ohmidog!

A dog attacked yesterday by a neighbor wielding a machete is scheduled to undergo surgery tomorrow.

On Tuesday evening, a man walked into his neighbor’s yard and attacked the dog in the face and head with the machete, inflicting injuries that went all the way down to the bone, authorities said.

The dog, named Okashia, lives on the 3000 block of Wylie Avenue in northwest Baltimore.

While she lost a lot of blood, the dog is expected to recover, though vets were worried she might lose an eye.

Okashia, a shepherd-pit mix, was taken to the Emergency Veterinary Center in Catonsville, where she was sedated and given intravenous fluids. She was returned to Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter (BARCS), where she was expected to be evaluated by a surgeon this morning.

As a result of Okashia’s treatment, and other recent emergency cases, BARCS’ Franky Fund — reserved for the most serious cases of sick and injured animals — is seriously depleted, according to officials at the shelter.

Contributions may be made here.

Caroline A. Griffin, head of Baltimore’s Anti-Animal Cruelty Task Force, said that in addition to injuries to her head, the dog has been found to have bruising to her lungs. Because of that, the decision was made to postpone surgery for her facial injuries until tomorrow.

According to police, Levar J. Bailey, who lives several doors down from the dog’s owner, attacked the dog in her own yard. When police arrested Bailey, 33,  he was yelling, “The dog was trying to bite my daughter,” according to charging documents.

The Baltimore Sun reported that Bailey was taken to an area hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and that, according to police, he has a history of mental illness.

The two-year-old dog is owned by Shea-Quan Moore-Williams, who went outside after hearing the dog yelping to find her bloody dog and Bailey in the yard with an 18- to 24-inch black machete.

(Contributions to BARCS are also being collected this week at Captain Larry’s, 601 E. Fort Avenue, in connection with the ongoing photo exhibit, “Hey That’s My Dog!” Checks can be made payable to BARCS or BARCS Franky Fund.)

Dr. Phil’s not one of my favorites — nor are most of the others who appeared on his show yesterday — but at least the program brought the scourge of dogfighting to the afternoon TV talk show forefront.

In addition to Rescue Ink and Paris Hilton, the show featured Rob Rogers, former leader of a dogfighting ring who said “animal fighting has nothing to do with violence whatsoever” — even though he admitted to killing a “couple hundred” dogs.

He was such a moron that even Paris Hilton, by comparison, appeared scholarly when she came on the show to promote dog adoptions and said of dogfighters, “I kind of want to punch them in the face.”

Dr. Phil said on his blog that the show was intended to “shine a harsh spotlight on the animal abuse that still plagues our country.

“We’re not only going after people who think it’s perfectly acceptable to leave their pets cramped in cages with little or no water and blatant neglect, we’re going after those professional ‘dogfighters’ who diligently train their pit bulls to fight other pit bulls to the death and every other form of abuse.”

Boston’s six-year-old ban on pit bulls has proven to be “all bark and no bite,” according to a review by the Boston Herald.

While the city has issued tickets in more than 518 cases since the law went into effect in 2004 — all to owners who failed to register or muzzle their pit bulls, as the law requires – the vast majority of them (four of every five)  have refused to pay their $100  fines.

Instead, many of them have opted to turn their dogs over to the city, meaning that, in addition to not collecting the fine money, the city’s burdened with the expense of caring for dogs whose owners have deemed the expendable.

“It’s a disposable commodity, and they don’t care. They’re not good dog owners,” said Sgt. Charles Rudack, director of Boston Animal Control, which has no authority to force scofflaws to pay the $140,000 in unpaid fines.

Rudack said about 1,000 violators have chosen to turn over their pit bulls to Animal Control rather than pay the fine.

Pit bulls under the care of Animal Control are put up for adoption. Those that aren’t adopted or taken in by other rescues are euthanized.

City Councilor Rob Consalvo, who co-sponsored the pit bull ordinance — it requires pit bulls to be registered, muzzled in public and for their owners to display “beware of dog sign” at their homes — defended the law.

“We never said this ordinance was going to be a magic wand that would make the problem go away. What we did say is that this would be a new tool that animal control and police could use to get a better handle on what I see is a problem with pit bulls.”

State data shows pit bull and pit bull breed attacks in Boston increased between 2006 and 2008, from 25 to 46. But that trend reversed last year, when the city recorded just 30 attacks from pit bull and pit bull breeds.

Still, people like Donna Fitzgerald, whose Shiba Inu “Rocky” was attacked by an unleashed pit bull in South Boston in 2004, say banning the breed seems to be the only solution.

“I’m a dog lover and I don’t mean to sound cruel about a certain breed, but there’s just no place for them in our society,” said Fitzgerald, who now lives in Florida.

(Photo by John Woestendiek)

With all the trouble dog poop seems to cause society (see Poop I and Poop II), it’s good to know that free enterprise is on the case.

From across the pond comes the Dicky Bag, an airtight, zip-able neoprene pouch designed to tote your nasty sack of dog poop to the nearest garbage receptacle in a clean and odor- free manner.

The Dicky Bag was created by a husband and wife team that left the rat race in London and moved to Cornwall to find a better life.

Barry Davies was an advertising account director, his wife a theatrical agent and operator of a dance and theater school. One of the first things they did after leaving the city was get a dog, leading them to quickly learn that ” along with all the good things a dog can bring to a family they also bring a lot of crap (and I mean that literally),” they say on their website.

“As responsible owners we always pick up our dog’s poo but are often then left with the problem of what to do with it then. There’s never a bin when you need one.”

The Davies, decided to create a hands-free, odor-free poop tote. Living in Newquay, a surfing hot spot, and home to many wetsuit shops, they took their idea to a neoprene factory — neoprene being lightweight, semi rigid and capable of forming an airtight seal.

After some refinements to the prototype, they’ve introduced the Dicky Bag, which has an airtight storage area for full bags, a dispensing area for clean bags and room to store a spare roll of clean bags.

They call their product “the No. 1 answer to dog’s No. 2′s.”

Officials in the otherwise affluent Minnesota town of Edina say free dog poop bags will no longer be placed in dispensers at city parks.

The reason? Folks were emptying the dispensers only hours after they were being filled, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.

“People walk up and take them until they’re gone,” he said. “And it’s not just one isolated incident. It’s everywhere and often.”

John Keprios, director of parks and recreation for the city of Edina, said the $12,000-per-year poop bag program was halted at eight parks that formerly stocked the bags.

“I would have loved to have kept providing them,” Keprios said. “Financially, it’s not just feasible if they treat it that way.”

One wonders how much it cost to put up the signs notifying people of that at the eight parks.

(Photo: Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

A 68-year-old Danish man was sentenced Monday for rubbing dog feces into the hair of a canine owner who neglected to clean up after her pet.

A 41-year-old woman in Silkeborg told police she was walking home with her dog and a load of groceries when the man confronted her for letting her dog defecate in his garden.

The woman offered to go home, get a bag and clean up the mess, but the man was apparently intent on exacting revenge.

“He was really aggressive. He grabbed the woman by the hair, held on tight to her and rubbed the dog poop all over her head,” a witness told the Copenhagen Post.

The man received 30 days suspended jail time.