ohmidog!

Coffee, a dog of many disguises, can be spotted outside the stadiums before, during and after many Mets and Yankees games. But what some New York baseball fans see as cute, others see as cruel, and one of the latter has launched a Facebook page campaign aimed at ending what he’s calling Coffee’s abuse.

For Mets games, Coffee is attired in a Wright No. 5 jersey, a baseball cap, and usually sunglasses or a Groucho Marx disguise, according to Gothamist.

She sits outside Citi Field, sometimes holding a pipe in her mouth, while her master, who places a donation jar in clear view, awaits contributions. The dog’s owner tells people the donated money goes to rescuing other dogs, training them, and finding them homes

According to Deadspin.com, the “Stop Abusing Coffee” Facebook page was founded by Jason Long, who works in marketing and social media. Long has provided photographic evidence to some media outlets of what he says is a shock collar around Coffee’s neck.

“The owner sets up Coffee two hours before every Mets game and stays until the game is over. Coffee does not receive food or water or any rewards. This is in spite of the fact that Coffee is forced to sit there in that ridiculous outfit, complete with a pipe in her mouth,” the Facebook page says.

“Coffee can do this because she is forced to wear a shock collar — that’s why there are so many bandanas around her neck. The shock collar is visible in one of the pictures … Her owner shocks her every time she moves. She is unable to take a rest or get the pipe from her mouth because she is immobilized.”

While Coffee’s master would hardly be the first  pet owner to humiliate a dog, exploit a dog, or zap a dog, that adds up to three strikes to me. If the final allegation is true — that Coffee is being constantly shocked – it’s time to call Coffee’s owner out.

(Graphic by Gothamist.com)

Tougher regulations on dog breeders go into effect in Wisconsin next month, and some unscrupulous breeders may be dumping dogs in an attempt to avoid them.

The Baraboo News Republic reports that, within the past week, two area families have found crates containing purebred dogs in their driveways.

And the Sauk County Humane Society says those dogs were just a piece of the bigger picture. The shelter has experienced a large spike in the number of purebred strays collected in the past month.

“It just boggles my mind,” Humane Society Executive Director Dianne Horlamus. “It’s wonderful, because they’re easy to place. But I’ve been in the shelter business for about 30 years and you rarely see that amount of purebreds coming in.”

About 75 percent of the stray dogs entering the shelter in the past month were purebreds that were not spayed or neutered. Ordinarily, about 1 percent are purebreds.

The new state law will require breeders who sell 25 or more dogs a year from more than three litters to apply for a license. State regulators will have authority to inspect any licensed breeders and, if necessary, order them to bring their facilities into compliance with state standards. Those who stay under the limits are not subject to the inspections and regulations.

Horlamus suspects some larger  breeders are trying to get rid of animals so they don’t have to comply with the law.

“We’re trying to get the word out that they don’t have to do that,” Horlamus said, adding that anyone can surrender an animal to the shelter free of charge. “We want people to be comfortable bringing us a dog. We’re not going to judge you.”

The newspaper quoted one breeder as saying there is “an awful lot of what we call dumping going on, and that’s just pulling along the side of the road and dumping them off, or throwing them over the wall at the local humane society.”

The breeder said others have given away dogs, or shot them.

Breeders ditching animals to skirt the new law, are violating another one.

Abandoning animals is against state law, and subject to a penalty that starts at $500 but goes up to nine months in prison, a $10,000 fine, or both.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection said the new law gives breeders time to sell their dogs and shut down their businesses.  “They don’t have to just set the dogs free,” she said. “They could have sold those dogs… They can’t blame it on the new law.”

Surf dog Ricochet is at it again — recently helping a woman with no arms go surfing off the coast of California.

Ricochet, who we’ve featured here before, was contacted via her Facebook page by Sabine Becker, who asked the question, “Do you think a girl without arms can surf?”

Arrangements were made for Sabine to receive lessons at AmpSurf, an organization that “brings the healing power of the ocean” to veterans and other people with disabilities by offering them an adaptive surfing experience.

