ohmidog!

The dog ate the car keys? No big deal — at least not in this case, and as far as the car goes.

In this new ad from Volkswagen, entitled “Vet,” a Jetta owner, and bulldog owner, discovers the latter has eaten the keys to the former, but calmly handles the situation.

He grabs the bulldog, puts him in his car and, thanks to a keyless operating system, starts the car up and heads for the veterinarian.

(To see all of our “Woof in Advertising” posts, click here.)

Between flight delays and her dog, it’s a wonder Kim Rhode, a member of the U.S. Olympic shooting team, made it to London at all.

Her poodle Norman ate her airline ticket — and that was the least of her problems.

Rhode, seeking to become the first American to win individual medals at five Summer Games in a row, went to the airport in Los Angeles on Friday intending to fly to Copenhagen for training camp.

Flight cancellations forced her to miss training camp, and instead she later flew directly to London — after being reissued a ticket because her four -month-old dog, who she referred to as “hell on wheels” ate the first one.

She finally arrived in London Tuesday, AFP reports.

“My dog ate my ticket,” said Rhode, 33. ” … I know that sounds crazy but I can honestly say and I have the pictures to prove that really happened. It’s not just an excuse.”

Rhode, who is taking part in women’s trap and skeet, said she was looking forward to the arrival of her teammates on Wednesday.

“Some of them sent me some well wishes on Twitter and Facebook. I know they’re having a blast in Denmark. They’ve gone and seen ZZ Top and have been training really hard — a lot of team-building going on there. I’m kind of bummed that I missed that,” she added.

Rhode is seeking her fifth straight medal and her third gold overall.

(Photo: AFP)

Every boxer — and we’re speaking here of the human kind who puts on gloves and climbs into a ring — needs a trainer.

Manny Pacquiao needs a  terrier.

“He’s part of my team,”  the World Boxing Organization welterweight champion told the Wall Street Journal. “He’s a special dog.”

Pacquiao’s Jack Russell terrier, who goes by Pacman (the boxer’s nickname), is helping him train for Saturday’s welterweight bout against Timothy Bradley. The dog normally runs off leash, setting a speedy pace for Pacquiao on streets and trails around Los Angeles.

Pacquiao hasn’t lost a fight since Pacman came into his life.

The dog lives most of the time in Los Angeles, where Pacquiao trains, and he often travels to the Philippines when his owner works out there.  He’ll also join the boxer for fights in Las Vegas, where he stays at the pet-friendly Mandalay Bay.

Pacquiao, whose childhood dog was reportedly cooked and eaten by his estranged father, slept with Pacman at first, until he realized he was allergic to dog hair.

Pacman has nearly passed out from climbing the hills in Baguio City and scurried after coyotes while sprinting ahead of Pacquiao in their frequent jogs up to the Hollywood sign, the article reports.

Pacquiao, since his last fight in November, has been working to sharpen his focus and eliminate distractions like gambling and drinking. Pacman, while he may or may not help with that, does serve to encourage the boxer — both by setting the pace and through the enthusiasm that, being a Jack Russell terrier, he brings to the job.

“I kind of feel like he’s now the Woody in ‘Toy Story,’” said Brian Livingston, a marathoner who paces Pacquiao. “He’s become part of the menagerie.”

Other fighters have relied on dogs over the years, according the Journal story. Floyd Patterson went on 4 a.m. runs with two German shepherds named Charlie Brown and Whitey. George Foreman brought his  German Shepherd to Africa to help train for the Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali.

While Pacquiao trains in California, Noel Lautengco serves as Pacman’s dog-sitter. He stays with the dog at a Hollywood motel, where Pacman sleeps on a  bed with a pink spread. As a puppy, Lautengco says, Pacman scratched and clawed through three hotel couches that Pacquiao replaced.

Pacman is more than just a mascot, Pacquiao’s people say. He drove the fighter to train harder than ever by running ahead of the pack. “Nobody could keep up with that dog,” said Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer.

In recent months though, the dog has put on some weight.

“He’s getting old. He’s become fat,” Pacquiao said.

(Photos: Top photo from Manny Pacquiao’s official website; photo of Pacman the dog by Dan Krauss, for the Wall Street Journal)

President Obama has turned to the cutest member of his admistration to raise funds for his  2012 campaign — Bo.

In one Internet ad, the first family’s Portuguese water dog  pops into the frame, with his tongue out, as the words “Join Pet Lovers for Obama” appear.

The Bo Obama Internet ad links to a sign-up page, giving readers an opportunity to donate to the campaign.

According to the Washington Post, Bo may be the first “first dog” to emerge as a central player in a presidential re-election campaign.

In 2004, George W. Bush’s campaign made a tongue-in-cheek video featuring Barney, Bush’s Scottish terrier, advising the Republican National Convention  on how to attract the “canine vote.”

But Bo’s appearances – coinciding with his third anniversary as a member of the Obama family (it’s Saturday) — are hoped to prove more viral and hard hitting.

