ohmidog!

Steve Martin wrote a song for his dog Wally.

You can download it for free here.

Now he wants a music video made of it. But being a busy, much-in-demand superstar, he doesn’t have time to do one himself.

“That’s where you come in,” he says. Steve Martin is inviting the public to create a music video for his song, “Wally on the Run.”

The best video — as chosen by him — wins $1,000. The only requirement is that the video have a dog, or lots of dogs, in it.

After making your video, you’ll need to join the Motionmaker program here, and upload your video here.

The deadline is Dec. 1. All the official terms and conditions can be found here.

Pet owners would get a $3,500 tax credit for owning a pet under legislation introduced by U.S Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan.

An NPR report on the legislation on All Things Considered Wednesday came close to taking the legislation seriously.

The bill  – dubbed the Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years or HAPPY Act — has been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee where, NPR reported, it will most likely die of neglect.

NPR reported that the bill’s sponsor declined an interview — even though he had no problem granting a lengthy one to Doggy TV.  You can see it above.

You can see the proposed act here.

Due to poor weather conditions for both this Saturday and Sunday, BARCStoberfest has been moved to Sunday, October 25th. Same time, same place — 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Patterson Park — and the delay allows those participating in the Strut Your Mutt walk to raise even more money.

Six-year-old Kayleigh Crimmins sold her toys on Craigslist to raise money to buy bullet-proof vests for police dogs in Newport News.

The Virginia girl received a well deserved standing ovation from the Newport News City Council Tuesday.

“I think she’s determined. I think she loves dogs,” her mother, Lee Crimmins, told MyFoxDC.com. “And there’s no end to this. She’s made that very clear.”

Crimmins who also sells toys donated by friends, as well as t-shirts and stickers, has made similar donations to K-9 units in Maryland and North Carolina.

Some of her donations have gone towards other safety equipment for police dogs, including a heat alarm for patrol cars that alerts officers to rising temperatures that could be hazardous for their canine partners.

Army Special Forces Sgt. Justin Noyes Blehar won’t serve jail time for shooting his neighbor’s dog earlier this year.

Blehar, 32, was charged with felony animal abuse, but the jury convicted him of misdemeanor animal abuse and shooting in a prohibited area after a three-day jury trial in Stafford County Circuit Court in Virginia, Fredericksburg.com reported.

According to prosecutors, Blehar shot a brown Labrador retriever that came into his yard on March 31. The dog lived with a family two houses away and repeatedly had gotten loose in the neighborhood. On March 8, Blehar’s wife called animal control after the dogs confronted her in her yard, and Blehar asked animal control officers if he could shoot the dog if it came back into his yard. He was told no, unless it was in self-defense.

On March 31 the dogs came into his yard again. He chased them away once, but they returned. Blehar said Zu Zu, the more aggressive of the two dogs, came at him and he felt threatened. He shot the dog twice with his Glock 9 mm weapon.

Prosecutors argued that Blehar was annoyed with the dog, not scared of it.

The jury recommended that Blehar pay a total of $1,146 in fines. The judge withheld the imposition of the jury verdict at the request of defense attorney, who requested time to file additional motions, including one to overturn the jury decision.

BAD RAP, the California pit bull advocacy group, invited Michael Vick to visit  eight of his former dogs this weekend when the Philadelphia Eagles are in town to play the Oakland Raiders.

Vick declined the offer.

BAD RAP (Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls) told the Associated Press on Wednesday that it extended the invitation through the Eagles to Vick last week.

Tim Racer, BAD RAP co-founder, said the group picked a location that would have allowed Vick to view the dogs from behind a window at a distance — thus satisfying the conditions of Vick’s parole that bar him from being near animals.

Racer said the Eagles informed him Wednesday that Vick would decline the offer.

“We understand Vick is trying to right his wrongs and is very interested in redemption, but you can’t find redemption without acknowledging your victims,” Racer said. “Making amends to the dogs themselves would have helped to create some closure for many of us, especially those people who worked so hard to keep them from being destroyed. It seems that Vick is not ready to go there.”

Oakland-based BAD RAP took in 10 of  the dogs that were part of  Vick’s dogfighting operation at Bad Newz Kennels in southeastern Virginia.

(Photo: Ernie was among the dogs seized from Michael Vick. He was adopted by Andy and Sasha Gibbs. Courtesy of BAD RAP)

 
As fancy as they are getting, dog parks really only need three basic things — some space, a fence and a source of water.

Kroll Dog Park in Bakersfield, California lacks the latter, and users of the dog park have banded together to do something about it.

The only water source at Kroll is located outside the park, and it has been repeatedly vandalized. A few dog owners took it upon themselves to put out water buckets, but they kept getting stolen.

