ohmidog!

A 7-year-old mutt who went missing in mid-November from his home in Colorado was reunited with his owner yesterday after being found in Salinas, Calif. — about 1,200 miles away.

Nobody knows where Buster Brown was for the past six months, or how he made it from Boulder to Salinas, but that’s all water under the bridge, or pavement under the paws, as the case may be.

Buster and his owner, Samantha Squires, reunited at Denver International Airport Friday.

“I never gave up on him and I thought about him every day,” she said as she awaited his arrival. “It wouldn’t be surprising to me that he was looking for us the whole time.”

Buster, who Squires rescued as a puppy, vanished from her back yard on Nov. 19 while she was out jogging, according to the Daily Camera.

Squires said she feared the worst –  that a mountain lion might have attacked Buster. Three weeks ago, she adopted a new dog.

Meanwhile in Salinas, Peter Ochoa noticed a strange dog sitting on his front porch.

“He laid there staring at me like, ‘Are you going to take me in?’”

Ochoa approached Buster Brown, told him to sit, and then shook his paw. Ochoa’s family gave Buster some water and called animal control, and volunteered to take Buster in if a new home couldn’t be found for him.

Staff at the Salinas Animal Shelter found a microchip in Buster Brown, but the numbers they called were no longer in service. Instead the shelter sent a certified letter to the last known address associated with the microchip.

That letter ended up at Squires’ current address. She called the shelter and confirmed they had Buster, who had somehow gained 13 pounds during his mysterious absence.

Squires was trying to arrange transportation home for Buster when Frontier Air Lines offered to fly him for free.

Squires suspects Buster probably got a ride to California — otherwise, she calculated, he would have had to travel about seven miles a day.

“My guess is he lived in a couple of homes and was a stray toward the end,” Squires said. “People would take care of him — he’s just a doggy you want to love.”

A dog friend we told you about during our travels was put down last week, at precisely 1:45 a.m. on Friday, after some long goodbyes from his family — George and Kathleen, who bid him farewell at the vet’s office in Virginia, and their daughter Elizabeth, who had a final talk with him via cellphone from California.

Puck was six weeks shy of turning 18.

Blind and deaf for the past two years, with one eye surgically removed, and diagnosed with congestive heart failure, Puck persevered — and did so with dignity, despite the diapers he wore and the daily shots he had to receive.

On Thursday night, Puck began coughing and having difficulty breathing — his third such bout – and George and Kathleen rushed him to the veterinary emergency room.

After months of wondering how they would know when it was time, they knew it was time.

The veterinary staff sent them to a room where they could say their goodbyes. They hugged him, cried a lot, and fed him turkey breast. He wagged his tail. They placed a call to their daughter in California and held the cell phone to Puck’s ear as she said goodbye.

Elizabeth was 7 when they got Puck, and she came up with the name — as in pucker up — because he liked to kiss. She’s 24 now.

A neighbor offered them the dog back then, describing the pup as a poodle. He didn’t look much like a poodle at all. That didn’t matter. They raised and taught Puck, and when he grew old, he, as dogs will do, taught them a thing or two, by example.

“There are two things I learned from Puck,” George said, “and I hope I remember them when I’m old and miserable — patience and grace.”

Puck was toted upstairs every night, carried downstairs every morning. Despite all his medical issues, the suspected strokes, the epilepsy, Puck was a stoic little guy. He never whined.

Despite all the inconveniences, the diapers, the shots, the veterinary bills, neither did Kathleen and George.

Near the end, Puck didn’t do much more than eat, sleep and cuddle.

Still, George noted, “It’s amazing the void there is now that he’s gone.”

Rest in peace, Puck.

That decomposed animal body found hanging in a tree in Philadelphia was not a dog after all, but a raccoon — and it was likely abused after death.

But investigators are still treating it as a cruelty case, given the circumstances — the animal had a stick shoved down its throat and was found dangling from a tree last week in Philadelphia’s Bridesburg section.

The Pennsylvania SPCA initially thought the animal, which had decomposed after at least two days in the heat — was a dog.

“While the circumstances of the animal’s final disposition were very disturbing, there are currently no laws regarding the treatment of animal remains if they are already deceased,”  PSPCA spokeswoman Wendy A. Marano told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “However, the Pennsylvania SPCA is continuing to investigate to determine whether the animal’s death was a result of cruelty.”

“Going in Circles”

On a spinning wheel

Beasts circle, musically

Destination: Joy

 (Highway Haiku is a regular feature of Travels With Ace. To see them all click here.) 

