ohmidog!

Anne Arundel County police shot and killed what they described as a pit bull after the dog ran into an Edgewater, Maryland home and bit a couple and their teenage son.

Officer said a man was walking into his home Tuesday evening when a pit bull ran up and bit him on the face, then ran into the house. The dog bit the man’s wife and his 19-year-old son, the Baltimore Sun reports. The man suffered severe injuries to his face and his wife and son suffered minor injuries, police said.

An officer who came to the house shot the dog to protect himself and the victims, police said. The dog’s owner, Karim Abdalla, was charged with having an animal that poses a threat to public safety and allowing an animal to run free, police said.

A parrot has been honored in Denver for helping to save the life of a toddler choking on her breakfast.

Megan Howard was baby-sitting in her home in November when she heard her bird — a Quaker parrot named Willie — flapping his wings and repeating the words “Mama, baby.”

By the time she rushed to the kitchen, the little girl, named Hannah, was already turning blue. Howard performed the Heimlich maneuver, dislodging the food stuck in the girl’s throat.

Willie was given the local Red Cross chapter’s Animal Lifesaver Award at a ceremony attended by Colorado Gov. Bill Riter and Mayor John Hickenlooper.

You can a find a CBS4 video report on the cermony here.

There’s a hefty penalty to be paid if your dog takes an uncollected dump on this fair city.

Unfortunately, there is no such recourse when the city dumps on dog owners.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the City Council in January passed a bill increasing the fines for both unleashed dogs and unscooped poop to $1,000.

That it has taken three months for that news to become public is troubling. That the city hasn’t done more to inform dog owners — if not through the media than by some other means – is even more disturbing. Try to find the rules, much less any information on fines, old or new, on the city’s Animal Control website. I’ll award a free poop bag to the first person who can point it out to me.

Granted, dog owners, on the whole, could show a little more respect to the city. Poop — and I passed a good $50,000 worth of it (under the new law) on my way to the park and back today — should be picked up.

But the city might consider showing a little respect to dog owners, too — one, by not assessing such ridiculously exorbitant fines; two, by possibly making it public that the penalties are increasing tenfold. It’s as if the city has borrowed a chapter from the BGE school of customer service: “Oh, and by the way, valued customer/citizen, your bill this month is $912.”

Animal Control Director Bob Anderson told the Sun that his office hasn’t received the official documents and is still issuing citations that carry penalties in the old amounts. The shift to the new fines, he said, will probably come in a matter of weeks.

As one who religiously scoops poop, but flagrantry violates the leash law — under the belief that dogs gotta run, and a well-behaved dog under voice control shouldn’t require constant leashing — I’d like to know, especially amid the crackdowns that have been going on: Precisely when does letting my dog run free become akin to a felony?

And, given that the city relegates any unchained dog to them, exactly when do those dog parks Mayor Sheila Dixon promised become a reality?

I’d hate to hear that they are among the services the financially strapped city is cutting back on, especially at the same time it’s raking in ten times more money in dog fines.

What the city fathers and mothers fail to realize is that responsible dog owners — we who navigate broken glass and dodge rats on our way to the park, we who sometimes pick up trash left by non-dog owners, we who take part in sprucing up your parks, pay our taxes, cast our votes and, for the most part, follow their laws — don’t particularly relish being treated like … the subject at hand.

And I don’t mean leashes.

Nobody has busted out of the Idaho Correctional Center in more than 20 years, and prison officials say the credit goes to the Dirty Two Dozen — a team of snarling guard dogs that patrol the perimeter.

Their names sound friendly enough –  Cookie, Bongo and Chi Chi among them — but the dogs, they say, are a mean lot, former death row inmates deemed too dangerous to be pets. Most would have been euthanized at the local pound if not for the prison duty that served as their reprieve.

The program began in 1986, when 24 dogs — German shepherds, Rottweilers and Belgian malinois, boxers and pit bulls — were placed in the space between the inner and outer chain-link fences that surround the prison.

The canines require no salary, don’t join unions and are more reliable during power outages than electrical security systems. They also seem to have a powerful deterrent effect.

“We’re basically giving them a second chance at a good, healthy life,” Corrections Officer Michael Amos, who heads the sentry dog program, told the Associated Press. ”Those same instincts that make them a bad pet make them good sentries.”

“The average offender has no problem engaging in a fight with a correctional officer — they’re used to fighting with humans. But they don’t want to mess with a 100-pound rottweiler who has an attitude and who wants to bite the snot out of them for climbing that fence,” said James Closson, a dog trainer in Boise. He arranged the donation of some overaggressive dogs to the prison when the sentry program was new.

Over the years, the dogs have bitten handlers, badly mauling a staff member who in the late 1990s entered the kennel without first making sure all the animals were caged. But no inmates locked up at the prison have been bitten, authorities said.

Interestingly, the prison also has a program in which inmates train and care for shelter dogs, designed to give the dogs a better chance of getting adopted. But those dogs, though they may have behavioral issues, aren’t as hard core as those that guard the fence.

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A proposed bill in the Ohio State House would remove pit bulls from state’s ”vicious dog” law.

Introduced by Rep. Barbara Sears last week, the bill would amend the current law, which deems all pit bulls dangerous and vicious solely on the basis of their breed.

“In the 1970′s it was German Shepherd, in the 80′s Dobermans, in the 90′s it was Rottweilers, now it’s Pit Bulls. Breed specific legislation does not accomplish the goal.” said Sears. “We want to take the focus of the law away from the breed and have it on the behavior of the animal, then hold the owner of the animal accountable.”

The proposed legislation has a zealous opponent in Lucas County Dog Warden, Tom Skeldon, who e-mailed Rep. Sears a case report regarding pit bull mauling deaths in Detroit, Michigan over a 19-year period, according to Fox News. The email contained an autopsy picture of a child.

