For nearly ten years, my life revolved around my two cats, Marmalade and Luna. Then they were both gone. I decided to make animals my job. Like a good, little academic achiever, I considered a graduate program, pursuing the Animals and Public Policy master’s degree at Tufts. When I perused the list of graduates’ achievements, I saw the kinds of jobs that I knew would never pay enough to allow me to cover the student loans I’d have to take out (on top of the ones I was already paying.)

It is only in hindsight that I realized my good fortune in stumbling onto a path of “Profitable Adventures,” an education in Animals in Society beyond what I could have planned and richer, I believe, than a year of classroom learning could have supplied. My accidental curriculum:

• working on technology, PR, and communications for a big-city SPCA
• developing business for a pet acupuncture clinic
• editing for one national leader in the humane movement and interviewing another
• writing original articles and blog posts
• caring for dozens of dogs as cats as a shelter volunteer
• making friends and allies promoting the No Kill, rescue, pet hospice, pet loss awareness
• having my journey profiled in a national magazine
• having my dog featured on the Website of a major newspaper

Where I would have been after a one-year master’s program: $50K in additional debt. Gross revenues from this alternative course of learning: over $120,000.

My goal for the next phase – figuring out how to create profitable adventures that become passive income sources as well, gifts that keep on giving.

I spent some quality time with my neighbor Jenna today. She’s a rescued pit bull, a Canine Good Citizen, and a cancer survivor. Jenna’s spent her life riding rough on the Wheel of Fortune. Scooped from a shelter where she was cowering at the back of a cage, Princess Jenna is the kind of dog that is regarded as dispensable in the conventional model tragically still in force at many shelters around the country.

Her owner is in a summer course, so neighbors, friends, and fans of Jenna are pitching in to give her three daily walks, food and water, and the medications she takes to keep her tumor at bay and to control the eye infections she gets occasionally. Despite her difficult history, Jenna now has the life she deserves — a life worth living.