ohmidog!

Recycled Love will be holding a large yard sale at HOWL Pet Food Store in Hampden tomorrow from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. All proceeds will be used to advance Recycled Love’s mission to help abused, abandoned and neglected animals. HOWL is located at 3531 Chestnut Street.

Investigations by a state’s attorney and the Maryland State Police into allegations against the Cecil County SPCA have concluded there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and that fired employees lied about their accusations, the SPCA is reporting on its website.

The allegations were brought to light  by Del. Michael Smigiel, who published them on the Internet and still maintains on his blog that the they have not been fully investigated.

Caroline County State’s Attorney Jonathan G. Newell reported on his review of a detailed State Police investigation and report in a June 1, 2009 letter sent to Cecil County State’s Attorney Christopher Eastridge, who had asked for an independent review outside Cecil County.

“Despite a very thorough investigation … in my opinion none of the allegations of criminal animal cruelty on the part of current or past employees of the CCSPCA are credible enough to be prosecuted,”  Newell said. The State Police investigation began in January, 2009.

The State Police report concluded there was no credible evidence against the Cecil County SPCA. Read more »

It’s being reported that researchers at a New York college say dogs don’t feel guilt — that the ”guilty look” on a dog’s face is all in the imagination of the human owner.

After tricking owners into thinking innocent pets had misbehaved, researchers found that owners claimed to see a guilty look on the face of dogs that did nothing wrong, proving owners were projecting human values onto their pets, the study says.

The study, led by Alexandra Horowitz, assistant professor at Barnard College in New York, looked at how dog owners interpreted their pets’ expressions when they believed that the dog had stolen and eaten a forbidden treat. In a series of tests, owners were sometimes given accurate and sometimes false information about whether their dog had stolen the treat.

Researchers found that pet owners’ belief that they could read their dogs’ “body language” was often entirely unfounded, according to a BBC report.

Far more likely, it seems to me, the dogs were correctly reading their human’s body language. Read more »

 
A study by Apartments.com has found that 80 percent of renters say a pet-friendly policy plays a major role in where they choose to live, and nearly one of every three seek out a home that is convenient to ameneties like dog parks and walking trails.

A whopping 90 percent of those responding to the survey said they had a pet, and half of the other 10 percent said they plan to get one within the next year.

While the majority of respondents experienced difficulty finding an apartment that allowed pets, 89 percent said they were not put in a position where they had to choose between their animal and a place to live.

For survey respondents who said they were forced to give up a pet, the two main causes were identified as not being able to find an apartment with a pet-friendly policy (65%) or not being able to afford the pet deposit (27%).

Apartments.com says more properties are welcoming pets. More than 11 million searches were conducted on the website in 2008 by people seeking pet-friendly apartments.

For tips on renting with pets, Apartments.com offers a special section on its website.

A dog owner thinks her 11-year-old Labrador mix, Jack, got sick after accidentally eating marijuana at a Seattle park.

Jack, after being unleashed in Seattle’s Seward Park, wandered off for about three minutes. About three hours later, ”his head was rocking back and forth his eyes were glassy,”  said his owner, Jen Nestor.

Nestor  thinks her dog must have happened upon some marijuana stashed somewhere in the park greenery, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. 

According to his medical records, Jack appeared dizzy and disoriented, was staggering and fell over when trying to sit. He also vomited large amounts of plant material and liquid that smelled like marijuana, his owner said.

Police say the story sounds legit, and point out that a wilderness guide playing hide and seek with kids in Seward Park discovered a duffel bag packed with five and a half pounds of marijuana on April 3.

Jack, after $1,500 in medical bills,  has recovered from his May 17 experience.

Marijuana can be toxic to dogs and, depending on a dogs’ size and the amount consumed, ingesting it can send them into a coma.

Dogs getting into their owners’ stashes — be they illegal or medically approved — isn’t really as rare an event as you might think. Figuring there are dogs in 43 million U.S. homes, and people who have smoked marijuana in the past year in 25 million homes, there’s got to a multi-million overlap there.

In parts of Northern California, vets face such cases regularly, with some attending to several zonked-out dogs a week, according to a 2005 Los Angeles Times story.

(Photo: Rocky, a Nebraska drug detection dog, sits atop a large haul in 2007, courtesy Douglas County Sheriff’s Department)

The Pennsylvania SPCA (PSPCA) is making an urgent appeal to the community to provide foster homes for dogs in need.

“The Animal Care & Control Team shelter (111 W. Hunting Park Avenue) and the PSPCA Adoption Center (350 E. Erie Avenue) in Philadelphia are full to capacity and we’ve tapped out our existing network of foster parents,” the organization says. “If you can provide temporary housing for a dog, we will provide free medical care and support in return. Foster homes are needed immediately! The longer you can foster the dog, the more lives we can save.”

To help, contact ACCT Lifesaving Manager Natalie Smith at nsmith@pspca.org or (267) 385-3800 (ask for the “Lifesaving Department”), or contact PSPCA Director of Adoptions, Rescue, and Foster Care Ray Little at rlittle@pspca.org or (215) 426-6300 (ask for the “Adoptions Counter”).

To see some of the dogs in need of foster care, visit the PSPCA website.