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For David Hartwig, the joy of showing off dog tricks died in 2007, along with his dog Skidboot — the remarkable blue heeler we’ve shown you before.

Skidboot’s still gone, but Hartwig is back.

Due to popular demand, he’s entertaining audiences with a trio of new dogs – Tiedown, Bois’d'arc and Little Skidboot, the Dallas Morning News reports.

None is as gifted as Skidboot, Hartwig is quick to point out — in his blunt and folksy manner.

“If you had never seen Skidboot, you’d think this was a real smart dog,” he said, talking about one of his new charges. “But compared to Skidboot, this dog has a bad case of dumbworms.”

The newspaper reports that the new dogs are learning the old tricks:

One morning at his Hunt County ranch, Hartwig tossed a stuffed hot dog toy in the dirt and instructed Little Skidboot:

“When I say three, I want you to get that toy, but don’t get it until I say three.”

“Good boy!” Hartwig said.

As if one species weren’t enough, PEOPLE magazine has branched out, establishing a new website called “PEOPLE Pets.”

Like the original magazine, the online pet version is short on edge and depth, heavy on fluff (we’re referring to both the animal and journalistic variety), with a heavy dose of celebrities stories and send-us-your-cute-dog-pictures contests.

It has a news section, and a style section, (”Mariah Carey celebrates the Holidays with her two loves. Plus: Mary-Kate Olsen, Dennis Quaid and other stars with their furry pals!”), and plenty of opportunities for readers to submit pet pictures.

It also has – for reasons I don’t grasp — lots of ads for Slim-Fast, the human weight loss beverage.

“It’s a site from the folks who do PEOPLE magazine, and it’s dedicated to all the things we love about our pets – funny photos, silly videos, heartwarming stories and, of course, styling pet gear,” Carol Vinzant, PEOPLE Pets community manager, said in an email about the new website.

Here’s an accidentally artsy photo I took at the park recently. It’s Ace (the brown blur) wrestling with Soju (the grey blur). Soju is a Great Dane, and one of Ace’s favorite wrestling partners.

You can see Soju — he’s named after the distilled beverage, native to Korea — elsewhere on this page, as he, along with his owner, is featured in one of our advertisements.

I could tell you what my camera settings were, and attempt to sound like a skilled photographer, but it was just on automatic, and the sun was going down. So the slow shutter speed, I think, accounts for ghostly streaks in the image –  not unlike how things might look if you had too much soju.

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Here’s a wonderful report by Steve Hartman of CBS News about Tarra, an elephant, and Bella, a dog, and the amazing bond that has developed between them at The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn.

Sanctuary co-founder Carol Buckley says it’s common for elephants arriving at the sanctuary to pick another elephant to hang out with. But in this case Tarra picked Bella, or vice versa.

Buckley spent more than 20 years performing with her elephant, Tarra, in zoos and circuses before deciding the animals deserved a different life and oepning the sanctuary. Bella is one of about a dozen stray dogs they’ve taken in.

For years, Tarra and Bella have played together and eaten together, and when Bella suffered a spinal cord injury a few months ago (the piece doesn’t explain how, but hopefully Tarra wasn’t involved), Tarra — despite having 2,700 acres to roam, stood vigil outside the sanctuary office, where Bella was recuperating.

Bella’s better now, and she and Tarra remain inseparable, Hartman reports.

Skateboarding bulldogs Tyson and Tillman, as we suspected back in November, turned out to be a huge hit at the Tournament of Roses Parade.

As Maria Menounos reported for MSNBC, the dogs trained for months, on a track built on a moving truck, in preparation for the parade. For two and a half hours, they circled the track that was part of the Natural Balance float in the New Year’s Day parade.

As the Berlin Zoo continued to make money off of Knut (pronounced kuh-NOOT), another zoo decided this year it deserved a piece of the action.

Tierpark Neumuenster animal park filed a lawsuit against the Berlin Zoo, saying that, in exchange for loaning Knut’s father, Lars, to the Berlin Zoo for breeding purposes, it deserved some of the profits the Berlin Zoo was raking in. Originally, the Berlin Zoo had promised the first surviving cub to them, the Neumuenster zoo claimed in the lawsuit.

While it wasn’t seeking Knut, the Neumuenster zoo argued it was entitled to some of the revenue. The lawsuit was later dropped and an out-of-court settlement reportedly reached.

By the time of this news report, Knut wasn’t so little anymore. He was up to 243 pounds — no longer exactly cuddly, but still drawing visitors.

A couple of months after it, Knut’s caretaker, Thomas Doerflein, who had bottle fed Knut as a cub and slept beside him at night, died, at 44, of a heart attack.

In effect, he was Knut’s daddy. Between his death, and the money-grubbing, Knut’s story was getting a little less heartwarming, but Knut himself remained fat, happy and secure in his home at the zoo.

Well, at least fat and happy.

Jasmine — the pit bull who went from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation to life with a young family of four in suburban Baltimore — graces the cover of this month’s Sports Illustrated.

One of three Vick dogs turned over to the Baltimore rescue organization Recycled Love for rehabilitation, Jasmine ended up in the home of Catalina Stirling, a 35-year-old artist and Recycled Love volunteer who, upon first meeting Jasmine, crawled into the cage where the dog cowered beneath a blanket.

