ohmidog!

The X-ray above shows some of the 109 stones a Lab named Barney consumed during a walk on the beach a few months ago. 

His owner, Kim Woollard, who’s used to Barney putting just about everything in his mouth, didn’t realize at the time he was swallowing them, but she noticed the next day that he seemed under the weather.

After taking him to the vet, Mrs. Woollard, who lives in Surrey in the UK, said she was “gobsmacked” by what she saw.

Barney, a chocolate Labrador, had eaten 109 pebbles during his walk on the beach, the Daily Mail reports.

The vets found 79 pebbles in stomach cavity – and Mrs. Woollard, after getting back home, found 30 more in his bed.

Mrs. Woollard, a 52-year-old jeweler, went for the walk with Barney and her husband, Andrew, back in September, on a beach in Kent.

“Barney was always full of energy and he loved going for walks on the beach. It was a pebbly beach and I let him off the lead there as there wasn’t anyone on the beach apart from us. Andrew and I were chatting and watching Barney, but we didn’t see him do anything out of the ordinary. He was racing along enjoying himself.”

Back at home, the Woollards noticed a few stones in Barney’s basket, but didn’t think anything of it. The next day, there were more, and when her husband ran his hand along Barney’s belly “we could actually hear them rattling,” she said.

Barney had an operation to remove the 70 stones remaining inside him and made a full recovery.

(Photos: WorldWideFeatures.com, via Daily Mail)

In honor of Barney, former President George W. Bush’s Scottish terrier, who passed away last week — and Scotties everywhere – we present … the Scottie Pinwheel.

Barney, the Scottish terrier who was ”first dog” during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office, has passed away.

Bush broke the news on his Facebook page, where he also made public a recent oil painting he did of his dog.

“After twelve and a half years of life, his body could not fight off the illness,” Bush said in the post.

Barney had lymphoma.

Barney was born Sept. 30, 2000 — two months before Bush was elected to his first term.

In his Facebook post, Bush wrote, “Barney greeted Queens, Heads of State, and Prime Ministers. He was always polite and never jumped in their laps. Barney was by my side during our eight years in the White House. He never discussed politics and was always a faithful friend. Laura and I will miss our pal.”

Barney’s mother was Coors, a Scottish terrier owned by former Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman, and his father was Kelly of Champion Motherwell Stormwarning.

Barney had his own section on the Bush administration’s official White House website, starred in numerous videos and was a fixture at the White House, the Bushes’ Crawford ranch and Camp David, where Barney’s favorite activity was chasing golf balls on the chipping green.

He was a “fierce armadillo hunter,” Bush wrote, who loved going along when he fished for bass at the ranch.

“Barney guarded the South Lawn entrance of the White House as if he were a Secret Service agent. He wandered the halls of the West Wing looking for treats from his many friends. He starred in Barney Cam and gave the American people Christmas tours of the White House.”

Barney also once bit a reporter who got too close.

The president, who has taken up painting since leaving the White House, also released a portrait he did of Barney. It is signed “43.”  Bush was the nation’s 43rd president.

Barney is survived by Miss Beazley, another Scottish terrier who lives with the ex-president, and Bob, a cat.

(Photo: Bush’s portrait of Barney, from Facebook)

In a tragic story out of Florida, a recovered dog is providing a lone note of solace to a grieving family.

Barney, a Vizsla, was jogging with his owner, Donna Chen, a mother of three, when she was killed by a drunk driver.

Somehow, Barney ended up in the Gulf of Mexico after the accident, where he was found by a kayaker, about a half mile offshore from Sarasota.

“I thought maybe he had fallen off a boat or something” Rory O’Connor told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News. “I knew it was probably trouble, because you know, he was coming straight toward me and he had a look of terror in his eyes.”

O’Connor, of Bellingham, Wash., inadvertently recorded the rescue and put it on YouTube, before knowing anything about the rest of the story:

Through his microchip, Barney was reunited with the Chen family, members of which say his presence is helping them through the grief.

“This is our one piece, our one link to Donna,” said Chen’s sister-in-law, Colette MacPhail. “For Barney, he’s going to have his own adjustments. He’s just a piece that came back for us.”

Ace’s herniated disc — steadily improving, it seems — has slowed our wandering ways, leading us to limit out travels for at least another week. So far, during our stay in North Carolina, we’ve mostly stuck around the mansion grounds, taking it easy.