Sabine is a survivor of birth defects caused by Thalidomide, a drug withdrawn from the market in 1961.  She was born with no arms, but, as she often says, ”There is more than one way of doing things.”

Ricochet has learned as much herself: Bred to be a service dog, she flunked out of training class because of her tendency to chase birds. Instead, the golden retriever went on to become an accomplished surfer who, with her owner, helps people with disabilities experience the joy of surfing, raising money for charities in the process.

Sabine was originally scheduled to surf with Ricochet last summer. But after driving about 1,000 miles from her home in New Mexico to a surfing clinic in Pismo Beach, she sprained her ankle.

She promised to be back the next year, and she was.

On a cold and dreary day earlier this month, Sabine and Richochet caught more than a few waves.

For more info, please about Richocet, visit www.surfdogricochet.com.

“Copperseverance”

Acrylic on canvas

By John Woestendiek/2011

Price: $1,800

Depicting man’s dogged uphill climb – the abysses he must cross, the spillage that inevitably occurs, and above all the Sisyphean, never-give-up perseverance that is at his emotional core (know what I’m sayin’?)  — “Copperseverance” is the first in John Woestendiek’s “Copper” series.

A one of its kind artwork, it is currently is on display in the artist’s home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but available for purchase (shipping and handling not included) because he can always just make another one and, because it was kinda fun, probably will.

It’s still two days from Judgment Day — by one evangelist’s count, anyway — prompting a question to arise, and with it some solutions.

The question: Assuming only humans – only believing humans — get swept up to heaven when the Rapture occurs, who’s going to feed their dogs?

The solutions: An insurance policy of sorts being offered by — among others, and with various degrees of seriousness — a New Hampshire man who says he has lined up non-Christian caretakers to feed and house the pets of Rapturees.

“I’m not looking to make a statement here,” Bart Centre, a retired retail executive, atheist author and founder of Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, told the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’m looking to make money.”

(We don’t believe that, and think he’s making a statement, too.)

The company, he says, hopes to profit from the May 21 Judgment Day hysteria, by selling 10-year contracts to protect pets from “a slow death by starvation in the event that you get raptured.” It costs $135.

Far cheaper alternatives are available, including one that only costs $10 and is offered by After the Rapture Pet Care, whose video is shown above.

Co-founder Sharon Moss says on the website that — though they got the idea from a joke — it’s totally serious.

After a woman in England, also an athiest, started a post-Rapture pet care website as a joke, Moss, a Christian, saw it as something that could be a legitimate and much-needed business. The company began recruiting non-Christian pet lovers nationwide to serve as post-Rapture pet caretakers.

Eternal Earthbound Pets, its owner insists, is also a legitimate business venture. Centre, who is the author of ”The Atheist Camel Chronicles,” says his rescuers – confirmed to have committed sins that will keep them from being caught up in the Rapture — will retrieve pets within 24 hours of the Rapture and “keep them as their own family members,” for up to 10 years.

Evangelist Harold Camping

The company was launched two years ago in response to the belief that, under the Mayan calendar, Judgment Day would occur Dec. 21, 2012. But it has gotten a boost from the prediction by Christian radio evangelist Harold Camping that — ready or not –the end will most assuredly come this weekend.

Centre says he has 258 clients in 26 states so far.

My question, though, is whether the Rapture is going to be dog-friendly — whether God, though The Bible doesn’t show dogs much respect, has come around in his view of them. Will all dogs go to heaven? Dogs being the least sinful among us, I would think that would be the case, in which case the post-Rapture pet care companies would have no dogs to feed.

Dog art — second-grader style — will be on display at Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter on Saturday, June 5, and then auctioned off to benefit the shelter.

The art was created by the second graders at Southwest Baltimore Charter School, who visited the shelter a few weeks ago and took photos of some of the adoptable pets.

After that they began working on their artworks of the dogs, using oil paints and watercolors.

