ohmidog!

The  SPCA may defend dogs, but who defends the SPCA?

In the case of the Maryland SPCA in Baltimore, it’s Paul Day, Jennifer K. Squillario and other counsel at DLA Piper US LLP.

According to an article in the Maryland Daily Record, lawyers from that initial-peppered firm represent the SPCA pro bono.

“If we had to pay market rates to draft contracts … or just anything, we wouldn’t be able to afford it,” said Maya Richmond, director of operations and programs at the SPCA.

Most commonly, the attorneys get involved in cases where a pet’s ownership is in dispute.

In one case, the Daily Record reports, the attorneys worked to take down a Craigslist posting “that the SPCA had killed some huge number of cats in one day,” accompanied by a picture of a bucket of dead cats, Day said.

“There’s a really big, I don’t want to say fight, push for facilities to go no-kill,” he explained. Activists are out to “make the facilities that aren’t no-kill look as bad as possible.” The text of the posting was incorrect and the picture was not taken at the SPCA; it was a stock photo used in similar postings elsewhere on the Internet.

PetSmart said late Tuesday it is recalling seven types of its Grreat Choice dog biscuits because of a salmonella concern.

The pet products retailer said the affected products contain peanut paste made by Peanut Corp. of America, whose Blakely, Georgia facility is currently the focus of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration salmonella probe.

PetSmart said it is not aware of any cases of illness related to the dog biscuits, and was conducting the recall as a precautionary measure.

Read more »

Every day in Seattle, where dogs outnumber children, 41,250 pounds of poop exits dogs and lands on the otherwise fair city, according to the Seattle Times.

In a year (who says newspapers don’t cover the important stuff anymore) that adds up to 15.1 million pounds, but it also leads to a lot of confrontations between neighbors, between dog owners and animal-control officers, and between dog owners and passers-by — not to mention steppers-in.

And, actually, it is important stuff.

The non-scoopers among us — and you know who you are — aren’t just contributing to an erosion in the quality of life, but to health problems as well.

When it rains, as it often does in Seattle, dog poop can run into storm drains, and then into lakes and streams and eventually Puget Sound. In Baltimore, it can take a similar route and end up in the Inner Harbor, and other, more frolic-worthy waterways.

Dave Ward, principal watershed steward for Snohomish County in Washington, notes that kids thinking they are playing in a pristine stream could actually be coming into contact with roundworms, E. coli and Giardia.

“Pet waste comes consistently to the top as one of the principal sources of contamination in urban waterways,” Ward said.

The Times story goes on to recount some of the nasty confrontations dog poop has led to in Seattle, where citations ($54 a whack) can be issued not just for failing to scoop poop, but for failure to carry proper poop-scooping equipment.

In 2007, Seattle – home to an estimated 125,000 dogs — issued 65 citations related to dog poop, from failing to scoop in parks to allowing accumulation of feces on one’s property.

(Graphic by Clyde Peterson, official ohmidog! cartoonist)

Studies are continuing to show that more omega-3 fatty acids in our diets — whether we’re human or canine — can play a role in reducing aggression.

Of course, eating more salmon isn’t going to cure all the violence in the world – and especially not for salmon, which we’d have to slaughter much more of in order to be peaceful.

But it’s something you might want to take a serious look at if your dog has aggression problems, or if (dare I say it, don’t get mad) you do.

A recent Italian study has shown that aggressive dogs are characterized by low levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid. Studies of humans have already indicated the same may be true in us.

In the Italian study, 18 adult male German shepherds with histories of aggression were compared to 18 male shepherds with no history of aggression.

Compared to the “normal dogs,” aggressive dogs showed lower omega 3 levels. “Altogether, our results suggest that low omega-3 fatty acids may adversely impact behavior in dogs,” the scientists said, resulting in greater propensity to aggression, and possibly hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Read more »

Who says the paparazzi are good for nothing?

TMZ is reporting that Jennifer Aniston’s dog, Norman, escaped from her Malibu home over the weekend, and was found and returned by a photographer. What’s more, the photographer saved the dog from walking into traffic, TMZ said.

Aniston, now appearing in Marley & Me, is shown here with Norman, a corgi-terrier, in a 2005 Elle magazine spread.

A video posted on TMZ.com shows a paparazzo taking the dog back to Aniston’s home. No comment yet on the incident from Aniston.

Here’s one way to reduce the number of birds at airports, and cut down on accidents like the forced Hudson River landing of US Airways jet last week.

Her name is Sky.

Sky (click the link above for the video) is a 1-year-old border collie about four months into her job shooing birds away from Southwest Florida International Airport.

“She’s not aggressive at all, but to the birds, she looks like a predator — a wolf or a coyote,” said James Hess, airport operations agent and Sky’s handler. Big birds or flocks of birds, in addition to getting sucked into jet engines, can disable wing tips, dent the fuselage and break windshields.

