ohmidog!

Since June of this year, four large scale dog breeding operations in North Carolina have been busted and more than 500 dogs seized as a result.

While that may sound like the state is making some gains in the fight against puppy mills, it raises another possibility as well.

Are tough new puppy mill laws in surrounding states leading unscrupulous breeders to move their operations to North Carolina, where the laws are more lax?

A recent investigation by NBC 17  asked that question — even if it didn’t entirely nail down the answer.

Since June 1, the report says, puppy mill busts have taken place in Hertford, where 86 dogs were seized; in Zebulon (25 dogs seized); Lincoln County (about 135 dogs); and in Caldwell County (276 dogs).

And while no documentation is provided that those breeders had fled to North Carolina from other states, Kim Alboum, the Humane Society’s state director, says it is happening.

“There are approximately 19 states that now have some level of regulations for commercial dog breeders, whether it’s licensing or standards,” she said. “And around North Carolina, we now have Virginia [that] has passed regulation. So we are seeing some breeders coming down to North Carolina from Virginia.”

Alboum says she has also seen breeders migrate from Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

She blames current North Carolina laws that fail to set high enough standards for breeding operations. So does Pricey Harrison, a state representative who tried to get puppy mill legislation passed last year.

“Apparently our neighboring states have pretty decent laws in place to prevent animal cruelty and protect animal purchasers from these puppy mills,” Harrison said. “We don’t, so we’re apparently a magnet for these dog breeders.”

Harrison sponsored a puppy mill bill in the 2009-10 legislative session that passed the House but died in the Senate. She said the bill was opposed by the Pork Council, the Farm Bureau, the American Kennel Club and the NRA.

“Every time we have animal cruelty legislation, it’s the same players that arise in opposition. It’s a combination of campaign money and membership pressure.”

Senate President Pro-Temp Phil Berger, who voted against the bill, says the wording of the proposed puppy mill law was too vague, and that it could have had unintended consequences on other industries.

No new puppy mill bills have been introduced, although the state did act to allow local governments to pass breeding regulation laws, such as one recently adopted in Guilford County.

A dachshund mix who police thought might have been fed LSD by his owners turned out not to have drugs in his system.

The dog was hit by car, and later had to be euthanized.

Necropsy results show Oscar had a broken back, but his body showed no traces of drugs, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Police in Snellville, Ga., arrested the dog’s owners after complaints that they were running naked through their neighborhood on Oct. 29. Officers said the couple told them they had taken LSD and also given some to their dog, who was missing.

Nicholas Modrich and Jamie Hughes, both 25, are awaiting trial on drug charges.

(Photo: Channel 2 Action News)

Yet another report of jealousy-induced dog abuse has come to light — this one in Austin, where a woman is alleged to have repeatedly slammed her boyfriend’s 12-year-old shih tzu to the ground.

About a week ago, we told you about Patrick Caleb Land, who was sentenced in San Diego to five years in prison for beating his girlfriend’s three dogs to death because, he said, he was jealous of them.

Just three days after that, police in Austin responded to a report of a couple arguing and arrested Maria Martinez on a charge of cruelty to animals.

She’s accused of taking her boyfriend’s dog, Chase, a shih tzu mix, from his truck and throwing him into a Dumpster, KXAN reported.

She then climbed into the Dumpster, according to the boyfriend, lifted the dog above her head and threw him to the ground.

The dog’s owner also told police that Martinez poured bleach into Chase’s dog’s food in an attempt to poison the dog.

According to police, Martinez admitted that she and her boyfriend had argued all day and told officers she was mad and jealous of the dog.

Chase was being treated for his injuries.

Leave it to the Sun to melt the Snowman.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Frosty the Snowman — so rudely removed from the Chestertown Christmas parade — has a history of tangling with police, and that Saturday’s arrest, after he allegedly kicked at a police dog and butted his snowman head against an officer, was his fifth this year

The man beneath the Frosty costume, Kevin Michael Walsh, 52, of Chestertown, has performed off an on at the Christmas parade for 10 years.

