ohmidog!

Given the Pentagon’s decision to ban pit bulls and other “dangerous” dog breeds from Army housing, we thought it would be a good time to revisit Stubby, the stray pit bull who became the most decorated canine soldier of World War 1.

At war’s end, Stubby was treated like a hero. Doors were opened for him, as opposed to being slammed in his face. Today, in light of a recently approved Pentagon policy, soldiers returning home — if they have a pit bull, Rottweiler, chow or Doberman Pinscher in their family — won’t be allowed to keep them if they live on a military base. (Thanks for fighting for our “freedom,” though.)

It’s just the latest breed-specific slap in the face to pit bulls, a breed that once served not just in battle (Stubby saw action in 17), but as corporate mascots (Nipper for RCA Victor) and TV show characters (Petey on “Our Gang”).

Stubby, though he entered the armed forces surreptitiously, was the only dog to be promoted to “Sergeant” through combat.

Stubby was found on the Yale campus — parts of which were being used as a training encampment — in 1917. He was taken in by John Robert Conroy and other soldiers, marched alongside them through training and, when time came to ship out to France, was smuggled aboard the USS Minnesota in an overcoat.

Overseas, he served as a morale-booster, sentry and more.

In April 1918, Stubby, along with the 102^nd Infantry, participated in the raid on the German held town of Schieprey. As the Germans withdrew they threw hand grenades at the pursing allies, one of which wounded Stubby in the foreleg.

In the Argonne, Stubby was credited with ferreting out a German spy and holding on to the seat of his pants until soldiers arrived to complete the capture.

Stubby eventually ended up in a hospital when his master, Corporal J. Robert Conroy, was wounded. After doing hospital duty, he and Conroy returned to their unit, and served for the remainder of the way.

At war’s end, he was smuggled back home.

Upon his return, he was made a lifetime member of the American legion. He marched in every legion parade and attended every legion convention from the end of the war until his death. He met three presidents — Wilson, Harding and Coolidge.

In 1921 General Pershing, commander of American Forces during the War, awarded Stubby a gold hero dog’s medal that was commissioned by the Humane Education Society.

One New York City hotel, the Grand Hotel Majestic, lifted its ban on dogs so that Stubby could stay there enroute to one of many visits to Washington.

When Conroy went to Georgetown to study law, Stubby went along and served as mascot for the football team. Some say his halftime antics — he would push a football around the field with his nose — was the origin of the halftime show.

Stubby died in 1926. His obituary in the New York Times ran three columns wide for half a page.

His remains were mounted by a taxidermist and presented for display at the Smithsonian. From 2000 to 2003, he was loaned to the Connecticut National Guard Armory, where he was exhibited for three years.

All that history seems to be lost on the Pentagon — as does that of Rottweilers and Dobermans who have served the country, and continue to.

If remembering Stubby’s life isn’t enough to persuade the Pentagon that their action was rash, ill-conceived and discriminatory, then they should borrow from another chapter of his legacy, that being the last one:

They should take their new policy and stuff it.

(Photos and source material: Connecticut Military Department)

Meatpacking giant Tyson Foods Inc. is reportedly buying a piece of a New Jersey company that is introducing refrigerated dog food to the American marketplace.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Tyson was expected to announce that it has bought a minority stake in Freshpet Co., a Secaucus, N.J., company that will be selling its dog food at Kroger, Supervalu, PetSmart and other stores.

Freshpet was formed by a group of former Meow Mix managers whose goal is to make dog food look, smell and taste as much like human food as possible. The line, the first national brand of refrigerated pet food, is aimed at consumers who — however much they may be cutting down on what they consume — are continuing to buy the finest for their pets.

A Tyson group vice president said he expects refrigerated pet food to grow into a $500 million sales category within five years.

Tyson will begin to make Freshpet products this year and will use the Tyson truck fleet to haul Freshpet products to stores alongside Tyson’s microwavable dinners, chicken breasts and hamburger, the Journal reported. Tyson, which also is opening its research kitchens to Freshpet, is stopping short of using the Tyson brand on dog food.

Tyson won’t be the first food company to diversify into pet products. Nestlé owns Purina Puppy Chow and Dog Chow, while Mars Inc. owns Whiskas, Pedigree and Sheba. Del Monte Foods owns Kibbles ‘n Bits, Meow Mix and 9 Lives.

The Humane Society of the United States and other consumers have filed a class action lawsuit against Petland, Inc., alleging it has conspired to sell unhealthy puppy mill puppies to unsuspecting consumers.

In addition to Petland, the nation’s largest chain of pet stores that sells dogs, the lawsuit names Hunte Corp., one of the country’s largest distributors of puppies, as a defendant.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Phoenix late Monday, alleges that Petland and Hunte violated federal law and state laws by misleading thousands of consumers across the country into believing that the puppies sold in Petland stores are healthy and come from high-quality breeders.