Three Georgia shelter dogs – among 50 on their way to a New York adoption event — suffocated last week after a mechanical failure in the trailer in which they were being transported.

Staff from the Hall County Animal Shelter were taking the dogs to an event hosted by Best Friends Pet Care in White Plains, N.Y.

“We had a mechanical failure with one of the power sources for the trailer, but we were able to get everything straightened out,” Mike Ledford, director of the shelter, told the Gainesville Times.

The deaths were discovered when the convoy made its first stop on the 875-mile trip, a week ago Friday night.

Ledford said the dogs were among a caravan transporting 50 homeless dogs. A power system failure on a trailer was blamed. Ledford said the trailer was new, and checked before the trip began.

Dogs from overcrowded shelters in the South are commonly shipped to northern states where they have been determined to have better chances of getting adopted.

One of the dogs assisting in rescue efforts in tornado-ravaged Joplin is returning a favor to the community.

Exactly three years ago, Joplin residents helped raise about $2,500 to have a pacemaker installed in Molly Brown, a chocolate Lab diagnosed with a heart blockage.

The surgery led to a full recovery, and allowed Molly to continue her career as a search and rescue dog.

In recent weeks Molly and her owners, Allen and Alicia Brown, have been assisting in the search-and-rescue efforts in the aftermath of a tornado that devastated neighborhoods not far from their home.

After helping injured residents, Allen, a paramedic, Alicia, a nurse, and 9-year-old Molly spent the next eight days helping search crews recover 12 bodies, according to the Columbia Tribune.

Alicia also has been taking the dog to visit local children, as therapy.

“The community has been really good to her,” Alicia said.

“It’s always great to be able to help anyone’s pet, but in particular a dog like Molly who’s both a pet and a working dog who helps other people is incredibly fulfilling,” said Deborah Fine, one of theUniversity of Missouri veterinarians who performed Molly’s surgery.

The animal shelter in Joplin has rescued 817 animals since the storm, the Tribune reported, and so far 215 have been claimed by owners.

Everybody doesn’t love a clone, especially when it’s for dinner, and especially when it has been sold to them without being labeled as such.

But that’s what’s ahead in the UK, where the Food Standards Agency has approved the sale of food from the offspring of cloned animals, including meat and milk.

The policy brings the UK more in line with the U.S., where we’ve also gone from wondering where’s the beef to what’s the beef.

The agency’s decision is in line with government policy in the UK, which supports clone farming and clone food without labels, even though research shows eight in ten shoppers oppose the cloning of farm livestock, the Daily Mail reported.

A little more than a decade into the 21st Century, the day has come when you can have a clone not just in your doghouse, but in your evening meal as well.

Both have come to pass — and operate virtually unregulated in the case of the former – despite polls showing the majority of the public is opposed to cloning, be it for purposes of creating pets or farm animals.

As related in “DOG, INC.: The Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend,” pet cloning became a reality alongside the cloning of livestock — in fact, the first successful clonings of several species of farm animals came about in the pursuit to clone a dog.

After Snuppy, the first dog clone, was created in South Korea, dog cloning became a business, producing for customers copies of everything from Tibetan mastiffs to Labrador retrievers, from Pekingese to pit bulls, and loads of beagles destined for lives as laboratory dogs.

In the UK, defenders of the practice of cloning livestock argue that the offspring of clones are the same as farm animals produced through conventional breeding. They claim existing animal cruelty laws are sufficient to deal with any problems or concerns that arise. Both arguments have been made by pet cloning companies as well.

Accidentally oversized animals, while a concern to pet cloners, are not so much an issue on the agricultural side, where creating supersized animals is a goal, and would further boost profits.

The Daily Mail says supporters of the sale of food from clone offspring include Dairy UK, which represents the country’s biggest milk and cheese producers, the Food and Drink Federation, which speaks for manufacturers, and the British Meat Processors Association.

But, as in the U.S., some outlets — Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, the Co-op, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose among them — have responded to customer concerns by pledging not to use meat or milk from clone offspring in their products.

The FSA, which had argued that meat and milk from the offspring of clones would have to be studied to ensure it was safe, now concludes that there is “currently no evidence” that food from cloned farm animals and their descendants poses a safety risk.

At least 100 clone offspring cattle are being reared on farms in the UK.

As for concerns about ethics and cruelty to animals, the FSA said that’s not its department. Instead, that falls under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has ruled in favor of cloning.

