ohmidog!

Bear, a Chicago police dog who went missing last month during a thunderstorm, has disappeared again.

On May 13, Bear jumped a 6-foot-high fence at his handler’s home and was found four days later outside Evergreen Cemetery.

On Saturday, the German Shepherd disappeared again, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Police were conducting a search for the dog Sunday morning. They described Bear as a 74-pound German Shepherd trained to track, do search and rescue and search property. The dog is black and tan in color and has an identification computer chip implanted under his skin.

Chicago Police dogs live with their handlers. The typical police dog costs more than $5,000, according to the department’s website, and must undergo 12 to 16 weeks of training.

How a golden retriever named Tuesday is helping an Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress was the subject of an excellent story in yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal.

Trained to help Luis Carlos Montalvan with his unseen injuries, Tuesday is a psychiatric-service dog — or, as the article referred to it, a “Seeing Eye dog for the mind.”

Tuesday, who is with Montalvan around the clock, has been taught to recognize changes in his breathing, perspiration or scent that can indicate an imminent panic attack.

Montalvan, a retired Army captain who received a Purple Heart for wounds he suffered during an ambush in Iraq, is one of the estimated 300,000 veterans who will ultimately develop PTSD — few of whom will be able to get access to dogs like Tuesday.

“We’re just scratching the surface,” said Gloria Gilbert Stoga, president of Puppies Behind Bars Inc., a New York-based nonprofit that uses prisoners to train animals. Tuesday is one of 11 psychiatric-service dogs it has placed. It hopes to provide 14 more this year.

Tuesday was eight weeks old when he and five siblings were turned over to Puppies Behind Bars. He was sent to New York’s Fishkill Correctional Facility. The pup shared a cell with John Pucci, a convicted killer who was given responsibility for molding Tuesday into a service dog.

Pucci taught Tuesday to respond to 82 commands geared mainly toward helping the physically disabled — turning on lights with his nose, retrieving food from shelves, helping load washing machines. In doing so he won a bet with fellow inmates, who didn’t think Tuesday could be trained. “I got released before I could collect the cigarettes,” said Pucci, 64 years old, who served 29 years.

After that,Tuesday received additional training, based on Montalvan’s needs — such as reminding him to take his pills, and serving as a buffer when Montalvan gets stressed out by large crowds.

Montalvan walks with a cane as a result of his physical injuries, but he says his biggest problems are emotional. “Sometimes my mind goes jumbled,” he said. “Everything just gets kind of cloudy.”

Tuesday also accompanies Montalvan to to Columbia University, where he’s studying journalism and communication.

“Tuesday is just extraordinarily empathetic,” said Montalvan, 36. “In bad moments, he’ll lay his head on my leg, and it’ll be like he’s saying, ‘You’re OK. You’re not alone.’”

A pit bull attacked and chased off an intruder from a home in Bradenton, Florida.

Manatee Sheriff’s deputies said two adults and two children were sleeping in the home when the adults heard someone break into the home and get attacked by the family pit bull.

The robber fired one shot at the dog, but apparently missed, deputies say. As the residents huddled in a closet, the intruder entered their bedroom, but was attacked by the dog again.

The residents heard the robber shout “get off of me,” before he fled the home without taking anything.

The adults and the dog were not injured; the two sleeping children never awoke during the attack.

About one of every four times that New York city police officers fire their weapons, they are taking aim at dogs, according to The New York Times.

And when shooting at dogs, lawmen more often find their mark than when shooting at people.

Officers shot 30 dogs last year and have shot 15 so far this year, the report said.

Of the 126 times that officers fired their guns in 2006, they shot at dogs 30 times, said Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who has analyzed the data in the department’s annual firearms discharge reports. A year earlier, he said, 32 of 123 shootings involved dogs, compared to 26 of 114 in 2004.

In those three years, Dunn said, the shots hit the dogs 55 percent of the time. When shooting at people, the shots hit their mark only 23.4 percent of the time.

On Wednesday night, police killed a pit bull in the hallway of a housing project on the Upper East Side. The dog, named Baby, charged at a group of officers who were responding to an assault call.

Police said Thursday that three officers fired a total of seven shots. Fragments from the richocheting bullets hit three officers and the dog’s owner, Milagros Martinez, who had let the dog out. Six people, including Martinez, 42, were arrested after the shooting.

