Animal Antics Line of Humorous Greeting Cards - Funny Pictures of Animals Doing Wild and Crazy Human Things!


John Lund’s Animal Antics


I can’t remember where I first got the idea for a photograph of a cat with a canary feather in its mouth, but the timing turned out to be very fortuitous.  I had just been invited to show my work at a prestigious art festival, an example of digital artistry, which was still fairly new back then.  A friend advised me to take some small unframed prints with me so that I had something inexpensive to sell as well as the larger more expensive framed artwork.  It was good advice.


One of the images I chose for the smaller prints was that of the cat with the canary feather in its mouth.  I made a half-dozen prints of the particular photo.  The first day of the two-day event I sold those half dozen prints by noon.  That night I went back to my studio and printed up a dozen more.  The next day I sold those too.  It occurred to me that I had created an image that people really liked.


With that in mind I called up a greeting card company and made an appointment to show my work to their senior art director.  I showed her my work, along with the cat image, and suggested that we could do a whole line of cards based around anthropomorphic treatments of pets.  To my everlasting surprise she agreed!  We started slowly, but by the end of two years we had about twenty images and the line began to take off. John Lund’s Animal Antics had been born, and we soon were selling 200,000 greeting cards a month!


This line of funny pet and animal pictures has continued to expand.  We now include not just cats and dogs, but mice, elephants, birds, lions and more, with no end in sight.  People from around the world send us e-mails thanking us for bringing a smile to their faces, and often offering their own pets as subjects for our photography.


Shortly after 9/11 an airline stewardess called me and thanked me for “bringing the first smile to me in a week”.  I recently received an e-mail from a man saying he had never laughed so hard as when he had received one of our cards on his 50th wedding anniversary. A woman from Spain recently ordered a wall-sized print for her bedroom!  The work has been featured in magazines from Germany to New Zealand.  Animal Antics gift books have now been published in seven languages.


As much delight as the Animal Antics pictures bring to others, I think I still get as much enjoyment as anyone from actually creating the images.  We always work with the same crew including our animal trainers.  The animals, though difficult to photograph, are always fun to interact with.  I never cease to be amazed at the athleticism of cats, the eagerness of the dogs to please us, and the special qualities of almost every animal.  In particular, I appreciate the sensual muscularity of lions, the seemly gentle yet massive power of elephants, and the almost eerie intelligence of primates.


When I sit down to do the digital imaging work, as a given image nears completion, I often find myself chuckling out loud at these funny photos, and the often-adorable expressions of our animal friends.