ohmidog!

 
There’s no reason — this weekend of all weekends — for you and the dog to sit around and complain there’s nothing to do.

For starters, there’s tonight’s (5 to 8 p.m.) Paws Fido Fashion Show, the last in a summer long series of themed, dog-friendly cocktail parties at Loews Annapolis Hotel.

Tomorrow at noon, there’s the official grand opening of the Locust Point Dog Park, held in conjunction with the day-long Star Spangled Festival.

On Sunday, just up the road from there, Merritt Athletic Club, 921 E. Fort Ave., will hold its Annual Doggie Swim at 3 p.m. Admission is $5 per dog, and all proceeds go to the Maryland SPCA on Falls Road. Door prizes and vendors will be on hand to make this a fun event for the entire family.

Also Sunday (noon to 4 p.m.)  is the Beagle Bash, sponsored by Beagle Rescue of Southern Maryland and held at Countryside Kennels in Owings. Admission is free and you don’t have to be a beagle to attend.

Meanwhile, in Cockeysville, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, Pets on Wheels will be holding its annual Dog-a-Thon, which includes a walk, demonstrations, contests, food and entertainment. The event, at Oregon Ridge State Park, raises funds for the non-profit volunteer organization, which provides friendly visits from volunteers and their pets to people living in institutional settings.

For more information on these and other events, visit our Doggie Doings page.

Coffee lovers in Fort Myers, Florida will get a chance to taste the rarest — and priciest — coffee in the world next week.

For National Coffee Day on Tuesday, Sept. 29, Bennett’s Fresh Roast in Fort Myers will serve Kopi Luwak coffee. The prized bean from Indonesia is eaten by wild civets, passes through the animal’s digestive tract and is collected and processed for brewing.

Often called “cat-poo coffee” — though the civet isn’t actually a cat – it sells for $190 a pound.

It’s believed that the coffee gets its distinct caramel-like flavor from being fermented by enzymes in the stomach of the civet.

“Sounds delicious, right?” said Bennett’s owner Bob Grissinger. “It’s been featured in Forbes Magazine, on ‘Oprah’ and in the movie ‘The Bucket List.’ I’ve always wanted to try it, and I figured our customers might be daring enough also.”

Bennett plans to sell small samples for $10 and 12-ounce cups for $20 while supplies last, according to the News-Press in Fort Myers.

The high price tag is a reflection of low supply: The average annual production is about 500 pounds, according to Bennett’s. Grissinger said he does not plan to brew Kopi Luwak on regular basis.

“At such a high cost, I don’t believe there is a regular market in our local economy for such extravagance,” he said.

The coffee is sold as caphe cut chon (“fox-dung coffee”) in Vietnam or Kopi Luwak (“civet coffee”) in Indonesia.

A children’s day care center in a Chicago suburb was also used for dogfighting — up until it was raided Tuesday, authorities said.

Three men were charged Wednesday, including the husband of the operator of the day care center, located in Maywood. Authorities were seeking two others, according to the Associated Press.

Nine battered dogs, four of them puppies, were rescued. Investigators found a blood spattered garage floor and wounded and malnourished dogs not far from where the children played.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said about 10 children were found in the day care center during the raid, but they were not in the immediate vicinity of the dogs.  The day care center was shut down Wednesday.

Pets on Wheels, a non-profit volunteer group that brings bring animals to institutions for visits, is having it’s annual Dog-a-Thon and walk Saturday at Oregon Ridge Park. In addition to the walk around the Cockeysville park, there will be demonstrations, raffles, food, a disc jockey, contests and vendors. The events run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information on this and other events, visit our “Doggie Doings” page.

A Superior Court Judge in New Jersey dismissed charges this week against a former Moorestown police officer accused of inserting part of his body into the mouths of several cows.

Judge James J. Morley said it wasn’t clear that the act constituted cruelty to animals.

Former Moorestown police officer Robert Melia Jr., since suspended from the force, was accused of repeating the act with five calves in rural Southampton in 2006.

But the judge, according to a Philadelphia Daily News report, claimed a grand jury that heard the case couldn’t decide if the cows were irritated by the act.

