ohmidog!

A walk in a park turned fatal for a Florida man’s dog, which was apparently electrocuted last week when he jumped in a lake while playing fetch.

Victor Garcia was walking with his 6-month old Labrador retriever, Ruger, Wednesday afternoon at the Perrine Wayside Dog Park in south Miami-Dade when he threw an object into the park’s man-made lake for the dog to fetch,  CBS4 reported

After the dog jumped in, Garcia said, he began acting strangely.

“All of a sudden, as he got closer to the center of the fountain, he started screaming, yelping, bloody murder,” said Garcia.

Garcia said when he ran into the lake to rescue he too was zapped by what felt like electric shocks.

“I just couldn’t pass this wall of electricity and I had to watch my best friend drown right in front of my face, essentially, I mean that dog is my whole entire world to me, he’s the reason I wake up in the morning.”

Garcia didn’t require hospitalization, but his dog was killed.

Park officials say the fountain in the center of the lake was turned off, but apparently it was still sending an electric current into the water. Electricians have removed the fountain to inspect it.

Another dog, tortured by children, has ended up at Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter –  this once so emaciated it appears that the abuse came after a long period of neglect.

TJ was brought into BARCS by a citizen who found him being tortured by children who had tied string around his neck and were dragging him down the street. The witness, according to BARCS staff, stopped the abuse and brought the dog — subsequently named TJ — to BARCS.

TJ is a male whippet/terrier mix, about two years old. He weighed in at only 13 pounds.

You can see more of TJ, and the kind of comments his case has led to on the Facebook page of Helene Scharf, who is associated with Charlietotherescue.org, which helps find foster care for dogs in need, and helps transport them to new locations.

TJ, like Jellybelly, who we showed you last week will likely be taken in by a rescue organization.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has accused Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter (BARCS) of being overcrowded (which no one is going to argue with), unhealthy (which is debatable) and of allowing an injured cat to sit for hours before it was euthanized (which the shelter adamantly denies).

The criticisms are based on a complaint from a citizen and a follow-up investigation by Teresa Chagrin, a sepcialist with PETA’s cruelty investigations department, which included a visit to the facility.

Chagrin said a resident of Hamilton named Joe Lombardo witnessed the cat get attacked by a dog and called animal control. The cat was neither treated nor put down for seven hours after arriving at BARCS, he said. The cat arrived at BARCS Aug. 8, according to the Baltimore Sun.  When Lombardo called BARCS the next day, he says he was told that the severely injured cat was not put down until 8:30 the next morning.

BARCS officials said Tuesday that the cat was immediately evaluated and then euthanized.

“That’s completely wrong,” Debbie Rahl, the shelter’s rescue coordinator, said of the complaint. “There was no delay.”

Chagrin apparently had investigated BARCS before the cat incident. In July, she wrote a letter to the city’s health department, criticizing conditions she had either witnessed or been told about.

“Visitors to the city facility report that several rooms lined with cages from floor to ceiling contain cats housed in high temperatures while small box fans, apparently meant to cool the rooms, simply blow hot air around the floors,” Chagrin wrote. “I visited the facility on June 13, 2010, and verified the complaints. During my visit, many cats showed signs of overheating — the majority of cats were lying on their sides with their eyes closed and were breathing very rapidly. They had no interest in visitors and appeared extremely lethargic.”

Chagrin said Wednesday she’d received no response from the city.

Jennifer Brause, BARCS executive director, called the complaints unfounded and said the cat was evaluated and then put down, a process that took several hours. Brause said the staff and volunteers have increased the number of animals whose lives have been saved at the shelter by 60% over the last few years.

Revisiting my old south Baltimore haunts while I’m briefly back in Baltimore, I made a point to stop by Miguel’s Cocina y Cantina – partly because it’s on my shortlist of dog-friendly local eateries, but mainly for the guacamole.

Between their ever-so-fresh guacamole, cold Mexican beers, dog-friendliness (in the outside dining area) and its proximity to Locust Point Dog Park, Miguel’s is hard to pass up, though difficult to find.

Miguel’s is located on the ground floor of Silo Point, a high-rise condominium in Locust Point. It has a fair harbor view, especially if you like big gray government vessels, and a spacious outdoor seating area.

Earlier this week, after a play date at the dog park — on a day too hot to play much — Ace and his friend Bimini (who you may remember from our pin-up photo session last year) — went on over to Miguel’s, where, being nearer the water, the breeze blows cooler.

We’d issue a cautionary note about feeding your dog guacamole — avocados aren’t good for them — but it’s probably unnecessary. You’ll want to keep it all for yourself.

(“Dog’s Country” is the continuing account of one man and one dog spending six months criss-crossing America.)

Gotta love Dundalk.

It’s Baltimore at its blue collar, unpretentious best, and it’s where, as our wandering continues, we’ve hung our hat (and leash) for the past three days as we attempt to figure out what to do next.

Once again, we were in the home of an ex (no bridge-burner me) — a modest little house on a traffic circle, across the street from the Dog House, a  to-go restaurant painted highway stripe yellow that serves up hot dogs, burgers and greasy breakfast sandwiches that I eat on the front porch as Ace and his better-than-ever friend Fanny frolic in the front yard.