Richard Lloyd, executive director of consumer group Which?, described the FSA decision as “a disappointment for the eight in ten people who don’t want to eat cloned food.”

“It’s vital that the FSA and the Government respect people’s desire to know what they’re eating and control the use of cloning technology in food.  As well as an approval process, we want to see a tracking system and clear labelling of these goods on the supermarket shelf.’

Emma Hockridge, head of policy at the Soil Association, which supports organic farming, animal welfare and consumer choice, also has a beef with cloning: “Not only are there insufficient long-term studies into the impacts on human health, cloning is cruel and damaging to animal welfare at all stages of the process,” she said.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has declared meat and milk from cloned animals safe to eat, admitted that it is probably already in our food supply and has taken no steps to require it to be labeled as such.

In other words, it’s entirely possible that– no matter what your stand is on the issue — you’ve dined on clone.

I’m not sure who knows best, the governments or the people. But sometimes I wonder if our beefed-up brave new world should be a little more chicken.

We’ve carried many a report on humans who have risked, and in some cases sacrificed, their lives to save their dogs, or to rescue dogs they’ve never even met from life-threatening circumstances.

But dogs, while they may be the animal we most often hear about being saved by a caring human, aren’t the only ones that bring out the hero in us.

Edward Gardner, of Naperville, Ill., pulled over to help a family of ducks cross a highway Monday night. He was struck and killed by a passing vehicle, WLS-TV in in Chicago reported.

As we’ve been pointing out in recent posts, it’s baby duck season, and humans can get pretty protective when it comes to ducks, especially babies.

Just the other day, a friend was telling me about being part of a crowd that gathered near a traffic circle outside the city of Baltimore to coax a mother duck and her babies out from under a stopped school bus and across the street.

Maybe it’s having lived 15 or so years in Yardley, Pa. — home of the bumper sticker “I Brake for Ducks in Yardley” — but my reasoning, old fashioned as it may be, is that animals, wild and otherwise, were here before we came up with motor vehicles, and thus should get right of way.

Of course, our world — particularly in places like Chicago — has gotten too fast paced for that.

Humans going to the aid of animals is a nice thing to hear about — especially given all the reports we bring you here of people abusing animals. It’s nice to know, if a little confusing, that, despite the of cruelty to which some humans go, when it comes to animals, there are others reaching true heights of kindness.

And it’s sad when, as is sometimes the case, those stories have a tragic outcome, like Gardner’s.

Police said Gardner died after being hit by a limousine along the Tri-state Tollway in Schiller Park. Illinois State Police say the limousine driver has not been cited.

“It was no surprise what he did, that he would risk his life to save another. That’s the kind of guy he was. Just an amazing spirit,” said his best friend, Jim Gollwitzer.

Gardner loved animals, Gollwitzer said, and working on cars. He was on his way to work on a vehicle he was restoring when he spotted the ducks.

Fellow members of his car club are finishing his car project for him to honor his memory, said Gollwitzer.

He deserves that, and more.

Feminist Germaine Greer says the way to save Britain’s bluebells is to kill Britain’s dogs.

“If you love your bluebells, kill your dog,” the outspoken academic said at  the Hay on Wye literary festival.

The phosphorous contained in dog feces is killing off a fungus, called mycorrhiza, necessary for the flowers to grow, said Greer, who owns a one-acre bluebell wood in Essex.

“…The real threat to our bluebells is not a foreign invader,” Greer is quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. “It is the use we make of the woodlands, people running through them, taking photos of each other standing on trampled bluebells.

“And, at the risk of making you all very cross, may I suggest it is also time that the British gave up on their endless love affair with the dog.”

Her comments came at the end of a panel discussion on defending “national treasures.”

A Kennel Club spokesman said: “I don’t think anyone would take Germaine Greer’s extreme and excessively anti-dog views seriously but we feel it would have been advisable that she used her platform to encourage dog owners to do the right thing and pick up after their dog to protect the countryside.”

Pennsylvania SPCA Humane Law Enforcement officers are investigating the death of a dog that was found hanging in a tree in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia.

The dog, whose breed was undetermined, was found by a man walking his dog in a wooded area near the Delaware River Wednesday evening.

“It appears the dog has been hanging there, in my estimation, for a couple of days in the heat. It is starting to decompose,” SCPA Humane officer George Bengal told WPVI, the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia.

The dog also had a stick shoved down its throat.

The area where the dog was found is a popular hangout for teens.