The city of Bakersfield has said it doesn’t have the funds to install a drinking fountain inside the park, but a pet-sitting business is leading an effort among dog owners to buy one themselves, ABC affilliate KERO reported.

After hearing about the problems,  Fetch Pet Care is helping organize dog owners. A website, ThirstyKrollDogs.com, has been created and work is underway to raise $6,000 to have a water source put in the park.

(Photo: A dog drinks from the fountain at Baltimore’s new Locust Point Dog Park.)

As yet more proof that dogs eat the strangest things, a terrier required veterinary treatment after wolfing down one of his owner’s silicone falsies.

The incident — despite its vast pun potential — was straightforwardly reported on Dogster back in August, in a dispatch written by the veterinarian, Dr. Eric Barchas.

“Last night at the emergency hospital a nurse carried a five-year-old Terrier cross into the treatment room. She advised me matter-of-factly that the dog had consumed a fake breast three hours earlier.”

Barchas determined that the fake breast, while not toxic, would ultimately lodge in the dog’s intestines — the dog being only 15 pounds and the breast being a size B.

With only three hours having passed since ingestion, the vet decided to try to make the dog vomit. The clients authorized the procedure — and the vet forced the dog to vomit with an intravenous injection of a drug called apomorphine.

“The dog vomited copious dog food, a moderate amount of grass, several small twigs, an ear plug, some yarn, and a fake breast, size B,” Barchas wrote. Forty-five minutes later the dog was ready to go home. Barchas didn’t mention how much he billed the family, apparently heeding the Biblical advice:

“Beware of falsie profits.”

 
Almost two of every three pet owners prefer dogs, according to an online poll conducted jointly by the American Kennel Club and the Cat Fanciers Asociation.

Of more than 9,000 votes cast, dogs fetched 65 percent of them. The votes in the “pet preference” poll were tallied over eight weeks on the website meetthebreeds.com.

Inspired by the upcoming Meet the Breeds event, the world’s largest showcase of cats and dogs, the American Kennel Club and the Cat Fanciers’ Association  joined forces this summer to put an end to the age old debate over whether dogs or cats are more beloved.

While cats outnumber dogs by nearly 13 million among the pet-owning American public, dogs fetched 65% of the vote, with the widest margins of victory in Chicago, Seattle,  and Detroit.

Cats fared slightly better, but still beneath dogs, in Philadelphia, Houston and Baltimore. The city-by-city tallies can be found on the Meet the Breeds website.

Voters were allowed to present their arguments along with their votes. Here are some of them, according to an AKC press release.

CATS:

– Don’t hang all over you wanting attention … they don’t eat disgusting things and then try to lick your face.

– Don’t have to be walked and they don’t bark!

– Are  much easier to live with – with much less work.

Dogs on the other hand “walk around with a smile as man’s best friend and are always there for us.”

And as for a cat’s nine lives, one voter said, “Cats have to have do-over lives because they didn’t figure out how to have fun the first time around.”

Sponsored by PetPartners, Inc. a leading pet healthcare provider, Meet the Breeds will be held October 17 & 18, 2009 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. The event will showcase 160 AKC registered dog breeds and 41 CFA registered cat breeds in booths individually decorated to depict each breed’s country of origin, historical purpose/function, and attributes as a family pet.

More information and tickets are available at meetthebreeds.com.

Berkeley Breathed says the inspiration for “Flawed Dogs,” his children’s book turned illustrated novel, came from a photo he saw of a Michael Vick dog taken in by Best Friends, the animal sanctuary in Utah.

“The book happened because I came across both a picture and a quote at about the same time — a picture of one of Michael Vick’s fight dogs. It was set to be put down, but a shelter in Utah decided to take the dog and a few others at the same time and try to rehabilitate them,” Breathed said in a CNN interview at his home in Santa Barbara.

“This was the first time the dog had ever received any affection in its life. … It’s the most moving picture of a dog I’ve ever seen, having gone through an impossible transition and fallen back to where dogs naturally go, which is just loving people.”

Breathed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist behind “Bloom County” and “Opus,” has a pit bull of his own, Pickles, one of several dogs he and his wife Jody have rescued over the years.

In “Flawed Dogs: The Shocking Raid on Westminster” (Philomel Books), the hero is a resilient dachshund with a soup ladle for a leg.

The dog, named Sam the Lion, goes through many travails in the book, the opening scene of which is a dog fight. From there, he gets shot at, ends up in a research labs, and occupies some pretty bad shelters — before meeting up with his nemesis, an evil poodle named Cassius, at the Westminster Dog Show.

The book is intended for children 8 to 12.