ohmidog!

The owner of a dog killed by police in Colorado last month says Chloe had never shown aggression toward anyone.

And his attorney said Chloe — despite Commerce City police officers having repeatedly described the dog as a pit bull — may not have had any pit bull in her at all.

Gary Branson, 58, of Pueblo, said the three-year-old dog who helped him recover from triple-bypass surgery, “was friendly with everybody … She loved being around people, loved attention,” according to Examiner.com.

Chloe was shot repeatedly — while in a garage and on a catchpole — after a neighbor reported a dog running loose. The incident was videotaped by the son of the man who made the report.

Officers said the dog posed a danger, but the incident is being investigated by the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, at the request of police officials.

Branson’s attorney, Jennifer Edwards of the Animal Law Center in Wheat Ridge, questioned whether Chloe had any pit bull in her, and said she hopes to have DNA tests performed on Chloe’s remains to prove that.

Commerce City has an ordinance banning pit bulls.

Chloe was staying with Branson’s cousin in Commerce City while he was away in California. He said he adopted her as a puppy in Pueblo.

Technically, maybe it’s correct to say no animals were harmed during the filming of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

But away from the set, when the cameras weren’t rolling, 27 animals signed up to take part in the production died, and more were injured – mostly at a New Zealand farm where they were being kept.

Animal wranglers involved in the making of “The Hobbit” movie trilogy say the production company is responsible for the deaths because it kept the animals at a farm filled with bluffs, sinkholes and other “death traps,” according to an Associated Press report.

Despite that, the movie’s credits do carry the American Humane Association’s “No animals were harmed” stamp of approval — the exact wording of which is “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.”

The AHA says its monitoring of animals is limited to the actual filming of a movie or television show, and that it lacks the manpower, funding and authority to police animals when they are away from the set.

But others, PETA included, think that’s splitting hairs.

“How can something like this happen when the unit production manager was warned and the production was monitored by the AHA,” asks PETA, which has been critical of AHA in the past, and which was involved in breaking the story.

PETA also wonders why — given the state of the art of computer graphics — live animals had to be used at all:

“This movie was directed by Peter Jackson, a master at computer-generated imagery (CGI). In a movie that features CGI dragons, ogres, and hobbits, CGI animals would have fit in perfectly. Jackson could have made The Hobbit without using a single animal—and he should have.”

AHA called the deaths “needless and unacceptable,” and said they show that there are shortcomings in the oversight system, which monitors film sets but not the facilities where the animals are housed and trained. Read more »