ohmidog!

The rural North Texas town of Ferris — about 20 miles south of Dallas — has approved a policy that allows authorities to shoot “wild” roaming dogs.

Ferris City Manager David Chavez said the Ellis County town approved the policy because it was becoming a dumping ground for unwanted pets. People drive out to the country to release pets they no longer want, but the starving animals breed, form packs and wind up scavenging for food, he said.

Ferris Police Chief Frank Mooney said the city would shoot only “potentially violent dogs,” and only as a last resort — after attempts to humanely capture the animal had failed.

This is a case, once again, of dogs being punished for the acts of humans; it’s the sort of thing you might expect in Baghdad, or maybe Alaska; and it’s full of faulty reasoning.

Every dog (like every human) is “potentially violent,” especially when it sees a lynch mob coming after it. My dog once roamed the streets himself, and gentle as he is, I’m sure he might have given indications otherwise if someone came after him with a rope or pole, much less a shotgun, which the new policy permits. I’m not entirely sure smalltown Texas lawmen should be acting as judge, jury and executioner.

As you might expect, the new policy has enraged animal welfare advocates.

“It’s unfathomable to me that the city of Ferris just outlandishly wants to go out and shoot these stray dogs,” Niloofar Asgharian, a board member of the nonprofit Animal Connection of Texas, said in a story in the Dallas Morning News. “It doesn’t do anything except that these dogs end up dying a slow, miserable death.”

Animal welfare advocates have suggested trapping the animals and better enforcing laws that prohibit dumping dogs.

“It seems like a cruel punishment to the animal when the blame is on people,” said Sherwin Daryani, the executive director of Operation Kindness.

There are 50 to 100 feral dogs roaming Ferris’ streets, said Misty Clark, the city’s lone animal control officer.

The town of Ferris can be reached through this contact form.

(Image: From dallasartsreview.com, ”Stray Dog,” a painting by Roger Winter, an artist and teacher from Denison, Texas, who served on the faculty of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts)

Dogfighting is experiencing a resurgence in Afghanistan, the New York Times reports.

Banned under the Taliban, who considered it un-Islamic, the “sport” has regained its earlier popularity since the Taliban’s ouster in 2001. Dogfighters line up weekly for informal tournaments on dusty lots in the country’s major cities.

In Kabul, there are two tournaments every week, both on Friday, the larger of which takes place in the morning at the bottom of a slope on the city’s outskirts and draws thousands.

Times reporter Kirk Semple describes a scene in which dozens of mastiff-like dogs, some of which required two men to restrain them, awaited their matches.

Some fights had been organized days in advance, with hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands, riding on each, he reported.

“The event was presided over by a ringmaster, a toothless old man with a turban and a limp. He carried a wooden staff that he used to beat spectators who crowded the pitch and members of the dogfighters’ entourages who blocked the spectators’ view.”

The country’s elite frown upon the dogfighters, seeing them as uncultured and the criminal.

“In my personal view, it’s not a good thing,” said Ghulam Nabi Farahi, deputy minister of information and culture. “In today’s world, these animals should be treated well. But unfortunately, there’s a lot of fighting.”

Prince Edward was caught on video raising has stick at his dogs during a pheasant shoot, and now he’s taking some heat from animal welfare groups.

The video shows him walking up to two black Labradors with his shotgun tucked under his arm and his four-foot long stick raised in the air. He then brought down the stick – a shepherd’s crook – in the direction of one of the dogs, but it is not known if he made contact.

He is then seen chasing one of the dogs and taking another swing in its direction.

The Labradors were trying to grab hold of the same dead bird on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, the Telegraph reports.

Buckingham Palace said that Prince Edward, 44, the Earl of Wessex, had stepped in when two gun dogs were fighting over a pheasant in an attempt to separate them.  “I don’t know if he physically struck them,” a spokeswoman said. “But both dogs are fine – no harm was done to them.”

Andrew Tyler, the director of Animal Aid, said: “We can’t be certain that Edward’s stick did make contact with the dog although he certainly appears to have acted impulsively without restraint. But we can’t expect etiquette and high manners in the context of a sport that is about killing animals for pleasure.”