“If the cow had the cognitive ability to form thought and speak, would it say, ‘Where’s the milk? I’m not getting any milk,’” he said. Morley also pointed out that children seemed “comforted” when given pacifiers. “They [children] enjoy the act of suckling,” the judge said. “Cows may be of a different disposition.”

Judge Morley has a four-star rating on the website Courthouse Forum, where one of two anonymouse commenters praised him for “seeing right through the bull.”

Burlington County Assistant County Prosecutor Kevin Morgan was disturbed by the ruling, and the fact that the grand jury wasn’t allowed to view videos of the alleged incident, including one in which a calf allegedly head-butted Melia in the stomach.

“I think any reasonable juror could infer that a man’s penis in the mouth of a calf is torment,” Morgan argued. “It’s a crime against nature.”

Although a bill was introduced in 2005 to ban bestiality, New Jersey has not passed such legislation — one reason that the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office charged Melia with animal cruelty.

Morley said it was questionable whether Melia’s alleged crimes against cows, although “disgusting,” fit the definitions in the animal-cruelty statute. “I’m not saying it’s OK,” Morley said. “This is a legal question for me. It’s not a questions of morals. It’s not a question of hygiene. It’s not a question of how people should conduct themselves.”

Melia and his former girlfriend, Heather Lewis, were arrested in April 2008,  after a girl told her stepfather she’d been abused by the couple. During the investigation, authorities say they discovered child pornography on Melia’s home computer as well as videos of him and  the cows.

Melia and Lewis still face charges of sexually assaulting three young girls over a five-year period, sometimes in Melia’s Cottage Avenue home in Moorestown.

Let’s hope that case goes before a different judge.

(Photo: Robert Melia Jr., via Philadelphia Daily News)

The Maryland SPCA confirms that Cuji, a pit bull mix featured in the organization’s 2010 Oriole’s calendar, has turned up, unharmed, at BARCS.

Cuji, featured in the Orioles Calendar with Koji Euhara, went missing last week. Her owner, Brian Willis feared the dog had been stolen from his yard.

Willis, who adopted the dog in June, was notified that Cuji had been recovered, and identifed through his microchip.

The dog was to be picked up by its owners from Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter tonight.

A cat bound in duct tape was found abandoned in North Philadelphia, and a $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the conviction of her abuser.

“Whoever did this is very sick,” said George Bengal, director investigations for the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is headquartered in North Philadelphia.

A resident of the 2200 block of Edgley Street found the cat yesterday afternoon, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Nicknamed “Sticky” by workers at the PSPCA, the cat was sedated so the tape could be cut away and saved as evidence. She is reported in good health.

“She was purring while we were preparing to take the tape off, while we were getting her sedated,” said Gail Luciani, PSCPA spokeswoman. 

The PSPCA asks that anyone with information about the case call its cruelty hotline at 866-601-7722.

For all those who fret obsessively about dogs leaving environmentally damaging messes behind — not that it’s not a valid concern — here’s a story of a dog who’s helping clean up the messes we leave behind.

Sable, a discarded German shepherd mix adopted from an animal shelter, has been trained to sniff out illegal sewer connections, which dump billions of gallons of bacteria-filled water into rivers, lakes and streams each year, leading to closed beaches, contaminating fisheries and costing millions to clean up.

Scott Reynolds adopted Sable with the idea of training him to sniff out illegal sewer connections. Now, after a year of work in Michigan’s Kawkawlin River, Sable has earned enough praise to be top dog at Environmental Canine Services, the Detroit Free Press reports.

“In the mornings, he runs to the back room and looks to the hook where his harness is, as if to say, ‘Do we get to do this today?’ ” Reynolds said. “He loves to work.”

Sable is scheduled to do his thing next in Santa Barbara, California, then head to Maine next spring to help track pollution that has closed shellfish beds along the coast.

Sable sniffs water in drains and pipes — often buried in deep woods or under fallen trees — to detect illegal sewer connections. He barks when he smells raw sewage.

Sable also  has his own website, sablethesniffer.com.

Sable has an 87% accuracy rate measured against lab results, Reynolds says.

Normally, municipalities send human employees to detect illegal sewer connections — a bit of a guessing game, and a process that requires lab tests that can take weeks.