But this year alone, according to the Sun, he has been convicted of “telephone misuse” for calling police in April and pretending to be a CNN reporter, and found guilty of disorderly conduct for standing outside the Town Hall in May banging pots and pans because he couldn’t get inside. Both incidents led to suspended jail sentences and probation.

The parade-related charges, though — three counts of second-degree assault and one count of resisting arrest — could, upon conviction, carry a sentence of as much as 33 years in prison.

“He likes to agitate police,” Deputy Police Chief William H. Dwyer Jr. told the Sun. “He’s just a town nuisance.”

Walsh, who once ran a watch business, describes himself as a political activist “exercising his right to free speech in a small town where officials don’t like being challenged,” according to the Sun.

Walsh said that upon noticing a police dog at the parade, he approached patrolman James H. Walker, who was standing on the corner with his K9, Henzo.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s not right to have a dog at the parade,’” Walsh told the Sun. “I don’t think a children’s parade should have police dogs.”

Police reports say Walsh made a “kicking motion” toward the dog; Walsh says he merely lost his balance in the costume.

After putting Henzo in his police car, the patrolman returned and removed Walsh from the parade — ostensibly to counsel him on the wisdom of antagonizing police dogs.

Deputy Chief Dwyer said Walsh then started “cussing” and became “verbally abusive” toward Walker, at which time he was arrested. He was released on his own recognizance later that day.

All of the dogs at Rolling Dog Farm are beloved.

But Blind Patti — it’s fair, if not gramatically correct to say — was beloveder than most.

The eyeless shepherd mix, one of the dogs featured in our “Travels with Ace” calendar, passed away Nov. 20.

“Our beautiful blind girl Patti died tonight, just a few minutes before 7 p.m. She passed away here at home peacefully, lying on a big soft fleece bed in the dog room, covered with a fleece blanket,” Rolling Dog’s Steve Smith reported from the sanctuary’s home in New Hampshire.

Patti came to Rolling Dog Farm — back when it was still in Montana — from Spokane Animal Control.

When she arrived in 2003, one of her eyes was missing, and the other was solid white. A scar ran across her forehead from one eye to the other, and suspicions were that she had been struck with either an ax, hatchet or shovel.

At the Spokane shelter, she’d been scheduled to be euthanized her second week there, but an employee felt sorry for her, checked her out of the facility the day before she was to be put down, and tried to find her a home.

Rolling Dog Farm (called Rolling Dog Ranch at the time) was contacted and agreed to take her in, and another rescue group agreed to transport the blind and battered dog to Ovando, Montana, where the sanctuary, until last year, was headquartered.

She was thin and had a ragged coat when she arrived in Montana, with one seemingly empty eye socket. When Rolling Dog Farm took her to their vet, the remnants of an eyeball were found in the open eye socket. They cleaned it out, and sewed the eye shut. The other eye, which she couldn’t see out of and which was clearly causing her pain, was removed.

After that, Patti blossomed, according to the profile of her on the Rolling Dog Farm website:

“Even though she can’t see, she still thinks of herself as a guard dog of sorts. She stands at the fence and barks if she thinks anything, or anyone, is out there and we ought to know about it. Now plump, her coat shines. (At 80 pounds, she’s on a diet!) She loves to ‘mix it up’ with Steve … woofing and wrestling and showing him just how tough she is.

“Her favorite activity is to climb on to Steve’s lap while he tries to read the paper. Not content to merely lay on his lap, Patti insists on rolling over upside down, feet up in the air, tummy ready to be scratched. And if she doesn’t get the attention Patti thinks she deserves, she begins squirming.”

I first met Patti when I visited the sanctuary in Montana in 2007, and I ran into her again when, during the year Ace and I traveled the country, we stopped in at Rolling Dog Farm’s new home in Lancaster, New Hampshire.

About a year after that, this past October, Smith noticed Patti wasn’t herself. A series of trips to veterinarians followed, and what was at first thought to be one cancerous mass turned out to be a rapidly increasing series of them. About four weeks ago, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer called hemangiosarcoma.

They did their best to make what would turn out to be her last month a comfortable one.

