This week’s collection of links is half about dog-friendly places to eat, and half miscellaneous. Starting, naturally, with the places to eat, check out Zagat‘s suggestions for dog-friendly restaurants in Los Angeles, and petswelcome.com‘s picks in Toronto. Join me, too, in celebrating Seattle’s first steps towards copying Portland’s massively successful food-truck pods — I’ve written a couple of posts about individual trucks, but this Seattle Times article provides helpful info about six pods, and where to find them. Why am I including them in this round-up? Because your dog can walk right up to a food truck with you while you order, and keep you company while you wrap yourself around a po’ boy, or a SPAM slider, or an ice cream cookie sandwich.

A Twitter follow brought to my attention three sites, two of which you might want to check out. Simplychâteau helps you locate a vacation rental in a “luxury French chateau,” and statelyescapes does the same for “luxury cottages, castle holidays & large holiday homes” in the U.K. Both sites, bless ’em, let you search for properties that allow dogs to join their traveling owners. In the search box on the right side of the home page, click on “More Options,” then check the box next to “Pets Allowed.” Mind you, I have no idea if these folks do good work or not, since I haven’t booked a vacation through them. I deeply appreciate the search feature, however. [Their third site, Simply Caribe, does not get any love from me, since “Pets Allowed” is not an offered option.]

There’s not much to this link, but I thought I’d just mention it: the New York Times passed on the news that Petfinder.com tipped its hat to Pet Airways (“most pet-friendly airline”), JetBlue (“best amenities”), and Frontier (biggest variety of allowed in-cabin pets, and most spaces allotted to in-cabin pets).

Not winning any prizes this week was the customs staff at Toronto Pearson International Airport — read this blog post from reader Patty (remember Truffles and the coconut?), and see how bad going through customs with a pet can be. (The post is also worth reading for its useful info about the Marsh Harbour airport, and flying on a small Abaco Air plane as well as an Air Canada A320M-3.)

And I leave you with happy news, sort of — the southern China city of Jiangmen, concerned about rabies and dog attacks, teetered on the brink of requiring its citizens to put their pet dogs up for adoption or have them euthanized, but decided, in the face of protests, just to ban pet dogs from “a number of public areas, including parks, schools, hotels, city squares, and malls.” Please note, in the article’s last paragraph, a bit of news that was news to me: “This past May, Shanghai, the country’s largest city, instituted a ‘one-dog policy’ to control the pet population and rabies…Beijing and Guagzhou also have such regulations in place.”