They’ve got it all — cuteness, charisma and hilarious habits.  For their ability to make us smile, we’ve deemed them the neighborhood’s  best pets.

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What makes an Advocate pet edition model?

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It is not necessarily impeccable breeding or a pretty mug but, rather, a personality — a certain je ne sais quoi — that jumps off the page.

Our 2011 model pet search garnered piles of adorable photos and amusing anecdotes. These finalists are the non-human neighborhood residents that most captured our hearts.

Pink puppy power

Photo by Can Türkyilmaz

Zazu and Amy Marks Photo by Can Türkyilmaz

The dog is pink. That’s the first thing you notice. Though she is loud in hue (except when camouflaged inside her handmade fluorescent flowery basket), the Maltese, whose natural color is white, is quiet as a mouse. She cooperates, without so much as a whimper or woof, as her owner dresses her in a teensy pink doggie skirt and applies bling-y clips to pink puppy “hair”.

“Look at you; you’re just beautiful, Zazu,” Amy Marks beams.

Marks admits to being an utter stage mom.

“She needs an agent. Doesn’t she? She’s so cute I just can’t stand it!”

About once a week, Marks dyes Zazu’s coat with Kool-Aid.

“I got her when she was just 3 weeks old, and the ride home was the only time I have ever seen her white,” says Marks, whose tall rubber boots match the color of her pet.

The dress-up games bring unabashed joy to Marks and amusement to observers (and Zazu, tail always dancing, seems to relish the attention), but the relationship between Marks and her dog runs deep. There was a time when Marks suffered from an incapacitating anxiety that kept her at home. She tried medication fto deal with the problem, but when she adopted this fluffy kindred-spirit, something profound happened: Marks began to heal.

Eventually, she and her dog began to venture out of their Lake Highlands home, and their favorite hangout became Savvy Consignment store, where Marks met her good friend Rhonda Arnold.

“Now Zazu is the store mascot,” Arnold says. “Everybody wants to hold her and play with her.”

Hoping to spread Zazu’s therapeutic effect, Marks regularly takes Zazu to visit ailing residents at C.C. Young and other retirement, nursing or hospice-care facilities. In fact, Marks takes the dog everywhere she goes.

“I sneak her in the movies. I don’t go anywhere without her,” Marks says.

What if it’s a place that doesn’t allow dogs?

“Then we don’t go there.”

Model citizen, canine

Photo by Can Türkyilmaz

Jazz is a majestic English Labrador, large and strong with a shimmering coat as black as night. With a regal gait, she follows her master along mountain trails or urban sidewalks, exhibiting unequivocal loyalty.

In the name of practicing his profession, photography, owner Jacque Manaugh sometimes dresses Jazz in decidedly undignified gear, but she doesn’t let it get to her. She is just happy to be there, even if her part does entail donning a pig nose or a turkey costume.

“She is my best friend, my loyal companion and, simply put, a good dog,” Manaugh says.

And her irrepressible willingness to please makes her a good test model.

“Jazz is just like her name: smooth and easygoing,” her owner says. “She is always eager to do whatever I want her to do. She just likes to hang with me.”

Indeed, Manaugh, a Lake Highlands native, has a constant companion in Jazz — from a hiking trip in the Arkansas mountains to a Vickery Park pub where Jazz is a regular on the patio and everybody knows her name.

“She even smiles,” Manaugh says.

Really?

“I swear,” he insists. “She gets this weird smile on her face and looks like she’s laughing.”

Even in the absence of a canine grin, her eyes exude fascination with her human friends, and her infectious contentedness lights up the room.

“With her looks and personality, Jazz attracts attention wherever she goes and puts a smile on your face when you see her,” Manaugh says. “Everyone who meets her falls in love.”

TV-censoring terrier

Photo by Can Türkyilmaz

There are disturbing things on TV these days — hollering car salesmen, real housewives, feuding bachelorettes and caught-on-camera car chases. It’s enough to make a viewer want to yell.

Or bark like crazy.

Max, a 10-year-old, TV-watching West Highland white terrier, doesn’t take the madness lying down. His people parents David and Gayle Copeland say he has taken on the role of house censor, barking and sprinting from room to room whenever he senses on-air inappropriateness.

“He starts barking as soon as something he has deemed unacceptable begins. Sometimes, because he remembers commercials, he starts in even before the objectionable part is reached,” Gayle says.

