ohmidog!

Leave it to the brother of the guy who plays “Monk” to come up with a way to keep dog poop from ever tainting the ground.

Yes, Tony Shalhoub, the Emmy-winning actor who plays TV’s “Monk,” the germ-fearing, obsessive-compulsive detective, has a brother. And that brother, Dan Shalhoub, is an inventor. And Dan is the father of the “Shapoopie” — a telescoping rod with a disposable receptacle on the end that allows one to snag poop, from a distance, before it lands.

Dan Shalhoub, who grew up in Green Bay with Tony and eight other siblings, makes his living cleaning window blinds, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. His Milwaukee-based firm, White Glove Ultra-Sonic Blind Cleaning, uses sound waves to remove the grime from blinds.

When his wife brought home a West Highland terrier, named Pippin, Dan — never a big dog fan — found cleaning up after the dog particularly distasteful, and, due to a bad back, a little painful. So he took a golf-ball retriever with a telescoping handle and rigged a plastic bag to the end, which he then carried with him and positioned directly under the dog at the appropriate time — i.e. when Pippin was poopin’.

After some design improvements, the device now features a basket that holds removable plastic liners with snap-shut lids. Shalhoub said he’s sold about 300 units ($19.95 each) on his Shapoopie website.

But business may get a boost from his brother’s recent appearance on the “Bonnie Hunt Show,” during which Tony Shalhoub demonstrated and plugged his brother’s device. You can see a video of his demonstration, using stuffed animals, here. For a more realistic demonstration, here’s one we found one Youtube.

“While human beings in Iraq were killing each other in huge numbers, they ignored the dogs, which in turn multiplied at an alarming rate,” the New York Times reported last week.

Now stray dogs are such a menace that municipal workers are hunting them down and slaughtering them — about 10,000 in Baghdad just since December.

“With fewer bombs going off and hardly any bodies being dumped anymore, the dogs are perhaps the biggest problem on the filthy and rubble-strewn streets of Baghdad. Packs of strays scare schoolchildren and people who get up at dawn to go to work. They gather at open-air butcher shops where customers choose their meat from flocks of live sheep.

“Thus a relative peace has changed priorities, and not just in Baghdad. The holy Shiite city of Karbala was so overwhelmed with stray dogs last year that officials there offered 6,000 dinars ($5.30) for each animal caught and handed over to the municipality. The dogs were shot and buried en masse.”

In Baghdad, dogs are killed with rotten raw meat laced with strychnine. On the outskirts of town, articularly around the city’s sprawling garbage dumps, the dogs are shot. By the time the cmapgin ends this month, perhaps 20,000 dogs will have been exterminated, said Shaker Fraiyeh of the ministry’s veterinary services company.

“Our work may be against animal rights, but there is a more important issue, public health,” said Dr. Fraiyeh, a veterinarian in his 30s.

Abdul-Karim Ismail, a veterinarian with the state-owned company dealing with the dogs, said building and maintaining animal shelters and introducing spay/neuter programs to control Baghdad’s dog population are considered too costly and complicated in a nation where people had so many more pressing needs.

Some stray dogs have been fortunate enough to find new homes outside Iraq. S.P.C.A. International, a Washington-based charity, began “Operation Baghdad Pups” in 2007 to help American soldiers adopt and take home stray dogs they befriended while serving in Iraq.

South Lake Tahoe has moved one step closer to banning the retail sale of dogs and cats by pet stores.

The Nevada city’s planning commission recommended approval of the proposed ordinance on a 4-1 vote Thursday, according to the San Jose Mercury News. It now will go to the City Council for consideration.

Supporters say the ordinance would allow the city to do its part to combat puppy mills—high-volume breeding facilities considered inhumane by animal welfare organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States, which says most dogs sold in pet stores come from puppy mills.

If approved, the ordinance would give stores that sell dogs or cats two years to phase out that part of their business.