ohmidog!

Deputies were justified in shooting and killing the two dogs of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo when they conducted a drug raid of his home in July, the Prince George’s County (Md.) Sheriff’s Office has concluded.

In other words, even though the raid turned out not to be justified, killing two dogs during it was — at least in the thinking of the sheriff’s office, whose logic strikes me as dubious as the raid itself.

Sheriff Michael Jackson said that one dog was “engaging” an officer and that the other was running toward a second officer, according to a Washington Post report.

But the ruling did not satisfy the owner of the two black labs, who said the inquiry was incomplete and misleading.

A necropsy on the dogs concluded one dog was shot four times and the other twice, including once in the dog’s back legs.

Calvo said the findings bolster his belief that neither dog was threatening law enforcement officers during the raid and that one dog was shot from behind as he fled into a back room.

A sheriff’s department SWAT team and county police narcotics officers burst into the mayor’s home July 29 after police intercepted a 32-pound package of marijuana addressed to Trinity Tomsic, Calvo’s wife.

Police cleared Calvo and Tomsic of wrongdoing, saying they were victims of a drug smuggling scheme in which drug-filled packages addressed to unsuspecting recipients were intercepted by a deliveryman.

An animal control officer in Houston says the heat-related deaths of six to eight dogs in the back of her truck last week wasn’t her fault. Instead, she blames the animal control bureau for issuing her a truck with broken air conditioning.

“It’s not my fault that the wires burned on the truck,” said Beverly Tucker, 36. “The air goes out, and I’m being finger-pointed.”

Tucker had nine dogs in her truck when she stopped for lunch Aug. 26 – a day when the high was 95 degrees at Bush Intercontinental Airport. After what she says was a 40-minute lunch, she found that the air conditioning in the back of the truck had stopped working.

Tucker, an animal control officer for nine months, said she poured ice and water from two coolers over two of the most overheated dogs and drove quickly back to the animal shelter, according to an account in the Houston Chronicle.  

Tucker said six dogs died, and two more that were in the truck were later routinely euthanized. Kathy Barton, spokeswoman for the city health and human services department, says eight dogs died from the heat.

Whether the air conditioner was broken was also in dispute, at least for awhile. City officials on Tuesday said the air conditioning in the back of the truck was working when Tucker returned to the shelter with the animals. On Wednesday, though, they agreed that the air conditioner was broken, but said the agency was still considering firing Tucker because she didn’t follow a policy requiring officers to unload a full load of animals at the shelter before taking an extended break in the summer.

The incident has made nationwide news, and has led to another outcry for reforms of Houston’s Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care (BARC).

Sam Levingston, a veterinarian fired by BARC in 2000, testified in state district court that animals sometimes died from overheating before arriving at the facility because air conditioners on shelter trucks weren’t working.

Levingston sued the city, saying he was fired because he was a whistle-blower. A court granted him a $1.2 million award, according to the Chronicle article, and the city settled the case by paying him $875,000.

They’ve been long delayed, and still aren’t right around the corner, but City Council member Ed Reisinger says multiple dog parks will be coming to Baltimore, and that the city — though it has long shunned any involvement with them — will be playing an integral role in their development.

Baltimore’s only dog park in Canton, funded and built by a grassroots citizens effort, will soon be joined by more fenced in, off-leash play areas for dogs — the first of which will be located in Locust Point’s Latrobe Park.

“No offense to (former mayor, now governor Martin) O’Malley, but the person he put in the job was not pro-dog park.”

Efforts over the years to start dog parks, Reisinger said, met with the concerns about liability and the city virtually washing its hands of any direct involvement. Instead it enacted a set of guidelines by which private citizen groups could apply to start a dog park, raise the money themselves, and pay for the building and maintenance.

Reisinger said the new parks director seemed to back dog parks, and the mayor and other politicians are increasingly getting behind the idea as well, realizing that dog parks improve a city’s quality of life, that the number of dog owners is increasing and that those dog owners often vote.

“More people are jumping on the train,” said Reisinger, who has been tooting the horn for dog parks for a while now — even though his own two pets won’t be using them. Reisinger has two cats.

All too often at my park, and maybe your’s, conflicts develop between those who go there to let their dogs get some needed off-leash romping and those who go there to experience something other than big, slobbery, barking, dirty-pawed creatures careening around like a pinballs.

The law, as most of us know, is on the side of the latter. Dogs are required to be on leashes at all times in all of the city parks in Baltimore, and violation of that law can result in a $100 fine.

Nevertheless at my park, Riverside, as at Patterson, Federal Hill, Carroll, Latrobe, Druid Hill, Wyman and others, dog owners regularly take that risk to allow their dogs some exercise. Dogs gotta run and, in the city, the parks are the only game in town.

Having only one official dog park — though more appear to be on the way — means all the rest of the parks must be shared by dogs and humans, which, with a little common sense and respect, is not all that hard to accomplish. In other words, we can all just get along. Read more »