We sleep on the couch, wake up to the best kind of coffee (already made), take daily walks down to Bear Creek and spend most of the time on the front porch, writing.

Ace and Fanny alternately wrestle and rest in the shade, and Fanny always leaps up and runs along the fence when a motorcycle, boat on a trailer, or skateboarder passes by — those apparently being among her triggers.

We’ve gotten to know Brutus, a six-month old, but already huge, chocolate lab next door who likes to jump on (but not over, yet) the chain link fence, dangling his paws over the top rail and leaning as if to say, “C’mon over, let’s talk for a while.”

We’ve watched as the school buses roll by, and fresh-faced students head to bus stops, falling into the routine of another school year. One paused at the fence — a Mountain Dew in one hand, an open and half eaten plastic bowl of microwaveable macaroni and cheese in the other, her requisite blue uniform shirt open to display more cleavage than I would think her school would deem appropriate – and asked me for a cigarette.

“Fresh out,” I replied.

In Dundalk, people say what they mean, mean what they say, and wear what they want. If they’re feeling crabby, they show it (especially in the traffic circle), and if they’re feeling friendly, they show that, too.

Today, Ace and I bid farewell to Fanny and head back to the old ‘hood — South Baltimore, where I’ll stay again with my schoolteacher friends for a couple of days before heading to another friend’s home nearby for a few days more. She’s going to the beach, and her cat needs feeding. Even though her cat hissed at me the last time I fed it — and after I fed it, no less — I quickly volunteered for the job.

Our time in Dundalk has been peaceful, work-friendly and comfortable, but one shouldn’t overstay one’s welcome — especially with an ex, even if she is your dog’s number one fan and Godmother. For ex’s move on from the shared life and start their own and, painful as it might to no longer fit into it, that’s reality.

Like the signs say, one must yield to the traffic in the circle.

Name: Gotti

Breed: I’m not sure … Maltese, maybe?

Named After: John Gotti, the organized crime boss

Encountered: Riverside Park in Baltimore.

Backstory: It had been a while since I’d seen Gotti, who I used to regularly encounter at the park. The other dogs below, to Gotti’s right, are not members of his crime family. They do seem to be whispering something in Gotti’s ear, though. Maybe they’re his lawyers.

(Roadside Encounters is a regular feature of “Dog’s Country,” the continuing account of one man and one dog spending six months criss-crossing America.)

Thanks to an extended pool season, dogs will once again have a chance to take a swim at Baltimore’s Riverside Park.

Kids aren’t the  only ones climbing aboard the school bus these days in Miami.

Totally Dog, a day camp for dogs in southwest Miami, sends a yellow school bus to pick up its campers — and from what I can see in this video they seem to behave at least as good as schoolchildren.

Dog trainer Elena Sweet opened Totally Dog in 1999. Her husband Jeremy drives the bus. Owners pay about $45 a day for camp.

Names: Gus and Pete

Breed: Bouvier des Flandres

Encountered: At a jazz concert in Baltimore’s Riverside Park over the weekend

Backstory: Gus and Pete are father and son and live with their owners in Dundalk. Sunday night, they made the trip to the city, where – despite the heat and their heavy coats — both seemed happy to sit in the shade and listen to some jazz.

(Roadside Encounters is a regular feature of “Dog’s Country,” the continuing account of one man and one dog spending six months criss-crossing America.)

He didn’t bring her flowers, but when Ace met up again this week with his old friend Fanny, he did tolerate her — and to a far greater extent than ever before.

The behavior he once found so annoying that he would go upstairs to avoid her — where Fanny feared to tread — Ace seems to now find mostly endearing.

Fanny was a rescue dog, fostered by my ex-girlfriend, adopted by a family, then returned for being overly rambunctious, at which point the ex-girlfriend became her forever mom. If you ever want to pry them apart, I suggest dynamite and bulldozers, but I’m pretty sure not even that would work.

Highly spirited, we’ll call her — the dog, I mean –  and Ace, back then, would only put up with her in small doses. He’d be excited when she visited, and they’d romp for 15 minutes or so, at which point he would want a rest. Fanny is not familiar with that notion.

So she’d stay in his face, and follow him wherever he went, even into his crate, and bark at him when he wouldn’t play, and Ace would eventually head for the second floor.

This time around — the ex is putting me up for a few days in her sunflower surrounded home in Dundalk — he just keeps playing, and he has even added a bark to his repertoire, something he never did before. He’d make growly lion-like noises, but never would he bark.

Now he barks right back at her, sometimes instigates the play, and doesn’t seem to quickly tire of it — at least not yet. He hasn’t been seeking refuge on the second floor, but then again the second floor isn’t air conditioned.

I’m not sure if he’s just happy to see her again, or if he realizes he’s a house guest and therefore shouldn’t be selfish or surly. He is being both more playfully assertive and more tolerant, and I can only conclude that absence — as it visibly does with dogs, sometimes less visibly so with humans — did indeed make his heart grow fonder.

Funny thing, relationships.