They were charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance after officers found a pipe with crack cocaine residue inside the apartment, the police said.

The shooting will be investigated by a police internal review board. According to police guidelines on the use of deadly force, officers may not shoot at dogs “except to protect themselves or another person from physical injury and there is no other reasonable means to eliminate the threat.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the police had acted responsibly.

A golden retriever rescued as a stray and trained to sniff out bombs for the Mount Holly, N.J., Police Department has died.

Patton, who was 5 years old, died in the vehicle of his handler and partner, Officer Kara McIntosh, the Philadelphia Daily News reported.

“We’re investigating every aspect of the case,” said Mount Holly Police Chief Steve Martin.

A spokesman for the New Jersey SPCA said his office was awaiting results of an autopsy performed at the Columbus Animal Hospital. He declined to say whether heat had played a part in the dog’s death. It was unclear how long Patton had been left in the vehicle, or whether McIntosh was working at the time of Patton’s death.

Martin declined to comment on the circumstances leading to the dog’s death.

According to a website dedicated to golden retrievers, Patton was discovered by Mount Holly officers looking for a K-9 dog at the Delaware Valley Golden Retriever Rescue’s Golden Gateway, in Lancaster County.

After intensive training, Patton learned to recognize more than 20 scents, and specialized in rooting out shell casings. He became part of a statewide task force under the U.S Department of Homeland Security.

The Trentonian quoted an anonymous source as saying the dog died at an animal hospital after being left in a hot car for an extended period of time.

Here’s one man’s tribute to his bulldog, Butkuss.

Arthritis supplements for dogs, cats and horses sometimes skimp on the ingredients, an independent laboratory has found.

Four of the six joint supplements for animals tested by ConsumerLab.com lacked the amounts of glucosamine or chondroitin promised on their labels or had other flaws, according to a report by the Associated Press.

“There is and there always has been” a quality problem, although many companies do a good job, said Mark Blumenthal of the American Botanical Council, which tracks research on herbal products.

Even when these supplements contain what they claim, there is little evidence that they work, veterinary experts say.

“You can’t ask a dog or a cat to give you a subjective impression of how they’re feeling after taking the product for several days. They can’t say, ‘On a scale of 1 to 5, I feel better or worse,’” Blumenthal said.

Up to one-third of dogs and cats in the U.S. are given supplements, a government report estimates. Sales of pet supplements have roughly doubled since 2003, to nearly $1 billion a year in the United States.

Few high-quality studies have tested the effectiveness of animal supplements. The Food and Drug Administration says these products are not bound by quality rules for human ones.

“Many people presume that supplements are safer than drugs, but the reality is that there is very limited safety data on dietary supplements for horses, dogs, and cats,” the panel concluded.To see the National Academy of Sciences report on supplements for animals, click here.

Police shooting at a pit bull inside a high-rise New York housing project injured three of their own and the occupant of the apartment.

Police said a woman opened the door of the apartment, allowing the pit bull to charge out. The dog was killed in the shooting that followed, and richocheting bullet fragments slightly injured the woman and three officers, according to The New York Times.

A police department spokesman said that a sergeant and five officers had been sent to the Upper East Side apartment building Wednesday night after someone called 911 and reported an assault. The caller said the assailant had a gun.

The woman who opened the door, and was hit in the arm during the gunfire, was arrested. Police haen’t revealed how many shots were fired.

The most ambitious crackdown on dogfighting in American history has now led to the seizure of more than 450 dogs, with raids and arrests in eight states.

Following an investigation initiated by the The Humane Society of Missouri, officers from multiple federal and state law enforcement agencies made arrests and seized dogs in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas in what was ”the largest simultaneous raid of multiple dogfighting operations in the history of the United States,” according to the Humane Society of the United States.

“This intervention is a momentous victory in our ongoing battle to end the cruel, criminal dogfighting industry,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The HSUS. 

Pacelle reported on his blog: “Four United States Attorneys and a bevy of federal law enforcement agencies, along with The HSUS, The Humane Society of Missouri, and the ASPCA, raided multiple dogfighting operations, and seized at least 450 dogs, in what was the largest single day of actions against dogfighting in American history.”

The Humane Society of Missouri is sheltering more than 300 dogs —  mostly pit bulls — seized in the Missouri and Illinois raids. The dogs will be housed, cared for and evaluated at an  emergency shelter in St. Louis.

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