Southwest Florida International is among about 20 airports nationwide using dogs for some form of wildlife control, according to Rebecca Ryan, owner of Flyaway Farm and Kennels in North Carolina, which has supplied dogs to both military and commercial airfields.

Southwest Florida International was among the first U.S. commercial airports to employ a bird dog, beginning in 1999, according to airport director Bob Ball. Sky is the third generation of her breed to patrol the airport southeast of Fort Myers.

According to USA Today, Charleston (S.C.) International and Canada’s Vancouver International also use dogs for wildlife control.

(Today, ohmidog! kicks off a new feature, a monthly column on dog training and behavior, written by Lauren Bond and Carolyn Stromer of B-More Charming School for Dogs. To keep up with their reports, click on the Behave! tab on the right side rail.)

I’m sure that by now just about every dog person has seen the movie “Marley and Me.” We laughed, we cried, then we cried some more.

Some experienced dog owners, and trainers like ourselves, have even offered our two cents about Marley’s upbringing, saying that his owners were irresponsible, that if we owned a dog like that we would most certainly have put him in his place. We wouldn’t have allowed our couch to be eaten, or our drapes to be torn down, or our gold necklace to go in one end of the dog and come out of the other.

But the truth is we have all been there.

We’ve all been first-time dog owners, overwhelmed, unsure where to turn. Some of us, even by our third or fourth dog, remain that way.

Why won’t he get off of the furniture? Why do my shoes, hairbrush, wallet, cell phone, (insert object of choice here) always wind up in his mouth? Why can’t I come home, just once, to the trash can being upright, untouched, with all of the trash still inside? How come my “NO’S!” and “STOP ITS!” only lead to a game of catch-me-if-you-can? Is it really too much to ask of man’s best friend that he just be calm, listen to what I tell him and lay quietly at my feet waiting for further instructions?

To be completely honest … yes, it is.

Think back to the day you brought your first puppy home. He didn’t come with an instruction manual. Maybe, at best, the shelter gave you a brochure, or some information on his vaccine record and what kind of food and toys he liked. But there was nothing on how to influence his behavior, no foolproof tips for getting him to stop jumping all over guests when they walk through the front door. Or teaching him to walk nicely on leash. Or keeping him from chewing up your new Blackberry.

You might have tried staying one step ahead by reading up on dog behavior before you brought him home. There’s a ton of conventional wisdom out there, books galore, dog magazines and an entire Animal Network. How could you go wrong?

Easily.

Read more »

Three months after shipping her adopted dog, Ratchet, home from Iraq, Army Specialist Gwen Beberg was reunited with him, her tour of duty completed.

“Hey, baby. Oh, you got so big — Oh, you got so big,” said the soldier to the pup. “Yeah, who’s home? Who’s home, huh?”

The two were reunited Saturday as Beberg returned to Spring Lake Park, Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

Friends, family and supporters gathered at VFW Post 363 to witness the reunion. “I wish every soldier in the world, past, present and future, came home to a welcome like this,” Beberg said.

Beberg urged support for Operation Baghdad Pups, a branch of SPCA International that rescues dogs and cats adopted by U.S. military personnel. More than 50 pets have been relocated to the United States.

Beberg adopted Ratchet as a month-old pup after fellow soldiers rescued him from a burning pile of trash.

Although the Army balked at Beberg’s plan to send the dog home, Beberg’s efforts, and those of Operation Baghdad Pups — along with 70,000 signatures on online petitions and some help from congress — led military officials to loosen the prohibition on U.S. troops adopting pets in Iraq.

Slate has a popular feature called “The Explainer,” which addresses those nagging questions the news leaves unanswered — be they too weighty, too trivial or just too weird.

Every year, the online magazine lets readers pick from submitted questions that never made the column, and choose what they call the “Explainer Question of the Year.”

Then the column answers it.

For 2008, after deeming the three top vote getting questions already sufficiently answered– including why cockroaches flip over on their backsides when they die – Slate named the No. 4 vote-getter as question of the year: What’s the most disloyal dog breed?

Slate’s answer: ”Nobody knows.”

The column’s author, Daniel Engber, writes that while conventional wisdom holds that each of the 161 breeds now recognized by the American Kennel Club has a distinctive temperament, the reality is the there is less difference, behaviorally, between breeds than ever.

The reason? Most dogs have lost their jobs.

Dogs once bred for a specific task — to herd, to guard, to hunt — are now bred primarily to make good companions or win dog shows. The traits a breed might once have clearly exhibited were tied in large part to how we used them. So a working dog, trained to guard property, might at one point might have been deemed most “loyal.” Today, though, the personality of dogs can vary tremendously within a particular breed.

Breeds might still have certain predilections, but any sweeping statements about dogs of a certain breed should be taken with a grain of salt — whether they’re about pit bulls or poodles.

Of course, plenty of people are still making them, and are still a little to quick to do what — were it applied to humans — would amount to “profiling.”

 Hats off to Slate for not falling into that trap.