All of the paintings will be up for auction at BARCS, and bidding will begin at 4 p.m., when the shelter normally closes.

On June 5, though, it will stay open an extra three hours for the exhibit, from 4 to 7 p.m.

Here in the waning days of Travels With Ace – it has been just about a year since we pulled out of Baltimore some 27,000 miles ago — our journey is going in a different direction.

Backwards.

We’re heading to the past, for multiple reasons.

One: Oftentimes you can get to the past pretty easily — without burning a lot of gas. Sometimes it can be a matter of letting your fingers do the walking through a dusty box of photographs, digging up that family tree your uncle once assembled, asking questions of your parents you never asked before, or getting in touch with a relative you’ve never met. While visiting the past we will, of course, continue to live in the moment (Ace insists upon it).

Two: We humans, in addition to getting too busy to live in the moment, also get so rushed to get where we’re going  that we fail to appreciate where we’ve been. And even though the pace of our travels across America was more full dawdle than full throttle, life before that, jammed as it was with deadlines and pushy editors, is in some ways a blur. Sometimes the only thing that slows us down to a reasonable pace – enough to appreciate life, smell the roses, all that crap – is our dog.

Three: Our travels triggered memories, many grown hazy. That, along with the return to the state of my birth, to the town of my birth, to the exact same house of my birth, has sparked my interest in how I came to be on the planet. Realizing that I probably know more about the heritage of my dog than I do my own, prompts me to put at least a little effort into investigating the latter.

Not long after I got Ace six years ago, I decided – because I was constantly being asked what kind of dog he was, and since almost everything about him was a mystery, from his age to his breed to how he ended up in Baltimore’s animal shelter – to find out what I could about his roots.

The result was a seven-part series in the Baltimore Sun about his heritage. In addition to being lengthy, it had a lot of those hanging thoughts set off between dashes — like in the paragraph above, and, hey, now this one, too — because that’s the way I think and because I like making dashes.

The investigation included searching records, pestering the shelter he came from, consultations with veterinarians, at-home DNA tests to determine his breed, wandering the zip code he came from in hopes he would be recognized, and even turning to an animal communicator — an attempt to get the story from the horse’s mouth, which in this case was a dog.

I learned Ace had been a stray, wandering the streets, spotted by a citizen who called animal control. He was picked up in southwest Baltimore and taken to the city’s animal shelter, where he was labeled a hound mix, and where he’d stay a couple of months.

I met him while visiting the shelter for research on a story about volunteerism.  Three days later, I was back to fill out the paperwork and adopt him.

I’ve had three DNA breed tests conducted on Ace — not so much because I was dying to know what he’s made up of, but for the purposes of that story, and subsequent ones that tested the tests that were hitting the market.

All three had slightly different results — but the breeds that showed up were Rottweiler, Akita, chow and pit bull (unless you are a landlord or insurance company or other form of breed nazi, in which case he is a, um … cat.)

Tracking down Ace’s heritage gave me more than just an answer for the dozen people a day who asked what kind of dog he was. By using methods scientific and spiritual — and neither of those is foolproof — the project gave me a better understanding of what made him him, convinced me that environment plays at least as large a role in a creature’s development as genes, and showed me that being pure of breed, unless you’re the AKC or a breeder, isn’t the most important thing in the world, or maybe even desirable.

The four breeds, all of at least some ill repute, joined together, in his case, to produce 130 pounds of gentle, mellow sweetness, enabling him to serve as a therapy dog for others, ward off evil humans by his size alone and keep me sane on the side.

I’m a mutt, too — the product of a mother whose roots are Welsh, a father whose are German and Irish, not to mention I’m a cross between a southerner and a Yankee.

Those are my parents at the top of this entry, youthfully frolicking it appears, in the yard of my father’s father’s house in Saugerties, New York.

Here they are again — not frolicking.

The photo of my father was taken while he was serving in the Army in Korea (and, yes, the typewriter is mightier than the sword, or at least it used to be.) 

