ohmidog!

Offspring of Snuppy — the world’s first cloned dog — are being offered to the public by Seoul National University, where Snuppy was created in 2005.

The Korea Times reports that applications are being accepted, and the nine puppies will be given to good homes at no charge.

The puppies aren’t clones themselves, but are the offspring of Snuppy and two female Afghans that were cloned at SNU to serve as his girlfriends, and for research purposes — namely to determine whether two cloned dogs can produce pups the natural way, or at least through artificial insemination.

Snuppy became a father in May last year after impregnating the two female clones, named Bona and Hope. It was the world’s first successful breeding involving only cloned canines. One of the 10 puppies died after birth, but the remaining nine — six males and three females — remain healthy.

Lee Byeong-chun, one of the leaders of the team that created Snuppy, said the school will take online applications until Oct. 31 and offer the puppies to  pet owners for free after a screening process. Each dog will be spayed or neutered.

“We will look through the applications and give the dogs to owners who we believe are most capable of raising them,” Lee said.

Lee’s team used artificial insemination to impregnate the two cloned Afghan hound females with Snuppy’s sperm last year.

Lee collaborated with now-disgraced gene scientist Hwang Woo-suk in the creation of Snuppy in 2005. Hwang was fired from SNU in the following year after his work on cloned human stem cells was exposed as fraudulent.

Since then, both men have continued to clone dogs — Lee at SNU and Hwang at a private facility he opened outside Seoul in 2007.

Lee had also announced plans to mate the world’s first cloned wolf, born in 2006, with other cloned wolves. Those plans took a blow earlier this week when the world’s first cloned wolf, Snuwolf, was found dead in a Seoul zoo.

(Photo: By John Woestendiek)

How do you get a 120-pound mastiff out of the bottom of a narrow 30-foot well?

You crawl down it — even knowing the dog’s name is “Kujo” — harness him up with rope, and get everybody to help pull.

In Suitland, Md. last Friday, Prince George’s County firefighter Travis Lambert was lowered into the well to rescue Daniel Ellis’ dog. The two men, and Kujo, appeared on the Today Show Tuesday.

Apparently Kujo had climbed under the deck to seek shelter from the rain and fell through a piece of rotting plywood covering a defunct well. Police were called. They determined it was a job for the fire department, who in turn called on the department’s rescue team.

Rescuers set up a pulley system to haul the dog out of the well. Lambert said he was in the well for about 15 minutes and that Kujo was cooperative.

A little more than four hours after falling down the hole, Kujo was brought back to ground level amid cheers from rescue crew and onlookers. Kujo, the Today Show reported, didn’t go to his owner first — instead he climbed on Lambert and gave him a big lick.

A California dog owner is offering a $3,000 reward for the return of her two pit bull puppies.

The two 10-week-old pups, named Chocolate and Ashley, disappeared from the backyard of Fair Norton’s home in Hayward Aug. 12, according to the Oakland Tribune. Norton suspects they went through a hole in the fence.

A pet detective, hired for $600, used a bloodhound to determine the pups had followed a creek bed into a quarry. But the trail ended there.

“I just have a feeling that somebody has them,” Norton said. “If something happened to them, we would have seen something … someone would have found a dead dog.”

Norton said the dogs were early wedding gifts from a cousin who owns the puppies’ parents.

Chocolate is brown and white, with green and hazel eyes and a brown and pink spotted nose. He has a brown leather studded collar. Ashley is gray and white, with steel gray eyes and a black leather collar. Both have white-tipped tails.

Anyone with information may call Norton at 323-384-1640 or 209-834-4317.