ohmidog!

Name: Dart

Breed: Chihuahua mix

Age: About 13

Encountered: At a Sunday street concert in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Backstory: Dart’s owners found him while they were living in Dallas. He was under some railroad tracks. They took him home and named him after the city’s transit system, Dallas Area Rapid Transit, or DART.

He seems to have it pretty cushy now, including his own little lime green beach chair they carry along to make sure he’s comfortable.

(Roadside Encounters are a regular feature of Travels with Ace. To see them all click here.)

Just a week after widely circulated reports of nails being found in cheese at a dog park — reports that mostly neglected to point out the incident happened months ago in South America — nails in meat have been found at a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, dog park

Lancaster police said two “large chunks of meat” were discovered Monday morning at Buchanan Park dog park, each loosely embedded with several framing nails.

Police said the meat was found  just inside the fence by a young girl and her father who brought their dog to the park.

The nails were “loosely attached” to the underside of the meat, according to the Lancaster New Era

“The dog wasn’t hurt,” an officer said. “It didn’t even touch the stuff.”

The investigation is continuing. Police asked that anyone with information call 717-735-3300.

A dog the city of Albany, Oregon, was planning to euthanize has disappeared from the kennel he’d been sequestered in since May.

And one city council member, who has been fighting on behalf of the dog, seemed thrilled about the crime.

On Monday, the dog, named Blue, was reported missing by staff at the  Albany Pet Hotel, according to the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Albany police said the perpetrator apparently broke a window and entered the kennel sometime between Sunday night and when employees arrived Monday morning.

“Bless their hearts,” said Councilor Dick Olsen, who had urged the city council to let the dog be retrained. “I didn’t do it,” he added. Asked where the dog might be, he said, “I hope crossing the Nevada-Arizona line as we speak.”

The Democrat-Herald said Olsen made the comment before heading to a Monday evening meeting about changes in the city’s ordinance on dangerous dogs.

Police said  the dog is considered dangerous. He allegedly bit a neighbor in July 2009, and, more than a year later, bit his owner’s grandson in the face.

Some neighbors described the dog — a Blue Lacey hound — as a menace.

Blue was impounded at the Linn County dog shelter on Sept. 12, 2010. A judge confirmed the police department’s finding that Blue was dangerous and ordered him put down.

The dog remained in custody as his owner, Richard Raymond, took legal measures to try and stop him from being euthanized.

A group of Blue supporters appealed to the city council to release the dog, but the council declined to take action.

(Top Photo by David Patton / Democrat-Herald; bottom photo KVAL News)

BARCStoberfest is this Saturday (Oct. 22) at Patterson Park.

K-9 demonstrations, adoptable pets from area shelters and rescues, pet product vendors, food, music and costume contests are all part of the free, day-long event, held by Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter (BARCS)

In addition, the Orioles bird will be there to promote the 2012 BARCS Orioles calendar and have his picture taken with people and their pets.

The centerpiece of the event is the annual Strut Your Mutt walk, starting at noon.

Participants may register for the walk at the event, starting at 11 a.m., or online, by clicking here.

The top prize for the walker who raises the most money is a trip for two to New York City.

In the pet costume contest, categories include most original costume, most Baltimore costume, and best dog and person look-alikes.

The rain date for BARCStoberfest is Sunday, October 23.

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk unveiled his latest cloning achievement yesterday – eight cloned coyotes, created by inserting the nuclei of coyote skin cells into harvested dog eggs.

The coyotes were presented to a wild animal shelter at Pyeongtaek, 35 miles south of Seoul, in a ceremony chaired by Gyeonggi province governor Kim Moon-Soo, Yahoo News reports.

The project was sponsored by the provincial government.

Hwang, whose feats and frauds are recounted in my book, “Dog, Inc.: The Uncanny Inside Story of Man’s Best Friend,” is a former Seoul National University scientist who was fired when some of his research into creating human stem cells from a cloned embryo was found to be faked.

He was also head of the SNU research team that produced Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog, in 2005.

I met Hwang in 2009, but wasn’t allowed to interview him, when I visited his private laboratory outside of Seoul. That’s where I took the photo of him above, after being invited to watch a dog cloning procedure.

By then, Hwang had left SNU, started his own lab and was cloning dogs for an American company that had auctioned off dog clonings to pet owners online.

The American company later went out of business, citing, among other things, animal welfare concerns and the relatively small market for dog cloning — it at the time costing $150,00 or so.

In addition to Hwang’s lab, another Korean company, RNL Bio, continues to clone dogs for pet owners, government agencies, and for medical use.

Hwang enjoyed international fame for a few years after successfully cloning the world’s first dog and for his research into human stem cells.

But his reputation was tarnished in 2005 when allegations surfaced that he had violated medical ethics by using human eggs from his own researchers. He was also found to have embezzled funds and faked some of his findings.