Many of the puppies sold by Petland, HSUS claims, come either directly from puppy mills or puppy brokers such as Hunte, which the organization says operates as a middleman between the mills and Petland’s retail stores.

Read more »

Camp Bow Wow — at 7165 Oakland Mills Road in Columbia, Md. — invites dogs and their people to a Yappy Hour Wednesday night, from 5 to 7.

“Bring your dog, meet new friends and enjoy a glass of wine at camp,” camp leaders said. For more information visit the Camp Bow Wow website.

People magazine has confirmed that one of Oprah Winfrey’s newly adopted and highly publicized cocker spaniels has died.

Ivan, one of two puppies Winfrey recently adopted from PAWS Shelter in Chicago died of parvovirus last week, a veterinarian confirmed. The second, Sadie, is being treated against the highly contagious virus as a precaution.

Winfrey announced the adoption of Sadie on her show March 6 and said she was thinking about adopting one of her three brothers still awaiting homes at PAWS. She brought home Sadie’s brother Ivan, but the puppy came down with a deadly virus last Wednesday and died, said Dr. Jean Dobbs, a veterinarian who supplied the plasma to treat them both.

A spokesperson for Winfrey confirmed to PEOPLE Pets that the puppy died over the weekend, and added that Sadie, “is getting stronger.”

“It was just a little bit too late. All the veterinary community got together to save his life,” Dr. Dobbs said of Ivan. “The puppy didn’t make it, but he’s teaching others how important this is to get vaccinated at the right times.”

Dr. Dobbs is the founder of Hemopet, a non-profit animal blood bank.

The PAWS Shelter has not responded to an email I sent yesterday — and they didn’t return People’s calls, either.

Winfrey’s Golden Retriever Gracie choked to death on a ball in 2007 and her cocker spaniel Sophie died about a year ago at age 13 of kidney failure. After airing a show on puppy mills, Oprah vowed that her next pet would be a rescue.

Sadie and Ivan were part of a litter of 11 puppies born to a dog rescued from Greenwood, South Carolina by a woman attending her mother’s funeral.

Interestingly, news of Ivan’s death was first broken last week by John Yates, head of the American Sporting Dog Alliance, an organization highly that was critical of Winfrey’s puppy mill episode and tried to initiate a boycott of the program’s advertisers.

Through the weekend only Examiner bloggers were publishing that unconfirmed report, picking up what Yates posted on the Internet.

A Pentagon memorandum issued earlier this year that bans pit bulls, Rottweilers, Dobermans and chows from living on Army bases has come under fire as being cold, backwards, misguided and an insult to soldiers who have served their country.

The Pentagon memo, dated Jan. 5, 2009, specifies that those breeds will no longer be allowed in Army housing — but it exempts those already housed. Any member of the military who switched bases, however, would be subject to its terms. The Air Force also has enacted a breed-selective policy and the Navy is expected to do the same.

Best Friends Animal Society in Utah said yesterday it is calling on the U.S. military to reverse the ban, which the organization says is “tearing apart families and their dogs at bases across the country.”

Best Friends attorney Ledy VanKavage said the memo is a “knee-jerk reaction” that “targets the wrong end of the leash. Our armed forces should target reckless owners, not a particular breed of dog.”

The memorandum states families “may not board in privatized housing” any dog of a breed — or a mix of breeds –that is deemed aggressive or potentially aggressive. The memorandum defines “aggressive or potentially aggressive breeds of dogs, “as pit bulls (American Staffordshire bull terriers or English Staffordshire bull terriers), Rottweilers, Doberman pinschers, chows, and wolf hybrids.”

”Behind that cold language are stories of our heroes and their families being separated from their dogs,” VanKavage said.

Read more »

Citing a budget shortfall, Los Angeles animal control officials say they will end a voucher program that enabled residents to get low cost spaying and neutering for their dogs.

The program started last year, when the city voted to require all Los Angeles dogs and cats be neutered or spayed, with the exception of show animals, law enforcement and service dogs, and those deemed too old or sick for the surgery.

L.A. Animal Services General Manager Ed Boks says the agency was compelled by the city to make up a budget shortfall of $414,000. Ending the spay and neuter vouchers will save about $150,000, he said.

Animal welfare advocates, and some city council members, are displeased with the decision to end the program, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Councilman Dennis Zine’s office said he ”strongly opposes the recent decision made by the department to halt the voucher program” and will move later this week for the council to reinstate the program.

Sniffing out harmful bacteria in bee colonies is a full time job for Klinker — “our newest employee,” said William Troup, an apiary inspector with the Maryland Department of Agriculture.

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.