Skeldon said the picture was necessary to show what the animal is capable of doing.

“The [Vicious Dog] law has been a valuable tool in protecting the public, it puts restrictions on pit bulls, requires the dog to be fenced or caged and requires owners to have liability insurance,” he said. “That would all go away with this law.”

Skeldon says his agency impounded 1354 pit bulls in 2007, compared to 50 in 1993.

A sixth dog in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race has died — this one on a flight to Nome.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports that the dog, a two year-old female on he team of musher Alan Peck, died during a turbulent flight from Shaktoolik to Nome.

The musher had scratched in Shaktoolik, and officials were picking up the dog team Monday. Race spokesman Chas St. George says the airplane encountered significant turbulence during the flight that forced the pilot to land in Golovin, where it was discovered that one of the dogs, name Cirque, had died.

St. George says the dogs were in good condition when loaded onto the plane. A necropsy has been scheduled.

PETA has asked Alaskan law enforcement officials to launch a criminal investigation into the deaths of five dogs who ran in this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to determine if four mushers should be charged under the state’s cruelty-to-animals law.

The PETA letter cites Alaska State Statute 11.61.140, which prohibits a person from knowingly inflicting “prolonged suffering on an animal.”

According to news reports, Grasshopper and Dizzy, both belonging to musher Lou Packer of Wasilla, apparently froze to death in high winds and sub-zero temperatures. Two other dogs, Omen and Maynard, who were under the care of mushers Rick Larson and Warren Palfrey, died of pulmonary edema, or excess fluid in the lungs. Race veterinarians have been unable to determine what caused the death of Victor, the first dog to die in this year’s Iditarod.

A study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that after a 1,100-mile race, 81 percent of dogs had “abnormal accumulations” of debris in their lower airways. PETA also cites a Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine article about the Iditarod that revealed 61 percent of dogs who were studied exhibited an increased frequency of gastric erosions or ulcers after completing the race.

“The Iditarod is more than a thousand miles of torment for these dogs,” says PETA Director Debbie Leahy. “Every year, dogs suffer serious injuries and death. The five dogs who paid for this race with their lives deserve justice — and that means holding these mushers accountable under Alaska’s very clear cruelty-to-animals law.”

PETA’s letter was sent to the director of Alaska’s State Troopers. A spokeswoman for the troopers  said  the state law PETA cites in asking for the investigation does not generally apply to accepted dog mushing contests.

For thousands of New Orleans pet owners who became separated from their pets during Hurricane Katrina, the pain still lingers, and a new documentary shows how deep and complicated the hurt can be.

Mine: Taken by Katrina, premiered at a film festival over the weekend in Austin, Texas and proved a crowd favorite.

The documentary highlights a few of the tens of thousand of animals who were displaced by Katrina, the dedicated volunteers who risked their lives to rescue them, the adoptive families that have taken these pets into their homes and the original owners who lost them — some of whom are still fighting for their custody.

Director Geralyn Pezanoski, herself the adopter of a Katrina animal, began documenting animal rescue efforts in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and has followed the stories of several pets and animals over the last two years.

The documentary, which won the Audience Award for best documentary feature at last weekend’s South by Southwest film festival in Austin, has some heartwarming moments and some anguishing ones, such as those of pet owners still trying to reclaim their animals from adoptive homes that have grown to love them.

Those include a man named Malvin, who built his dog Bandit a new dog house next to his FEMA trailer — in case the dog’s adoptive parents in Pittsburgh ever agree to return the pooch. Another, Jesse James Pullins, a downtown hotel worker, was still mourning his separation from his Akita mix when he saw him show up on Cesar Millan’s The Dog Whisperer.

Like the aftermath of Katrina, the documentary is a testament to the intense bond between people and their pets. In this case though, those bonds are often shared by the guardians who lost their pets and want them back, and the well-meaning adoptive guardians who have taken them in, nursed them back to health and don’t want to part with them, even when the real owner surfaces.

Police in Rockford, Illinois, say a man who shot a 16-year old boy in the mouth over the weekend may have actually been aiming for a stray dog.

Police were told that a dog was bothering a small group of people gathered outside a home, prompting one resident to fire a shot at it. The 16-year-old boy’s injuries were not considered life threatening, authorities said.

The shooter fled before officers arrived, police said, but they have a suspect, according to the Rockford Register Star.

Yet another one we can add to the “dangerous breed” list — and I don’t mean the dog.

Nearly 400 neglected dogs were rescued Monday from an Arkansas puppy mill in a raid by local authorities and the Humane Society of the United States.

Dogs were found living in horrific conditions in dilapidated structures throughout the 82-acre property, authorities said, and at least 350 were removed. Also seized were 17 miniature ponies, six cats and several exotic birds and turtles from the property.  

When rescuers arrived at the property, in Logan County, they found dogs, ranging from shih tzus and poodles to Akitas and Shelties — some only a day-old –suffering from serious medical ailments and housed in filthy conditions.

“Most people don’t realize that this is the cruel reality behind those cute puppies for sale in pet stores and online,” said Desiree Bender, Arkansas state director for The HSUS. “These dogs were kept in tiny cages and forced to breed continuously for the profit of the mill owners.” 

“People were buying the puppies without knowing the cruelty they were supporting, Bender said. “It is vital that anyone buying a puppy go and see where they were born, meet the parent dogs and ensure they are being well cared for.”

All of the animals were swiftly removed and transported to a nearby emergency shelter and checked by a team of veterinarians, the HSUS reported.

Volunteers from United Animal Nations assisted with the temporary shelter, and supplies were provided by PetSmart Charities, which sent its Emergency Relief Waggin’ full of wire crates, dog food and bedding.