The dog was turned over by owners who mistreated him, said Autumn Russell of Mackenzie’s Animal Sanctuary, near Grand Rapids. “No one had any idea of his potential,” she said.

Reynolds, who has trained other rescued dogs for search and rescue and narcotics detection, spent more than a year training Sable to sniff out waste, ammonia and detergents that signal illegal connections.

(Photo: By Robert Domm, courtesy of Environmental Canine Services)

Dog trainer Joel Silverman’s brought his road show to Columbia, Maryland last night, where he took some jabs at TV trainers who see dominating a dog as a cure-all for behavior problems.

“When people talk about being the leader right off the bat, you’ve just opened the door to jeopardizing your relationship with your animal,” Silverman told a crowd at Camp Bow Wow in Columbia.

How a dog is trained should be tailored to the dog’s personality, Silverman maintains, and trying to dominate a new dog in the first 30 days — before you’ve earned its trust — can easily backfire.

Silverman’s appearance was part of a tour to promote his book, released this summer, “What Color is Your Dog?”

While Silverman’s dog, Foster, stole the show — that’s him above delivering a letter to the mailbox — the Hollywood dog trainer and author stressed that getting to know a new dog and establishing a trusting relationship is the key to good training.

In ”What Color is Your Dog?” Silverman breaks canine personalities into five groups — red (off the wall), orange (high strung), yellow (mellow), green  (timid) and blue (overly fearful). One type of training, he says, does not fit all. “All dogs are different,” he noted. “What works with one won’t work with the other.”

Silverman is a career animal trainer, having started at Sea World in San Diego, where he trained dolphins, sea lions and killer whales. He worked for more than 25 years training animals for movies, TV shows and commercials. He was host, of ”Good Dog U” on Animal Planet.

Silverman said 90 percent of dogs fall into the orange, yellow and green ranges of his color spectrum. About 5 percentof dogs can be classified as red, and 5 percent as blue.

Dogs in the blue and green categories need to be motivated, while those in the red and orange range need to be calmed down.

The goal is to move the dog through training practices individualized for each type of dog and reach the middle (yellow) level.

Silverman and Foster are traveling the country in a large bus for the book tour, to which he’s added stops at pet expos, dog training centers and doggie day care facilities.

He said he and his dog have traveled 20,000 miles since March, visiting 60 cities.

Add San Antonio to the list of cities waking up to the fact that allowing human customers to dine at restaurants with their dogs — outside, at least — is an idea whose time has come.

City Councilman John Clamp says council members could approve a dog-friendly restaurant ordinance as early as next month, joining Austin and Dallas on the list of Texas cities that have gotten variances from state law.

Texas law bans animals in restaurants — except when served on a plate — but the rules provide for variances when individual municipalities request one.

The proposal was pushed by John McClung, co-owner of the Los Patios, a restaurant on the city’s north side.

McClung — knowing it was a common practice in many European cities, and seeing it was catching on domestically in cities like Seattle and San Francisco — brought the idea to Clamp, according to the San Antonio Express-News..

“It’s separate and outdoors, exclusively an outdoor dining variance-type thing,” Clamp said. He emphasized that nonservice animals still wouldn’t be allowed inside restaurants.

The law would require a restaurant owner to seek a variance and pass a health inspection before animals could enter the property, Clamp said.

While several San Antonio restaurants already allow dogs in their outside dining areas, the new law would allow them to do so legally, and avoid the long arm of the Department of State Health Services.

A department spokesperson said the state law exists due to concerns that animals can carry disease and sanitation could be compromised.

Supporters of the proposal point out that humans carry disease, too, and that when dining al fresco, one takes certain risks, such as bird poop, car exhaust and cigarette smoke, not to mention the sun’s damaging rays.

McClung, who points out food wouldn’t be prepared near animals and that pet owners would be able to reach their tables without going inside, says he thinks dogs, in some ways, are better customers than humans.

“A veterinarian friend of mine tells me that the number of flora inside the mouth of a dog is about one-third the number of flora that are inside the human mouth,” he said. “We know that animals are kinder to their own species than people are. Name a dog that’s started a war.”