a video of an English Mastiff and Chihuahua playing together on Boy’s Life on-line version.  Kudos to Boy’s Life for including purebred dogs!