But that doesn’t mean we still can’t go to Mayberry, one way or another.

There are those who will tell you there is no real Mayberry in North Carolina. They’re the same ones who will tell you there is no Santa. In truth, in North Carolina, Mayberry is never more than 30 minutes away from wherever you are. You just head down that country road, away from the city, past the suburbs, and stop in the first town big enough to have gas pumps and a barber shop. If you’re greeted with a smile, and it appears genuine, you’re in Mayberry.

Of all the smallish towns in North Carolina, Mount Airy is the one that makes the most of its link to Mayberry, and — it being just up the road — we’ll be going there once Ace is up for it.

For now though, we get there via the couch, with a remote control as our steering wheel. Usually, if you keep flipping, you can find it and, for 30 minutes, go back to a time and place where gigabytes didn’t exist, the pace was slow, things were black and white, and life had just the right amount of complications — enough to keep it interesting, but not so many as to overwhelm your hard drive.

That’s what I liked about Mayberry: Every problem could, in less than 30 minutes, be resolved with some calm and unrushed reasoning — even what to do with a pesky pack of stray dogs.

PART ONE: In which Otis gets his breakfast and Opie finds a dog …

PART TWO: In which Barney takes the dogs — 11 of them now — to a happy place …

PART THREE: In which the strays save the day …

Finally, some good press.

Ace got a nice mention — and I didn’t fare too badly, either — in our friend Susan Adcock’s “Carny Dog” blog last week.

We had the pleasure of meeting Susan, a long-time ohmidog! reader, and her pit mix, Stella, when they came to Baltimore from Nashville last week — a pilgrimage prompted by the last request of a carnival worker named Barney, who Susan befriended as a photographer.

After Susan spread Barney’s ashes on the grave of his mother, we met up at Riverside Park, stopped to hydrate with the dogs at a neighborhood bar and went out to eat.

Among Susan’s kindly notations on my dog and me:  ”…It didn’t take long to realize that the two of them were as much a part of the neighborhood as the park itself. Everyone from homeless guys to moms pulling wagon-loads of kids knew them well enough to stop and talk, and they did. Humans called out to Ace from a distance.” Ace, she noted, was “one of the more well-adjusted dogs we’ve encountered.”

She was also impressed with our impromptu dessert. We stopped at the house of some friends on our way back for some leftover birthday cake. “It is a true friend who will let a man show up with a complete stranger, at nine-thirty at night for dessert,” Susan wrote.

On that point, I couldn’t agree more.

I think, for Susan, it was love at first sight — for the city, I mean. I think she saw in Baltimore what I see in it: its curiously appealing grittiness, its near total lack of pretentions, its quirkiness, its deeply etched character, and characters — some as shiny and polished as the Inner Harbor, some as rough-edged and splintered as a ratty working wharf.

Having just pulled out Friday, I miss it already.

I think Susan does too. “Seriously,” she wrote, “it made me want to move.”

(Photo: Ace, Stella and me, by Susan Adcock)

This one’s about a dog named Stella, a carny named Barney and the woman who sort of adopted them both — a Nashville photographer who motored up to Baltimore last week to carry out Barney’s last wish: that his ashes be spread upon the grave of his mother.

Susan Adcock became enamored with carnival workers more than a decade ago, and continued to count them as her friends long after she completed a newspaper assignment documenting their lives in photos. A highly compassionate sort, she helped them through troubles and sometimes even gave them shelter in her own home.

Among those she befriended was Barney, a down on his luck, hard drinking sort from Baltimore who she met while taking carnival photos. Barney, for a while, had a job as Barney, the dinosaur. He’d put on his purple dinosaur outfit and delight when the audience cheered and called his name, which was actually his name.

When Barney died, it was Susan who saw to it that he was cremated, in accordance with his wishes, Susan who took possession of his ashes, and Susan who cleaned out his apartment.

“I packed up his apartment over the weekend and by Monday afternoon, twelve years of hard living evaporated into space,” she wrote on Pitcherlady.com, one of her blogs. “People that hadn’t seen Barney in forever stopped by to say how sorry they were. They asked for things and I didn’t mind them asking. Most of them loved Barney too. Just not enough to stop by and help him get to the bathroom when he needed it …”

The next day, she took the Baltimore native’s ashes back to her house in Nashville, and found some comfort in having them around.