Despite that, he still had enough support to establish his own lab, in the mountains outside Seoul, where, while banned from further research invovling cloning human embryos, he was permitted to continue his research into canine cloning

In 2009 he received a two-year suspended sentence for embezzling research funds and ethical lapses in obtaining human eggs. Last December an appeals court reduced the penalty to an 18-month suspended sentence.

To clone a coyote, Hwang took cells from the skin of a coyote, and transplanted their nuclei into enucleated dog eggs. An electric jolt was applied to lead the cells to begin dividing, after which the eggs were implanted into surrogate mother dogs.

The first coyote clone was born on June 17.

The Gyeonggi governor praised Hwang and said further cloning projects were in the works:  “The cloning of an African wild dog is under way, and we will attempt to clone a mammoth in the future,” he said.

(Photo by John Woestendiek / ohmidog!)

In the virtual world, you can, with a few well-placed clicks, pick your house, your car, your clothes, your physique, hair style and persona.

You can go out for a night on the town, in the setting of your choice, looking for love, or a fight, or any of thousands of other adventures — all of which are under your control.

Or you can spend a quiet evening at virtual home with your virtual pet — like a Panda-chow, or a tiger-husky, whose behavior, traits, appearance and even species combination are all changeable at your whim.

The video above is a preview for Sims 3 Pets, hitting the market today.

At the risk of sounding like an old man (one can’t criticize video games or apps without sounding like an old man), at the risk of being told by countless commenters that it’s only a game (yes, I realize that), I find it bothersome (and I don’t just mean that annoying narration).

In a way, I find what Sims 3 Pets does with dogs and cats nearly as troubling as that dogfighting app that led to so much controversy.

It’s a reflection of the same wrongheaded (in my view) mindset that we can do whatever we want to with dogs as long as it (A) entertains us, (B) makes money, (C) makes our lives easier, or (D) is done in the name of science.

It’s that mindset that leads to dogs as fashion accessories, dogs being abandoned when fads change, cruel laboratory experiments, greyhound racing, dogfighting, puppy mills, over breeding and, yes, cloning.

It’s thinking that dogs and all animals exist to serve our whims — however fleeting, selfish or bizarre those whims may be.

“Lighten up dude, it’s just a video game,” you might say. “It’s just a fantasy.”

And you’d have a point.

But (A) experimenting with and exploiting dogs doesn’t just happen in video games; and (B) Sims is not really the target of my tirade, for the game is just the latest rendition of a recurring theme in our society.

Of course, if it weren’t for man’s self-serving tinkering, we wouldn’t have dogs at all. It was man that shaped the wolf into all the diverse shapes and sizes we have now — and I’m not for doing away with any of them.

But somewhere — at least in real life, if not in video games — all the tinkering needs to stop.

We don’t need tiger-retrievers, or panda-chows — whether it’s the result of creative hair-styling and dye jobs, or inter-species experiments, or cell manipulation.

We don’t need robot dogs, or gladiator dogs, or fluorescent dogs, or dogs so inbred that they are unhealthy caricatures of themselves, or dogs created in a laboratory from the harvested cells of a deceased pet.

We don’t need to reinvent the dog, redesign the dog, ressurect the dog or even fine tune the dog. It’s fine as it is, and much of man’s meddling — whether it’s to make dogs more predictable, produce look-alike, act-alike cookie cutter versions of them, or invent new versions that are low-drool or non-allergenic — is an insult to that.

It’s even more of an arrogant pursuit when you stop and consider that the species that probably needs the most work is us. Maybe it’s our inability to control what happens among our fellow humans that makes us so prone to inflicting control over dogs, nature, or whatever else we can.

Here is something I said before, somewhere: If there is even a remote chance of controlling something, humans wanted to control it, preferably remotely.

In Sims 3 Pets, players can create and control over a hundred different kinds of cats and dogs, and can breed and share them with friends providing endless possibilities to create “new and exciting” breeds.

One can customize the pet’s coat, shape, pattern, color; the size of its ears, tail, snout, eyes, and more. You can also choose their behavior pattern, traits and control their bodily functions.

Dogs can even get jobs and make money.

And most creepy of all, pets can be shaped via virtual interspecies breeding, resulting in skunk-cats and panda-chows.

(If you think mixing species, fluorescent dogs and cloning are too far fetched to ever happen, I’d refer you to my book, DOG, INC.: the Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend. They all already have.

It would be too much to ask, given that pesky First Amendment and all, that gamemakers refrain from virtual interspecies breeding.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow limit all forms of novelty dogs — and other bad human concepts like war — to the confines of computerized games?

Unfortunately, that seems out of our control.

Another truckload of dogs have been saved from being slaughtered and sold in restaurants after a standoff between a dog trader and animal activists over the weekend in China.

Two animal protection organizations paid about $13,000 to a dog trader in Southwest China’s Sichuan province to rescue nearly 800 dogs that were due to be delivered to restaurants, China Daily reports.

The deal was reached in the city of Zigong on Saturday night after two-days of negotiations.

The Sichuan Qiming Companion Animal Protection Center (SCAPC), a Chengdu-based animal welfare organization, and the Love of Home Animal Rescue Center (LHARC) in Chengdu raised the funds.