So what does Max find objectionable?

“Any form of violence or potential violence, such as someone carrying a gun or knife; anything that is physically impossible; people acting silly; fire, explosions or anything flying through the air …”

Oh, and Flo, from the Progressive Insurance commercial, really gets him worked up.

“He’s hated her perky voice since he first heard it,” Gayle says.

The Lake Highlands couple bought Max from a breeder when he was just a pup. Unlike his champion-pedigree father before him, Max was slightly big, by breed standards, for showing, but what he lacks in physical perfection, he makes up for in smarts, his owners say.

Indeed, Max is quite strategic in his protest of poor taste on TV. When he’s in another room and hears something he doesn’t like, he runs, barking fiercely, into the room with the TV. Even if the human capable of operating the remote changes the channel on one set, Max might race into the other room, because, David says, “He understands that the same thing might be showing simultaneously on other sets.”

Max’s usual modus operandi is to watch TV in a mirror until the bad stuff starts, after which he will whirl around, tail wagging wildly, to bark at the actual TV, not the reflection.

“I’ve had a lot of dogs,” David says, “but never one anywhere near as smart as this one.”

Squeaker specialist

Photo by Can Türkyilmaz

When he was 2 years old, Willy bounded into the lives of Laura Lieck and her 9-year-old beagle, Stan.

“He sort of found us,” Lieck explains. “That’s what happens.”

The older dog, a calm and gentle soul, wasn’t threatened by the younger pup’s presence. In fact, he seemed to delight in it, Lieck says.

“They got along from day one. Stan didn’t mind Willy getting on the bed. He loved his little brother so much,” she says. “When Willy arrived, Stan seemed to become a little more youthful.”

Rather than lying on his back, as Stan might do, Willy often assumes the “Karate Kid position” in order to make his belly accessible to potential petters.

And his greatest gift is perhaps the deconstruction of dog toys. He doesn’t destroy the toy, but turns it into a flatter version of itself by carefully creating a small incision through which he withdraws they toy’s heart, otherwise known as the squeaker.

“First, you must silence the squeaker,” Lieck notes.

Then he finishes pulling the stuffing through the incision. And that is how Willy earned his nickname: “The Surgeon.” There was a time when Stan would step in to ensure that the stuffing, post surgery, was effectively torn to shreds.

“It was clearly a two-dog process,” Lieck recalls with a laugh.

Around Christmastime, Stan succumbed to heart complications. In the months leading up to the old dog’s death, Lieck says, Willy often tended to Stan, licking his coat and, in his own way, petting him.

“I think animals just understand what is happening.”

After his friend was gone, Willy spent a couple of days frantically going through Stan’s toys.

“He seemed so anxious,” Lieck says. “But after a couple days, he settled down and went on with his life” — a world of belly rubs, neighborhood walks and an abundant supply of squeaky toys.

And waiting for the day when, maybe, another young pup will join them.

Dynamic doggie duo

Photo by Benjamin Hager

Ebony and ivory. Yin and yang. Peanut and Joe. The orphaned siblings have seen some tough times. Abandoned along the side of a highway as pups, they were rescued and cared for at a shelter until Jessica Mullins-Ta, a law student at the time, adopted them. Actually, it was supposed to go like this: Jessica would adopt poor Peanut and Jessica’s mother would take Joe. But Mom, Jessica says, soon decided that the animals had become dependent on each other and needed to be together. That’s how Jessica ended up with the doggie duo sharing her tiny apartment.

“It was cramped, but we got by.”

Today, six or so years later, they all live with Jessica’s husband, Thomas, and their daughter Lola-Iris in a Lake Highlands home where Joe lounges and (despite his attempts to be “manly”) cuddles all day with pink fuzzy toys, and Peanut roams the yard barking at “imagined intruders” (hence her svelte physique compared to Joe’s, her owner notes). They are polar opposites, Mullins-Ta says.

“Joe is laid back and lazy; Peanut is the neurotic and starved-for-attention older sister,” she says. “But they love each other, like a human brother and sister.”

Peanut protectively follows her human baby sister around.

“She’s always about three steps behind Lola-Iris.” But the dogs are no real threat to anyone, their momma says.

“They might show some aggression toward inanimate objects, but if an actual intruder ever shows up, we’re screwed.”