They also seem to be an attempt to capitalize on the Crate-gate controversy dogging Mitt Romney, who transported his Irish setter Seamus in a crate atop the family station wagon for a 12-hour trip to Canada in the 1980s.

Republicans have fired back, pointing out that Obama — as he admits in his 2004 autobiography – ate dog meat as a child in Indonesia.

Russ Berkman considered himself  pretty lucky when he scored four passes to a practice round of the Masters in the prestigious golf tournament’s ticket lottery in August.

But he was pretty unlucky when — the evening before he and three friends were to depart — he found his dog had eaten them.

Sierra, a Swiss mountain dog, gobbled up pretty much everything but the strings.

It appeared Berkman’s once in a lifetime opportunity had vanished.

Frantic, Berkman, who lives in Seattle, called his girlfriend, who recommended he give Sierra some low-concentration hydrogen peroxide solution to induce vomiting.

Not long after that, with just hours to go before a 6 a.m. flight east, Berkman was sifting through Sierra’s vomit and trying to piece together the passes. Sierra hadn’t eaten much recently — other than the tickets — so it was “not as bad as you’d think,” Berkman said on Thursday.

Hoping the reconstructed passes would be accepted once they arrived in Augusta, Berkman didn’t tell his three friends about what the tickets had been through.

The foursome made a stop in Myrtle Beach to play some golf, and then headed for Georgia.

On Monday, Berkman called the ticket office and sent them photos of the original tickets and an e-mail verification of his purchase. He offered to present the passes that had passed through Sierra as well.

Berkman said he was hoping they would be ”gracious Southern folks” and let him and his friends attend the event.

He also shared his story with “Mitch in the Morning” on sports radio station KJR.

Two days later, Berkman and his friends picked up their graciously reprinted tickets and watched the final practice round for the Masters.

A bull mastiff named Bean is recovering from surgery last month after wolfing down a hunk of brie, and a three-inch cheese knife.

Sean Burte said he put the brie and knife on a coffee table in his home in Roslindale, Mass., and walked away briefly.

That’s when Bean, a 118-pound female, seized the opportunity, jumped on the table and swallowed both.

Burte rushed his dog to Angell Animal Medical Center, where veterinarians confirmed the dog had the knife in her stomach, CBS in Boston reported.

Bean swallowed the knife handle-first, so she suffered no cuts to her throat or stomach.

“Bean is a very lucky dog because her size, and the position the knife was in when she swallowed it, minimized further damage to her throat and stomach,” said Dr. Mike Pavletic, head of Angell’s surgery department. “She did very well throughout the surgery and we’re glad to see her recuperating at home.”

When a Lab mix ate $1,000 of his owners’ money — intended for a car payment — the Florida couple was able to make him cough up $900 worth.

Christy Lawrenson says she left ten $100 dollar bills stuffed in an envelope at her home in St. Augustine one day a couple of weeks ago.

When her husband Joe came home during a lunch break to get the money and pay the bill, the envelope was gone, according to the St. Augustine Record.

“I saw one $100 dollar bill almost ripped in half on the floor,” Joe Lawrenson said. “I found like three or four pieces around the house. I thought somebody broke in originally.”

But there was only one explanation: Tuity, a four-year-old mutt they’ve had since she was a puppy.

“She ate the bills, the envelope … everything,” Christy Lawrenson said.

Joe Lawrenson fed Tuity a hydrogen peroxide mixture to induce vomiting, waited, then the family began putting the pieces together. Only one of the $100 bills remained intact, and the Lawrensons, with tape, were able to reassemble another $800 worth.

The bank refused to accept what remained of the last one, because it was missing serial numbers.

Instead, the Lawrensons sent it to the U.S. Treasury along with details about what happened in hopes of getting a new one.

A University of Maine graduate student says he has found a bone fragment from what he believes is the earliest domesticated dog ever found in the Americas — one that walked the continent 9,400 years ago.

And where he found it — ensconced in a dried-out sample of human waste — gives proof that eating dog was part of America’s culture, at least before America was America.

Graduate student Samuel Belknap III came across the fragment while analyzing a sample of human waste unearthed in  the 1970s. Carbon-dating placed the age of the bone at 9,400 years, and a DNA analysis confirmed it came from a dog — as opposed to a wolf, coyote or fox.

The Associated Press  reports that the fragment — which was the dark orange color characteristic of bone that has passed through the digestive track — was found in Hinds Cave in southwest Texas. 

The fragment provides the earliest evidence that dogs were eaten by humans in North America, and may have been bred as a food source, he said.

Belknap was studying the diet and nutrition of the people  in the Lower Pecos region of Texas between 1,000 and 10,000 years ago when he came across the bone.

Belknap and other researchers from the University of Maine and the University of Oklahoma’s molecular anthropology laboratories, where the DNA analysis was done, have written a paper on their findings, scheduled for publication in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology later this year.