“She was one of our stars, a favorite of volunteers, employees, visitors and media over the years,” Steve, who runs the sanctuary with his wife, Alayne Marker,  noted.

“Only four dogs have been with us as long as Patti — Widget, Goldie, Cedar and Libby. So she was a fixture not only of the sanctuary, but of our hearts as well.”

The day after she died, Steve, who I’d been exchanging emails with regarding making Rolling Dog Farm a beneficiary of sales of our “Travels with Ace” calendar, opened up a link I sent him to the calendar page.

The calendar documents some of the memorable moments from the year Ace and I spent traveling the U.S. — including our stop at Rolling Dog Farm. In addition to receiving 50 percent of profits from the sales, Rolling Dog Farm is featured one month, and among the photos I used — though I didn’t know of her condition — was one of Patti.

“… On that page you’ll see a photo of me with blind Patti that almost made me cry,” Steve recounts on the Rolling Dog Farm blog. “When John sent me the link, I clicked on it, the page opened … and there was the photo.”

The photo shows Steve and Patti, face to face, and I like to think it comes close to capturing the essence of what Patti, blind as she was, far more eloquently depicted than I ever could.

As Steve puts it:

“She showed us how animals are immensely capable of forgiving — if not forgetting — what people have done to them. “

Some websites seem to be huffing, wringing their hands and otherwise whining about a new dog park slated to open in 2013 in TriBeCa as part of a series of renovations at Hudson River Park.

They all seem to have decided to call it “a luxury dog park” (though its amenities seem no more than most new dog parks), they’ve all slapped a $6.5 million price tag on it (though that’s the price of all the renovations in this phase of the project, not just the dog section), and they’re all referring to things like water and shade as if they were champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries.

If we didn’t know better, we’d think that these websites didn’t know anything about dog parks, and are all just copying what the others are saying.

DNAinfo points out the park will feature separate play spaces for small and large dogs, and have “different sized doggie fountains,” neither of which strike me as luxuries.  The park will also feature — and this is a new one on me – gray-blue pavement designed to compensate for dogs’ color blindness.

Business Insider says “other luxury features include a water fixture in the center, similar to fountains children frolic through in other parks, and umbrellas for dogs to find shade in during the summer time, since initially the planted trees will be too young to provide shade.” I’d venture to say that water features aren’t unheard of at dog parks, and that humans will be making use of that shade, too.

Gawker, meanwhile, under a headline that reads “Luxury Water Park for Dogs to Disgust Everyone in New York,” predicts that “Hudson River Park will soon have a million-dollar watered-down-dog-shit fountain, which drunk NYU students will dive into no fewer than three times a week.”

I’m not sure how much of it is anti-dog, or just TriBeCa envy, but the bloggers sure seem to have their knickers in a knot over this one.

Do rich people’s dogs deserve better? No. Should every New York neighborhood get a dog park as nice as this one? Yes. Does a more a basic and natural dog park appeal to be more than this sort of modern-day one with multiple faux features? Absolutely, but then again it’s New York, and there’s not much natural left.

But whatever the case, there’s no reason to let dogs get hurt by the fallout from our class warfare, which is what appears to be at the bottom of all this.

Some members of the Community Board 1′s Waterfront Committee said they thought too much was being spent on the dog park. (Not a single one of the aformentioned reports pinpointed what that figure is.)

The $6.5 million figure is for all the renovations planned on a new two-block section of the park. Those include two curving lawn areas, landscaped bike and walking paths and a flexible open space between Pier 25 and Pier 26 with room for gatherings of up to 2,000 people.

On Pier 26, there are also plans for a boathouse and a restaurant.

Renovations to the Pier 26 area, just one phase of a far broader Hudson River Park project, still need final approval from the Hudson River Trust, which will issue a final decision in January.

Somehow, Cyber Monday has snuck up on me.

Which is surprising, considering how loud, garish, and exclamation point-filled it is.

Likely, there are two reasons I’ve been taken by surprise: First, I don’t have a proper wall calendar, on which I can write down important dates. Second,  up until the last couple of days — even though it has been around since at least 2005 — I’d never heard of it.