In exchange, the dog trader, Tang Daguo, has promised to give up dog trading.

Supporters were rallied after an animal activist saw caged dogs being loaded on two trucks in a village on Friday evening. One truck with about 500 dogs pulled away, but they managed to stop the second one.

The dog trader refused to release the dogs and asked for money. Eight dogs died in the cages during the standoff, which lasted well into Saturday.

The dogs are now being cared for by the SCAPC and LHARC in Chengdu.

A volunteer said most of the dogs are in poor health after two days without food and water, and some have broken legs as a result of being crammed in cages. At least two of the dogs turned out to be stolen from owners.

In April, animal activists stopped a truck carrying 520 dogs on the Beijing-Harbin Highway and, after a 15-hour standoff, paid 100,000 yuan to save them from being butchered and sold as meat.

(Photo by Chuan You / China Daily)

Thanks to a newspaper and a good samaritan, a Chihuahua named Boo’kie was returned home last week after the pickup truck he was in was stolen from a Wal Mart parking lot in Winston-Salem, N.C.

John Jenkins, a 67-year-old cancer patient who’d gone to the store to fill a prescription, spent two sleepless night after Boo’kie, his 7-year-old Chihuahua, disappeared.

The dog had helped him through the death of his wife, in 2009, and his battle with throat and esophageal cancer.

He and friends had searched all last Monday and Tuesday for the dog.

On Tuesday night, Vanessa Calvery, a personal chef, was driving home from delivering meals when she saw a Chihuahua standing in the middle of a road in the rain near her home in Rural Hall.

Calvery, who has two Chihuahuas of her own, stopped her car, bundled the dog up, brought him home, cooked him chicken and made him a bed in her TV room.

The next day, Calvery, who was laid off from her full time job on Jan. 1, took the dog to the Animal Care Clinic in Rural Hall, where she takes her own dogs, because one of his  paws seemed swollen.

One of the veterinarians at the clinic, Preston Roberts, recognized Boo’kie from a story about his disappearance that ran on the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal on Wednesday.

That story, by reporter Laura Graff, noted Boo’kie had one paw larger than the other, a result of frostbite when he was a puppy. The vets office called Jenkins, whose number was published in the story.

By then, Jenkins had gotten his truck back, after it was found abandoned. He got the call just after returning home from getting new keys made.

When he picked the dogs up, he saw that the animal clinic had given Boo’kie a new collar, and implanted a microchip under his skin.

“They done everything, and they charged me nothing,” he said.

Jenkins, according to the Journal’s follow up story, also by Graff,  had offered a $500 reward for Boo’kie’s safe return.

He tried to give it to Calvery when he met her at the clinic.

She turned it down.

(Photo by David Rolfe / Winston-Salem Journal)

A disabled Washington woman said thieves stole her bulldog and are threatening via text messages to torture and kill him unless she sends them money and her prescription drugs.

Jennifer Thomas, of Woodland, relayed the bizarre story to KATU News, saying “People have a hard time even believing it. I can’t believe it! This kind of stuff doesn’t happen in our lives.”

She said she saw a man and a woman in her driveway just before she noticed her English bulldog, Jaggar, was missing 10 days ago.

Thomas said the people who took Jaggar knew she was in a wheelchair, and that she takes prescription painkillers.

Thomas read KATU News a text message she received that said: “If you don’t do exactly as you’re told the next few messages will be of your friend slowly getting tortured to death. And do us both a favor, keep this to yourself, no cops.”

Thomas has been in contact with Cowlitz County investigators about the theft.

When her number was up — that number being 30 days — a stray black cat in the Salt Lake City area that went unadopted was placed in the gas chamber at West Valley City Animal Shelter.

Officials say the machine was working just fine, and pumped in the carbon monoxide like it was supposed to.

But when the cat, named Andrea, was removed, she still showed some signs of life.

So they put her in again.

After the second gassing, they checked for vital signs, pronounced her dead, put her in a plastic bag, and put that in a cooler.

But Andrea came back again.

“For whatever reason as time went on the cat came back to life,” said Aaron Crim, the shelter’s director of public relations.

The shelter workers decided not to try a third time. “It was just one of those things where they thought this cat obviously really wants to live,” Crim said. “Let’s give it a chance to find a permanent home.”

Andrea was cleaned up and taken home by Janita Coombs, a volunteer with the Community Animal Welfare Society

“She’s pretty tough, obviously,” Coombs told the Salt Lake Tribune. “She’s definitely got some will to live.”

Coombs is keeping the cat at her home until plans are finalized for a permanent adoption.

“When we first got her, she had some difficulty walking,” said Coombs. “When they found her hypothermic in the freezer she had vomited and defecated on herself, but she has since seemed to recover quite well … If you just look at her she looks perfectly healthy.”

No More Homeless Pets in Utah says about 30,000 animals were euthanized in the state in 2010; nearly 25,000 were adopted.

(Photo by Djamila Grossman / Salt Lake Tribune)