ohmidog!

A stray shih-tzu in Utah got hit by an outbound train, and hit by it again on its return route, then was rescued and taken home by the engineer.

“I saw this little guy between the rail,” said Fred Krause, a Utah Railway engineer, “and of course and it was too late to do anything about it… It breaks your heart. But there’s nothing you can do.”

Krause’s train, on its way to Kennecott, struck the dog Sunday. On his return trip to Midvale, he encountered the dog again, ABC 4 News reported.

It was as if the dog were playing a game of chicken with the train, he said.

“I’m flashing the lights, blowing the horn, trying to get him out of the rails,” Krause said. “And he just ran right down the rails at us. I tried to slow down, got it from 20 miles per hour to 15 miles per hour when we hit, thought for sure we killed him.”

The engineer was required to keep the train moving, but when he got off work, Krause, who has a shih-tzu of his own, went back to the scene to look for the dog.

“I took my flashlight and walked down the rails and saw a heap of fur and thought this is it,” Krause said. “I shined a light on him and he turned around and looked at me.”

Krause took the dog to the vet, then brought him home.

“If he can get along with Milo (his other shih-tzu) we might keep him,” Krause said. “If we can find the original owners we’ll give him back. Or if not we’ll find a home.”

A dashboard camera caught only a slice of the action, but police in Fort Worth say the video shows an officer was justified in shooting a family’s pit bull mix on Easter Sunday.

The family, meanwhile — one cousin was hit by shrapnel — is outraged.

Channel 5 in Dallas reports that the incident began as a traffic stop.The officer stopped a pickup truck with unrestrained children in the back.

The driver pulled into a relative’s driveway, where the dog greeted him, then began barking and advancing toward the officer.

Just off camera the officer fires two or three shots, injuring the dog. Police say the video shows the officer clearly feared his life was in danger. The family says the officer should never have even pulled out his gun, pointing out that several children were within feet of him when he fired.

The dog, named Papi, is recuperating at a vet clinic.

Police say that, while it appears the officer was defending himself from the dog, they are continuing their investigation.

The Kentucky father whose 3-day-old son was snatched from a crib by the family’s wolf-hybrid dog last summer has written a book about the ordeal.

A spokesman for AuthorHouse, a Bloomington, Ind., company that specializes in self-publishing, confirmed to the Lexington Herald that the book will be published in late May.

Its mouthful of a title? “Could It Happen to You?:  Baby A.J.’s Story of Being Taken From His Crib by the Family Dog Dakota.”

“I think it’s going to answer a lot of questions about who we are,” said Michael Smith, who along with his wife, Chrissie, became the subject of nationwide TV coverage and news articles after their family dog snatched Alexander James “A.J.” Smith from his crib July 20.

Dakota, the female wolf hybrid that had a habit of taking objects from the house, carried the baby outside in her mouth, eventually setting him down in the woods behind the Smiths’ house north of Nicholasville.

A.J. was treated for a cracked skull, cracked ribs, a collapsed lung and a partially collapsed lung and returned home after several days.

Except for a small scar, he has recovered fully, the family says. “He’s a healthy little boy. He’s doing great.” Chrissie Smith said.

Michael Smith said the book will be a behind-the-scenes narrative of the ordeal that included his interviews with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Deborah Norville on “Inside Edition.”

The book, he said, will clear up any notion that he’s an unfit parent.

The Smiths were investigated for child neglect, but a Jessamine County grand jury found no criminal intent.

The family attempted to get Dakota back, but eventually consented to letting the dog live with another family.

The Smiths still have two dogs, one of them a wolf-hybrid.

WorldNetDaily was among those asking that question this week after reports that Jenna, a German shepherd whose owner admits she doesn’t like non-whites, was stabbed by one of the owner’s employees.

The attack cost Jenna an eye.

“The dog reacts to black people, Hispanics, anyone who is not white,” owner Paul Tocco, who runs a family-owned oil-delivery business in Yonkers, told New York’s Journal News.

One of Tocco’s employees, a black handyman named Andrew Owens, became annoyed at Jenna’s incessant barking, and reportedly ”egged on” the dog before charging at her and slashing her eye with a 9-inch folding knife.

Detective Ken Ross said Jenna, a four-year-old guard dog, was cut “over the right eye, all the way down to the socket bone.” Ross said Owens “never liked the dog. The dog did not bite him (Monday). It appears everything was done out of anger.” Owens allegedly had threatened to kill the dog in the past and claimed Jenna had bitten him last year.

Owens was arrested and charged with felony aggravated cruelty, as well as fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor.

Tocco says he never trained Jenna to behave that way. He said it wasn’t fair to call his dog racist or prejudiced. Jenna  just “doesn’t like minorities,” he said.

Your civil comments on this one, as always, are welcome. Can dogs be “racist?” Is the owner always to blame?  Might this phenomenon show up more in guard dogs, and if so why?