The photo of my mother — though she appears to be multi-tasking before it was called that — is a staged one, shot to illustrate a 1950s era newspaper story about newfangled kitchen appliances. While homemaking was among her skills, she was not a stay-at-home housewife, but among those groundbreaking women who stepped into newspaper work when journalism was still mainly a boys-only pursuit.

My father’s parents met in Newark — the New Jersey one — when both were working at the laundry that my great grandfather, who immigrated from Germany, owned. They married and later moved to  Saugerties, N.Y., where they’d raise three boys in a big white farmhouse.

My mother, meanwhile, grew up in Asheboro, N.C., where her family dates back to Revolutionary War days. Her father owned a furniture company that, seeing how well coffins sold, made the transition to full-fledged funeral home and, later, a chain of them.

So, in one way of looking at it, I owe my existence to dirty laundry and dead bodies — those being the lifeblood of the industries that enabled my parents’ respective families to make enough money to send them off to college.

They both ended up at the University of North Carolina, studying journalism — a pursuit that traditionally draws its practitioners from those with egos too big and egos too small; people with a desire to change the world, or at least see it; the nosey, the gossipy, the terminally curious, the perpetually suspicious, and those who lack any truly marketable skills.

After graduation, getting newspaper jobs, getting married and moving to Winston-Salem — eventually into the apartment I have recently re-occupied — they had their their first child, my sister.

Here she is sitting on the front steps of the apartment in College Village I now sit on most evenings, writing on my laptop computer while Ace watches squirrels.

She was about three years old when my father got called upon to serve in Korea.

Upon returning from his stint there, pretty immediately as I understand it, I was conceived, in the room I now sleep in.

Not long after his return he was off again — one of  the journalists invited to witness atomic bomb tests in Nevada.

Unlike area residents and, possibly, him, I was not subjected to any fallout from that, for I was already forming in the womb by the time he left. While, in subsequent years, I would have to hide under my elementary school desk during bomb drills, I was otherwise unaffected by the Cold War’s psychological shrapnel, I think.

A few months after my father witnessed that spectacle, there came another one — me. For one year, I slept, peed, cried, spit up and crawled here in the apartment I moved into last month.

Being here hasn’t automatically rekindled memories. There is only the vaguest sense that I’ve been here before. The doorbell, and it’s actually a bell — you turn the crank and it rings — struck me as familiar. The first time it rang, I did a dog-like head tilt (but didn’t start barking). Was it stirring an infant memory, or just my imagination?

At the age of one, I’d be moved — temporarily — to Boston when my father was selected to be a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Instead of returning to North Carolina after that year, my parents moved to New York, where my father had gotten a job at Newsday.

After 10 years there — we lived in Huntington, where my parents would have another son — we moved to Houston, where my father would work at the Houston Post, and my mother at the Houston Chronicle.

Their marriage would implode about the time I was 12, After their divorce, I lived with my mom in Houston and later Raleigh, spending summers with my father in Connecticutt and Colorado.

I, like them, would end up at the University of North Carolina, and, like them, in journalism — and as a result I would see both dead bodies and dirty laundry, but plenty of joyous and inspiring things as well.

I, like my father, would have the privilege of getting a fellowship (a Knight Fellowship, at Stanford University), be involved in winning my newspaper a Pulitzer Prize (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1987), bounce around to a lot of different newspapers and get divorced twice.

From time to time, I’d wonder how much those similarities had to do with genetics, environment or simply coincidence – how far the apple fell from the family tree. (That’s it to the left.)

After about 35 years in newspapers, I left to write a book, and produce my own website. And a year ago, in a  rare show of spontaneity, I put my belongings in storage, moved out of my house and hit the road with Ace, to see America, and its dogs, and blog about it.

During those travels, we made some stops at places of my past — my grandfather’s house in New York, Houston, where our house in Raleigh used to be, and  Tucson, the site of my first real newspaper job — and doing so sparked a desire to remember more and learn more about my past, and about my family roots, whitebread as they may be.

