ohmidog!

Opening statements were made yesterday in the Missouri trial of Mary Wild, charged with animal abuse in connection with the deaths of seven show dogs who died when left overnight in a hot van last summer.

Wild, a 25-year-old dog handler from Arnold, Missouri, is charged with eight counts of misdemeanor animal abuse — one for each of the dogs she left in the van after returning from a dog show in Iowa last June.

Only one of the dogs, a Siberian husky, survived.

Defense attorney Brad Dede said he would show that “all reasonable and legal precautions” were taken to ensure the safety of the dogs and that his client is not guilty of a crime, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Authorities say the temperature inside the van could have reached 120 degrees.

Animal abuse is a Class A misdemeanor in Missouri, and the maximum penalty is up to a year in jail and a fine up to $1,000.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and family have put down Lady, the golden retriever they took in 10 years ago, when O’Malley was mayor of Baltimore.

Lady, who had been on medication for the past three years for a bad hip, was recently diagnosed with cancer, at 13.

The governor took the dog to a vet last month, after she became unable to climb the stairs to the bedroom, where she commonly slept on the floor on the governor’s side of the bed.

He shared the diagnosis with his wife, District Court Judge Katie O’Malley, who was at a conference in Russia.

They discussed waiting until the first lady’s return five days later but decided against that.  Lady was put down the following day, May 14.

“It would have been unfair to Lady,” Katie O’Malley told the Baltimore Sun. “Martin had to go all by himself and hold her in his arms while she went to sleep. It was very, very sad for the kids.”

Lady, whose image graced state highway maps and the governor’s Christmas cards, was taken in by the O’Malley family ten years ago when her owner, a friend of a friend, had to giver her up due to health problems.

But the governor’s mansion is still home to Rex, a cocker spaniel; Winston, a Yorkshire terrier-poodle mix; and two cats.

Miss Ellie, a Chinese Crested who won the 2009 World’s Ugliest Dog Competition, has passed away at 17, but her legacy will live on.

Miss Ellie appeared on The Animal Planet show, “Dogs 101,” was featured on Fox News, seen on billboards and a commercial, captured the ugliest dog contest at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in northern California and was the star dog at The Comedy Barn Theater in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

She was rescued when she was 7 years old and brought to live with her owner, Dawn Goehring, and 13 other rescue dogs. In her final days, Miss Ellie was continually working on raising awareness and money for rescue animals, according to the Asheville Citizen-Times.

She was entered in the 2010 World’s Ugliest Dog contest at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, and had planned to travel to California next month to compete one more time.

She was also serving as the mascot behind an effort to raise $1 million dollars for the Sevier County Humane Society.

The goal of  “Miss Ellie’s Mission” was to build a new shelter. The current animal shelter was built to hold 1,000 animals a year. It now holds about 5,000. Pigeon Forge Mayor Keith Whaley proclaimed Nov. 12, 2009 as “Miss Ellie Day” in Pigeon Forge for her efforts.

Miss Ellie had been named both the ugliest dog and the cutest, winning a 2009 contest sponsored by the All-American Dog Food Pet Brand. She came out top in online voting, over 60,000 other dogs.

Condolences can be sent to The Comedy Barn Theater at 2775 Parkway, Pigeon Forge, Tenn. 37863, or e-mailed to ComedyBarn@aol.com.

Lou Reed and his wife Laurie Anderson are planning a concert for dogs this month in Australia — one that will be fully audible only to canine ears.

Music for Dogs,  a “high-frequency concert” for canines, will be held outside the Sydney Opera House during the Vivid Live festival. It’s being billed as “an inter-species social gathering on a scale never seen before in Australia,” the BBC reports.

The couple said they have experience making music for at least one dog- – their rat terrier, Lollabelle. “She likes things with a lot of smoothness but with beats in them,” Anderson said.

She said the inspiration for the performance came while she was backstage at an event and thought: “Wouldn’t it be great, if you were playing a concert and you look out and you see all dogs?”

The show will last for 20 minutes as she says “dogs don’t have a giant concentration span.”

Does what you name a dog shape that dog’s personality? Will “Killer” turn out to be one? Of course not. Dogs, or for that matter, people, don’t always live up to their names, which is fortunate for Young Boozer.

It was while driving through Alabama last week that I first became aware — through a campaign ad on the radio — of Young Boozer, a former banker who is running for state treasurer.

I started scouting for his campaign signs, but, amid the thousands of candidate signs stuck in the ground last week, I couldn’t find one bearing his name, which is just as well because I would have been tempted to take it.

I did find his campaign ad online though (above), which ends with the tagline: “Funny name, serious leadership.”

Today, we’re happy to report that Young Boozer’s name didn’t hold him down. He won the Republican primary over another name that may ring some bells: George Wallace Jr.

 Young Boozer captured 64 percent of the vote in the primary, the Gadsden Times reports.

Young Boozer– he’s actually Young Boozer III, meaning there were two other Young Boozers before him — will face Democratic candidate Charley Grimsley in the general election.

Actor Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley on the hit series Lost, has reported the death of his Chihuahua, named Nunu.

Nunu was struck by a car and died in his arms, Garcia wrote Monday on his blog, “Dispatches from the Island.”