The Sports Illustrated article looks at what has become of the 51 dogs seized from Vick’s Virginia estate — dogs that even some animal welfare organizations were saying had been so brutalized that euthanasia, not rehabilitation, was the only solution.

Jasmine was likely born at Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels and, because of her youth, was a “bait dog,” used to provide practice matches for the fighting dogs, spending the rest of the time chained to a car axle in the nearby woods.

During evaluations of the Vick dogs, Jasmine was being considered for sanctuary with Best Friends in Utah, where the most severely traumatized dogs were sent, when Recycled Love volunteers went to see her and the other dogs being held at the Washington (DC) Animal Rescue League.

Stirling, seeing the dog under the blanket, crawled into the cage and began massaging and whispering to her, and Jasmine seemed to respond. The dog was turned over to Recycled Love, then sent to live with Stirling, her husband, two young children, two other dogs and a cat.

For months, Jasmine sat in her cage in Stirling’s house and refused to come out. “I had to pick her up and carry her outside so she could go to the bathroom,” Stirling says. “She wouldn’t even stand up until I had walked away. There’s a little hole in the yard, and once she was done, she would go lie in the hole.”

It was almost four months before Jasmine would get out of the cage by herself. Visits from another Vick dog living in Maryland, Sweet Pea, helped draw Jasmine out of her shell — enough so that after six months Stirling could finally take both dogs for a walk in a park near her house.

Jasmine is still fearful, the article says. She almost always walks with her head and tail down. She won’t let anyone approach her from behind, and she still spends most of the day in her pen, sitting there quietly, even thought the door is open.

In the end, 47 of the 51 Vick dogs were saved. Two died while in the shelters. One was destroyed because it was too violent; and another was euthanized for medical reasons. Twenty-two dogs went to Best Friends. The other 25 have been spread around the country. Ten went to California with BAD RAP. Fourteen of the 25 have been placed in permanent homes, and the rest are in foster care.

(To  learn more about the Vick dogs, you can check out ohmidog!’s earlier incarnation, Mutts.)

Earl Simmons, better know as rapper DMX, faces at least 90 days in jail after pleading guilty on Tuesday to drug, theft and animal cruelty charges, Arizona prosecutors said.

The Baltimore-born Simmons, 38, pleaded to three felony charges and one misdemeanor count in Maricopa County Superior Court under a deal to settle three criminal cases against him. He also agreed not to own any animals or posses firearms.

His sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 30.

“I am pleased that this defendant will be held accountable for both his drug and animal cruelty offenses,” said County Attorney Andrew Thomas, in a statement.

The rapper turned actor has been battling legal woes during the past year in Arizona, according to Reuters. In May, he was arrested on drug and animal cruelty charges after sheriff’s deputies raided his home in Phoenix. Authorities found dog carcasses and malnourished pit bulls at the residence.

(Photo: DMX’s album “Year of the Dog… Again”)

The New Jersey homeowner who found this creature might not have been sure what species had taken refuge in his garage.

It’s fur was so badly matted it could barely move.

The case was reported to the Associated Humane Societies in northern New Jersey, which dispatched an ambulance and brought the neglected dog to its medical facility in Newark.

After some careful shearing, a male poodle emerged.

The dog had been a virtual prisoner in his own fur — barely able to move and see, according to an archived report on the AHS website.

The shearing also revealed an old injury to a rear leg but it didn’t seem to be a problem for the dog, who was named Milton, after the street on which he was found. In March, AHS reported Milton had been adopted.

Founded in 1906, AHS is the largest animal sheltering system in New Jersey, comprising three shelters located in Newark, Forked River, and Tinton Falls. The Forked River facility also includes Popcorn Park Zoo, a sanctuary for abandoned, injured, ill, exploited, abused or elderly wildlife, exotic and farm animals, and birds.

Its website is the latest addition to our blogroll (below the tags on our right side rail). Welcome AHS, and keep up the good work.

(Photos from AHS website)

Before Ashlee Simpson had her baby, Bronx Mowgli, she and husband Pete Wentz turned to Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan — not for child-rearing (or naming) advice but for help with their two bulldogs.

The pop star and her rocker husband were concerned about how their sometimes obsessive, sometimes aggresive bulldog, Hemingway, might react to a baby in the house. When they got him a second bulldog, Rigby, as a companion — in hopes of calming him down — it only made Hemingway’s aggression escalate.

So, in the months before Bronx Mowgli was born, Simpson and Wentz brought their worries, and their bulldogs, to Millan — well, actually he went to them. The experience is recounted on tomorrow night’s episode of “The Dog Whisperer” on the National Geographic Channel.

Millan works with the couple to help Hemingway overcome his aggression toward other dogs, his habit of attacking his own shadow, or any other shadow, and his tendency to assault the couple’s silver exercise ball. By episode’s end, those matters seemed well on their way to being resolved.

We can only assume the dogs are getting along fine with Bronx Mowgli (born Nov. 20) and not teasing him too much about his name — the first half of which comes from the borough, the second half of which comes from the Rudyard Kipling character, who, by the way, was raised by a pack of wolves.