Among the many things I learned, or had reaffirmed, on our trip were not to take my dog for granted, or my friends, or my family.

Since coming to Winston-Salem, I’ve been rummaging through old boxes of family stuff, reconnecting with relatives, and learning more about my family history and working on better remembering my own life as well — all those memories that got shoved aside to make room for new ones. For the next few weeks, we’ll continue doing that, including taking at least two more trips, the kind that do burn gas, before we wrap things up.

By the time you read this, we’ll be off on one fo them – a camping trip in the mountains where I plan to reunite with two college roomates.

A little further down the road, we’ll be visiting a battlefield and a cemetery and seeking to shed some light on this question:

Why, on June 19 (which is also my sister’s birthday), 1771, was my great great great great great great great grandfather hung?

Jennifer Aniston’s Welsh corgi-terrier mix, Norman, has passed away.

“He died a few weeks ago. He was an old dog and it was just his time,” a representative of the actress confirmed.

Norman was 15.

The death, according to the Daily Mail, came just before Aniston closed a deal on a New York penthouse, purchased in Norman’s name.

The former “Friends” brought Norman with her most everywhere, including television and film sets, and their relationship long outlasted that she had with the men in her life.

“He’s my baby boy. Norman goes with me on location – I’ve got to take Norman,” she said in a February appearance on the Chelsea Lately show, where Norman appeared at her side.

Even as a puppy, Aniston said, “he was as cool as a cucumber. He’s just a person in a dog suit,” she said.

Norman went missing for two days back in 1998 but eventually turned up unharmed at an animal shelter. Aniston also has another dog, a white German shepherd named Dolly.

When Aniston recently bought three units in a New York City condo, she did so under the name Norman’s Nest Trust.

Maybe I’m missing something, but this ad, which PETA says has been rejected by Lifetime, CNN, Animal Planet and other networks, doesn’t seem that over the top to me.

In fact, it seems an awful lot like the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) ad with Wendy Malick that has been airing on TV with amazing frequency — sad looking animals behind bars, plaintive song in the background, request for donations, free subscription to our monthly magazine.

PETA says it has approached many of the largest cable networks hoping to place its latest ad, which features actor and PETA honorary director James Cromwell.

In an email, PETA said the reasons they were given for the ad being rejected include the group being “too controversial” and that some of the video depicts animals being abused. Apparently showing animals that have been abused is OK, but showing people abusing them is not.

Even so, I don’t see clear instances of the latter in the new PETA ad.

Whatever the case, PETA will get plenty of mileage out of of being able to put the label “banned” on their ad — thereby assuring it a place in blogs such as this one — as they have before, including a Super Bowl ad in 2009 that it says was deemed too sexy for TV.

A University of Maryland organization called Terps for Animal Welfare is urging Prince George’s County to call a halt to its pit bull ban.

The student organization hosted Best Friends Animal Society staff on campus at the end of March — and since then they’ve been mobilizing to bring an end to a ban that critics described as costly, ineffective and discriminatory.

“The law has a lot of negative effects and not a lot of people know about it,” said Aman Chopra, treasurer of Terps for Animal Welfare.

Members of the organization are speaking out, contacting their county board members and asking them to change the policy, according to an article appearing on Change.org, written by Ledy VanKavage, senior legislative attorney for Best Friends.

“By clinging to its antiquated policy of canine profiling, Prince George’s has blatantly disregarded the recommendations of its own Vicious Animal Task Force, convened in January of 2003, which called the breed specific portion of the ordinance ‘costly and inefficient’ and recommended that the county repeal it.”

As for the costly part, VanKavage says, the county was paying about $68,000 to maintain a pit bull through the entire hearing process, according to old estimates by the county’s own task force.

Today, the county spends $1,137,720 annually to enforce the pit bull ban, according to estimates.

Canine aggression isn’t an issue of breed, she and other experts note; it’s a people issue.

If you’d like to sign the petition to end the breed ban in Prince George’s County, you can find it here.

(Photo from Best Friends)