ohmidog!

     A Long Island company recalled its Four Paws Pimple Ball last week after a Manhattan couple’s lab mix had to have his tongue removed following a freak accident with the popular rubber chew toy.
     Chai, 10 years-old, had emergency surgery after his tongue was sucked into a hole in the ball in late June. Massive swelling after the surgery led vets to remove the dog’s tongue a week later. 

“It’s been devastating,” the dog’s owner, Daniel Rechelbacher told the New York Daily News. “He was depressed, he was in pain and he couldn’t chew his food.”

Rechelbacher, 39, a hair stylist who runs Salon2b in lower Manhattan said he plans to sue Four Paws, Inc. Videos on Rechelbacher’s blog show the dog whimpering, being hand-fed and drinking through a giant syringe.

Four Paws posted a recall and warning on its website, Tuesday.

The company said it has stopped shipping the toys to distributors. It asked retailers to remove them from the shelves and asked customers to return them.

Four Paws executive Barry Askin said a defect in the product’s mold sealed one of the ball’s two holes, creating a vacuum effect that could trap a tongue. The Daily News reported that Chai isn’t the only casualty of the Pimple Ball.

In 2005,a 5-year-old lab mix had to be euthanized after his tongue got caught in the toy, swelled and would not heal, the Daily News reported.

Chai is slowly recovering from his ordeal, and is learning how to eat and drink without a tongue, but is still unable to cool himself through panting.

(Photo: Chai’s Pimple Ball, from Daniel Rechelbacher’s blog)

A cat named Bella was shaken up, but survived a 2 1/2-hour trip on a spare tire under her owner’s truck.

Gil Smith recently drove 70 miles from his home in Gilbert, Ariz., to a business meeting in Kearny. When he got out of the truck, he heard a cat in distress and realized it was his, according to an Associated Press report.

Smith said Bella apparently was smart enough to know not to jump off the tire as the truck was moving.

Smith, who has three indoor cats, three goats and three chickens, skipped the meeting and took Bella — this time in the truck’s cab — straight back home.

It’s hard to top something like the “Running of the Pigs,” but the Pigtown Pooch Pageant, also scheduled as part of this weekend’s Annual Pigtown Festival, will give it a shot.

Dogs will be exhibiting their talents and wardrobes Saturday, and judges will be awarding prizes to the three that make the biggest impressions.

The festival — on the 700 and 800 blocks of Washington Boulevard in Baltimore’s Pigtown neighborhood – also features food, drinks, music, community booths and children’s activities. It starts at 11 a.m. and runs until 5 p.m.

If you plan to enter your dog in the pageant, you need to register at the festival a half hour before the event.

The pooch pageant is sponsored by Doggie Style, 1130 Light Street, in Federal Hill.

A Wall Street Journal columnist posed that question recently after hearing from a “sizable” pack of angry readers who took him to task for lamenting how much of his paycheck was being gobbled up by medical care for his dogs.

Neal Templin, author of the Journal’s “Cheapskate” column, focused on his beagle in the original column, and recent vet visits that set him back more than $1,000 each — one of which was to treat his dog for injuries received after he escaped from home and was hit by a car.

“Your dog-owning incompetence is matched only by your lack of journalistic and personal integrity in not taking responsibility for … allowing the dog to escape in the first place,” one reader wrote Templin. “If your dog liked you he probably wouldn’t escape or howl.”

Templin noted that dogs are becoming family — not just backyard denizens.

“When I grew up in the 1960s, you took your dog to the vet for shots or perhaps to have a broken leg set. But if a dog got really sick, it died.

“It’s different today. Vets do aggressive cancer surgery and hip replacements. They pump dogs full of expensive drugs for various maladies. In short, dogs get many of the same procedures we humans get. But it’s not cheap, and if it’s anything like human medicine, it’s going to get more expensive as vets take increasingly sophisticated and heroic measures to keep dogs alive.”

So the answer to the question Templin poses in his aptly-named column depends not on the dog, but on the human that owns it — and on that human’s priorities. 

“There are many who think burning 18 grand to keep a dog around for six or 12 extra months is madness,” a Massachusettshe man wrote. “Sometimes I think so, too. But my wife died from lymphoma two years ago, and I have no children. What am I going to do, buy a bigger television set?”