ohmidog!

Car thieves stole John Schneider’s sport utility vehicle at a suburban Los Angeles mall last week, including two pups that were early Christmas gifts for his children.

The Escalade belonging to the co-star of the old “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show has since been found — but not the dogs, according to an Associated Press report.

TMZ reported that Schneider searched the neighborhood for the 10-week-old dogs, a Yorkie, named Paisley, and a Yorkie-Poodle mix, named Marley. He says he suspects whoever took the SUV is caring for the dogs, or even re-gifting them.

Officials in Santiago, Chile say they have lost hope of finding a dog whose attempted rescue of an injured animal on the highway inspired worldwide admiration — though more than eight months after it happened.

Jorge Rivas, operations manager for Vespucio Norte Highway in Santiago, said police and highway workers had searched for the dog several times to no avail, according to the Associated Press.

He said too much time has passed since the video was recorded on March 23, when a surveillance camera captured images of the apparently homeless dog pulling the body of an injured dog through busy traffic to the relative safety of a freeway median strip. The injured dog, which had been hit by vehicles, died.

Rivas said earlier reports that the incident happened on Dec. 4 were based on confusion with the date the image was first shown on local television, then picked up on numerous websites.

Broadcast of the images came on the heels of an animal welfare scandal in the Chilean capital, where officials raided an Animal Protection Society accused of mistreating and killing dogs and cats in its care. Four employees of the society face charges of animal abuse.

North Carolina’s State Highway Patrol said Monday that it will use dogs solely to sniff out narcotics, and avoid the kind of rough training tactics – swinging, suspending and kicking of patrol dogs — that caused a national furor when one trooper’s treatment of his dog showed up on Youtube.

“This is rebuilding the unit from the ground up,” said Capt. Everett Clendenin, a patrol spokesman.

The patrol suspended the canine unit in April after several troopers testified in a personnel hearing that the dogs had been subjected to disciplinary tactics such as swinging them around by their leads, suspending them until they nearly passed out, shocking them with stun guns and throwing plastic bottles filled with pebbles at them.

The troopers defended Sgt. Charles L. Jones, who was fired last year for kicking his police dog, Ricoh, several times after suspending him so that his hind legs barely touched the ground.

The Raleigh News and Observer reports that the patrol plans to acquire six Labrador retrievers, which are known for being passive, obedient dogs with good noses for narcotics. The dogs will be paired with newly trained officers who were not part of the previous canine unit. The new unit should be up and running by mid 2009.

The patrol said that the new program will not use dogs to track down suspects or defend their handlers. As a result, the patrol does not need aggressive dogs such as Belgian Malinois or German shepherds, nor does it need to use strict disciplinary measures so the dogs will obey, Clendenin said.

“Our dogs are going to strictly be sniffing and searching for narcotics,” he said.

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Dogs know when they’re not getting a fair shake, and react accordingly, according to a new study out of the University of Vienna.

In a series of “reward” experiments reported in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, dogs that understood the command “paw” sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them.

In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other. The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.

When one dog got a reward and the other didn’t, the unrewarded animal stopped playing, showing that dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness, the Associated Press reports.

“Animals react to inequity,” said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna in Austria, who led a team of researchers testing animals at the school’s Clever Dog Lab. “To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently.”

The results won’t surprise any dog owner — or anyone who knows anything about wolves, who are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other.

One thing that did surprise the researchers was that — unlike primates (and unlike my dog) — the dogs didn’t seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

(Photo from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

A 3-year-old lost in the Virginia woods was back home Sunday thanks to two puppies who kept him warm through a night of freezing temperatures.

Jaylynn Thorpe wandered away from his baby-sitter at 4 p.m. Friday and was missing for 21 hours as hundreds of friends, family and law enforcement officials searched for him in the thick woods of Halifax County, according to a report in the New York Daily News.

Officials said the lost little boy and the two family puppies wandered up to a mile in the dark, even across a highway, but it wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that members of the search team found him sitting by a tree, the two puppies nestled against him.

When I first saw him, he was like, ‘Momma, I got cold. I slept in the woods last night. The puppies kept me warm.’ He told me that … the dogs slept up against him. And I’m sure the body heat kept him warm,” said his mother, Sarah Ingram.

The boy’s father, James Thorpe, said temperatures that dropped into the teens Friday night added to their worries.

Upon his rescue, the boy didn’t say anything, according to searcher Jerry Gentry; he “just opened his arms up like, ‘I’m ready to go.’”

Close to 300 people from North Carolina and Virginia joined in the search to find Jaylynn.