The fragment is about six-tenths of an inch long and three- to four-tenths of an inch wide. Belknap said he and a fellow student identified the bone as a fragment from where the skull connects with the spine. He said it came from a dog that probably resembled the small short-haired dogs that were common among the Indians of the Great Plains.

Other archaeological findings have found evidence of domestic dogs in the U.S. as long as 8,000 years ago.

A 1980s study reported dog bones found at Danger Cave, Utah, were between 9,000 and 10,000 years old, but those dates were based on an analysis of the surrounding rock laters as opposed to carbon dating. In Idaho, researchers believed they’d found 11,000-year-old dog bones, but later tests showed them to be no more than 3,000 years old.

Worldwide, studies have found evidence of dogs going back 31,000 years from a site in Belgium, 26,000 years in the Czech Republic and 15,000 years in Siberia.

The earliest dogs in North America are believed to have come with the early settlers across the Bering land bridge from Asia.

Belknap said eating dogs was once common in Central America, and that some Great Plain Indian tribes ate dogs when food was scarce or for celebrations.

 ”It was definitely an accepted practice among many populations,” he said.

The sprucing up of Petite Acres — the trailer park in Arizona where I’ve temporarily hung my hat — continues.

In addition to paving the dirt road that leads into the trailer park, to keep the dust down, the owner hired one of my neighbors, Ramiro, to come over and remove a tree stump from my yard.

As Ramiro brought over his tools — an axe, a pick and multiple shovels — Ace followed him back and forth to his trailer, and, as he has before, got a hand out.

“I was feeding him some tamale and he ate the whole husk,” Ramiro said. “I hope it doesn’t make him sick.”

Clearly, Ace didn’t understand the intricacies of Mexican cuisine; then again, his policy when it comes to any food is generally to eat it first and ask questions later.

Six hours later, about the time the tree finally came down, the tamale came up. Ace walked to the trailer door and started hacking, and got down the stairs just in time to cough up a corn husk.

Simultaneously, Ramiro, who had spent six hours digging and chopping roots, was heaving, too – throwing all his weight on the the six-foot-tall stump, which slowly toppled as he rode it down.

I’m not sure why the stump had to be removed. It takes up much more of my dirt yard now that it’s horizontal instead of vertical, but I’m sure someone will be chopping it up and hauling it away, and filling the giant hole in the ground.

I’d thought it would be cool to leave the stump standing, and paint it to resemble a cactus.

But, being a temporary resident, my vote didn’t count.

Ramiro probably didn’t care either way about the stump in my yard, but once he tackled the task, it became a battle he had to win — and all done without the aid of heavy equipment. It was man versus stump.

Ramiro proudly took a picture of the tree he’d singlehandedly brought down. I took a picture of what Ace coughed up. Then, at Ramiro’s request, I took some pictures with his cell phone camera of him standing atop the fallen tree truck, raising his arms in victory.

All in all, as they go, it was a pretty exciting day at Petite Acres.

A Labrador retriever who ate a beehive – bees included – has been named winner of this year’s “Hambone Award” an insurance company’s annual tribute to the pet with the most unusual insurance claim.

Veterinary Pet Insurance Co. (VPI), the nation’s oldest and largest provider of pet health insurance, chose 12 nominees for the honor – all selected from claims filed by clients. More than 3,000 people voted online to pick the winner.

Ellie lives in Santee, California, and the beehive was just the latest in a long line of items she has consumed in her young life – from wooden toy train tracks to laptop computer keys.

On top of the hive, and its thousands of inhabitants, Ellie also consumed pesticide – for the hive had recently been sprayed. On the plus side, that meant the bees she consumed were already dead. On the down side, the pesticide made her upset stomach even worse. She made a full recovery.

Ellie’s owners, Robert and Sandra Coe, will receive a bronze trophy in the shape of a ham as well as a gift basket full of doggie toys and treats, VPI announced this week.

The VPI Hambone Award is named in honor of a VPI-insured dog that got stuck in a refrigerator and ate an entire Thanksgiving ham before someone opened the door and found the dog inside, with a mild case of hypothermia.

This year’s second place honors went to Aubie, a border collie from Birmingham, Alabama, who wanted to meet (or eat) the mailman so badly he leapt through a closed living room window. The leap shattered the glass and left Aubie with a cut front leg that required 40 stitches.

“Aubie’s never been enamored with the mailman,” said owner, Sharman Martin.

Third place went to a West Highland white terrier named Darci, who attacked her owner’s running chainsaw. The chainsaw cut two small holes into Darci’s muzzle and she underwent five hours of surgery.

Additional nominees for the 2010 VPI Hambone Award included a boxer that chased and caught a moving delivery van by biting into one of its tires, a standard poodle with a taste for dirty diapers, and a Jack Russell terrier that suffered injuries from wrestling with a lizard.

All pets considered for the award made full recoveries and received insurance reimbursements for their medical care.

(Photo: Courtesy of VPI)