In case you’re as uninformed as I was, Cyber Monday is basically Black Friday online, with Internet retailers offering alleged discounts on purchases made through their websites.

After three days of shopping ’til you drop (apparently Black Friday also includes Saturday and Sunday), yet another day is set aside for you to spend some more in the comfort of your home.

Normally, I couldn’t care less about Cyber Monday. But with the announcement of our new 2012 (and half of 2013) “Travels with Ace” calendar — now available at a website near you — I would like to hop aboard the bandwagon and take advantage of any spending frenzy that’s out there.

So, for one day only — what the heck, let’s make it a week; no, let’s go crazy and say a full month (while supplies last) — our sister website (TravelswithAce.com) will be taking orders for the calendar at full price. That’s right, full price, allowing you to spend the money that you, thanks to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, have saved elsewhere.

What, you were expecting a bargain? Alas, we shant be slashing prices — for several reasons.

First off, the calendar is raising money for Rolling Dog Farm, with 50 percent of all profits going to the non-profit organization that cares for blind, deaf and disabled animals in New Hampshire.

Second, I put it together through a website that will remain nameless –  unless you order a calendar, in which case it will have their name plastered on it somewere — and as I was doing so, the price kept going up. When I called to see if I could get an additional discount given my volume purchase, and given it was a partly philanthropic effort, I was told no — that the current “sale” price was the best they could offer. Because the website pointed out the sale price was expiring that day, I placed my order. Guess what happened the next day? The price went down, a little. In other words, I paid too much for them.

Third, it’s an 18-month calendar. That’s six, SIX! extra bonus months. It’s also a limited edition, and each copy will be hand signed. My first real foray into Internet marketing ( if you haven’t already figured that out), the ”Travels with Ace” Calendar features some of the more memorable moments from the year Ace and I spent traveling the U.S. It also features 30 or so of our old dog friends back in Baltimore.

But wait.

There’s more.

For every purchase of a “Travels with Ace” calendar, customers can buy as many additional copies as they want at FULL price.

(Normally, this is where the small print would go, but I don’t know how to make small print. Besides, it hurts my eyes.)

There’s cycling with your dog, and then there’s cycling with your dog.

Above is Abby, who commutes to work via bicycle with her human. She calmly lays, sits or stands there on a nice padded surface as her human does all the work. Lazy dog? Or smart dog?

In any case, she seems, in this video anyway, a low energy dog.

Cycling with a high energy dog? That’s another story, or at least another video.

Check out Lily, the official mascot for MtnRanks.com, a purveyor of outdoor gear in Park City, Utah:

When posting flyers around her neighborhood failed to lead to the return of her missing Chihuahua, Arlene Corona — desperate to reunite with her dog, Chispita — took bolder action.

For three days, she stood in a bikini at a busy intersection in La Jolla, holding up a sign seeking her dog’s return, and pointing out she was on a hunger strike until Chispita was found.

By Friday though, the only lead had come from a guy calling himself Merl, who was sending her messages, some highly personal photos and pictures of a dog he claimed was Chispita, who he promised to return in exchange for sexual favors.

Needless to say, Corona has dropped the bikini idea.

Chispita, who is on medication for epilepsy, went missing more than a week ago, according to NBC in San Diego

When no one responded to her flyers, Corona decided to attract more attention by holding a sign about her lost dog while wearing a bikini at the intersection of Genesse and La Jolla Village.

“My heart is just to not [going to] give up hope,” said Corona. “I’m stressed out and I’m depressed but I just feel like somebody is going to return her, you know?”

On Friday morning, she received an email from a man who identified himself as Merl, and who went on to email her a photo of a Chihuahua and some photos of his genitals.

Corona realized the picture wasn’t her dog, and decided to ignore the man. Later, though, she received a text from a different number from someone claiming a neighbor was beating Chispita. When she called the number, the man on the recording identified himself as Merl.

Here’s hoping Chispita gets found, and that authorities track down creepy Merl, too.