Garcia, according to People magazine, frequently chronicled the adventures of Nunu, purchased from a pet store in Hawaii five years ago.

“We are burying her in the Pet Garden at Valley of the Temple in Kaneohe,” Garcia wrote. “Nunu hated the water so we couldn’t bring ourselves to having her ashes scattered in the ocean. Three months from now you’ll be able to find a bronze plaque inscribed with just her name there. If you’d like to leave a flower or a toy, I’m sure she’d love it.”

A French study says dogs can sniff out signs of prostate cancer in human urine — a finding that could lead to better cancing-sensing technology, according to its lead author.

While some scientists have questioned similar reports of dogs with such diagnostic powers in recent years, French researcher Jean-Nicolas Cornu, who works at Hospital Tenon in Paris, said, “The dogs are certainly recognizing the odor of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells.”

Researchers don’t know what that molecule is,  according to U.S. News & World Report, but the study’s findings could prove useful in the detection of cancer, which often goes undetected until it is too late to treat.

Urine tests can turn up signs of prostate cancer, Cornu said, but miss some cases.

In the study, two researchers spent a year training a Belgian Malinois, a breed already used to detect drugs and bombs.

The dog was trained to differentiate between urine samples from men with prostate cancer and men without. Ultimately, researchers placed groups of five urine samples in front of the dog to see if it could identify the sole sample from a man with prostate cancer. The dog correctly classified 63 out of 66 specimens.

If the findings hold up in other studies, they’ll be “pretty impressive,” said urologist Dr. Anthony Y. Smith, who was to moderate a discussion on the findings Tuesday at the American Urological Association annual meeting in San Francisco.

Baltimore residents Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson Fleisher will perform together Friday night at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in a benefit concert for The Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS).

The internationally-renowned pianists will be performing spring favorites by Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, and Schumann.

Tickets are available at $35, $50, $75 and $125 at BaltimoreAnimalShelter.org. The $125 tickets include premium seating and a reception with the artists.

The concert takes place at 8 p.m. and will be preceded by a silent auction at 6:30 p.m. The silent auction features 50 items including a piano lesson taught by Leon Fleisher, a week at a country house in France, a Pandora bracelet from Smyth Jewelry, original artwork and gift baskets from Baltimore area retailers.

BARCS is a non-profit organization created in 2005 to manage the Baltimore City animal shelter. BARCS provides shelter, food, and medical attention to over 400 animals daily.

Leon Fleisher was the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors award presented in 2007 by President George W. Bush. His wife, Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, is a soloist, duo-pianist and chamber musician who has received international critical acclaim for her talents.

Gabriel, a Weimaraner who helped thousands of people in his ten years as a therapy dog, passed away recently in Arizona.

Since his death, the Arizona Republic reports, his owners have received about 400 e-mails, stacks of cards, floral arrangements and 1,000 new followers on Twitter.

The responses came within a day of the news that a second bout of cancer had ended his life, at age 11.

Gabriel inspired the founding of Gabriel’s Angels, a non-profit organization that today has 150 dogs and their human partners providing help to kids in Phoenix and Tucson.

“If it wasn’t for him, there wouldn’t be a Gabriel’s Angels,” says Pam Gaber, who adopted Gabriel on Jan. 1, 1999, from a Gilbert family.

Gaber was volunteering at Crisis Nursery in Phoenix, an agency dedicated to stopping child abuse and neglect. Children were so entertained by stories of her dog’s antics, she decided he should visit with her.

The pup made his first appearance there dressed as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

“If he had acted like a typical Weimaraner, which would have been, ‘I ain’t doing that,’ that would have been the end of it,” Gaber says. “But he walked in like, ‘Here I am!’ And because of that, Gabe started a revolution of therapy dogs helping kids.”

Gabriel’s Angels was founded in May 2000. Certified owner-pet teams (including one cat) began volunteering with Pam and Gabe. Now the agency each year helps about 13,000 kids through age 18 in more than 100 facilities, including shelters, schools, treatment centers and recreation programs.

The dog answered to English, Spanish and sign language. But it was his gentle ways the kids responded to most, learning from him and Gaber how to be gentle in return.

“Kids who were normally angry were loving and soft and kind with Gabe,” Gaber says. “He went to every single kid and said, ‘You rock. You’re a great kid.’ And the wall came down.”

In January, four months after the cancer returned, Gabriel retired as a therapy dog. Unwilling to let him suffer, Pam and Michael Gaber called a veterinarian, who came to their house on May 17 to euthanize him.

A popular dog park in Aurora, Colorado has been shut down after an increase in dogs being bitten by rattlesnakes.

The decision was made to close the Great Plains Dog Park off Jewel Avenue earlier this month after two dogs were bitten.

Veterinarians in the Denver metro area say they saw an unusually high number of dogs bitten by rattlesnakes in May.

The closure of the Great Plains Dog Park is temporary until the city decides how to make the park safer, CBS4 in Denver reported.

“You just have to be cautious and keep your dogs near you enough and hope that they are smart enough that if they see a snake they’ll not tempt fate,” dog owner Skip Stewart said.

When a dog sees a snake, it’s recommended for the owner to call the dog and try to back away slowly. People or dogs bitten by rattlers should get medical attention as quickly as possible.

CBS4 said there are reports that some local veterinarians are running out of the anti-venom medicines.