“Often you have three days or so to say goodbye and then that person in in the ground under a stone. This experience taught me that being able to take the remains of the deceased home with you is much more bearable. I knew in my head that Barney was gone but I was able to sit the box on my kitchen table and we hung out all summer together. That was a gift. My grief was tempered by having him around.”

As summer wound down, Susan planned the trip to Baltimore. Barney wanted to be “returned to the arms of his mother.” She died in 1978. This week, Susan drove to Baltimore with her dog Stella in the back seat, and Barney’s boxed ashes in the front. She took the ashes to a cemetery on Eastern Avenue, where she me Barney’s daughters, and a grandson he had never met.

“Their pictures used to be stuck on the side of his refrigerator with magnets and he told me once that he wanted them there so he could see them from his bed whenever he looked up. He used to tell them goodnight before he went to sleep, ’like the Waltons,’ he said.”

Barney was a big fan of TV, and, for 12 years, never turned off the one in his apartment. “I remembered Barney saying once that wherever he ended up, they better have cable,” Susan wrote.

Once Susan accomplished her mission and the ashes were spread, she — along with Stella, a pit bull also adopted from the carnival — saw a little of Baltimore. She visited Edgar Allan Poe’s house, they took a ride in a water taxi, and she went in search of crab cakes — finding none below $20. That’s when she wrote me.

A regular reader and commenter on ohmidog!, Susan knew Ace and I were on the road, and didn’t know we were back in Baltimore for a bit. Long story short, as they say, we emailed back and forth, talked on the phone, met with our dogs in Riverside Park, and went to Captain Larry’s for crabcakes.

Susan, though she has a degree in psychology, decided to become a full-time photographer almost 20 years ago. You can see her work on her blogs, including pitcherlady and carnydog, which centers on Stella, the pit bull she adopted two years ago. Stella belonged to some carnival workers and was three months old when Susan took her in. By then, she — Stella — had already been to four state fairs and a variety of other spots throughout Wisconsin and Illinois.

Knowing how hard carnival life can be, on dogs and people, Susan volunteered to adopt her and the owners agreed.

Stella and Susan left Baltimore Thursday, headed for a visit to the beach before going back to Nashville. We wish them safe travels, and count ourselves lucky to have met someone so compassionate, so talented and so aware that not every creature in need of rescue has four legs.

(Photos: Barney photo by Susan Adcock; Stella photos by John Woestendiek)

You don’t know the face, but you may know the leg: A khaki-clad hunk of it often shows up — generally from the knee down — in photographs of Bo Obama.

The leg belongs to Dale Haney, who, when the First Family is too busy to walk the dog, assumes the duty.

As a keeper of the White House grounds for nearly 40 years, Haney has managed to cultivate  relationships with the presidential pups — all the way back to Richard Nixon’s Irish setter, King Timahoe.

“They heard about me and they called me to come over here for an interview and I came and here I still am,” he told the Associated Press  during a tour of the gardens on a rainy morning when first lady Michelle Obama — Bo’s primary walker — was out of town.

“I have him a little bit more” when she’s traveling, said Haney.

Before Bo came along, Haney had walked and played with President George W. Bush’s Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley. But he says he was most fond of Spot, an English springer spaniel whose mother, Millie, belonged to Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush.

“I do have a soft spot for Spot,” he said in an online chat in 2003. “I was there when she was born and now she’s back.” Millie gave birth to Spot at the White House in 1989; the younger Bush and his wife, Laura, put Spot to sleep in 2004 after she’d had several strokes.

Haney began at the White House as a gardener, then was supervisor of grounds maintenance and lead horticulturist before becoming superintendent of all the grounds last fall.

Besides helping out with Bo, Haney tends to the nearly 19 acres of lawns, trees and gardens around the White House.

The White House has produced its final holiday video (I’m hoping this isn’t our tax dollars at work) featuring the president’s dog, Barney.

In this year’s “Barney Cam” Christmas greeting, the first family’s Scottish terrier scampers amid the White House’s red, white and blue holiday decorations before retiring for a nap and imagining himself as an athlete.

The Barney Cam was introduced in the 2002 holiday season, and got 24 million Web visitors on its first day, according to the Associated Press.

Since then, Barney’s holiday videos have featured former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush adviser Karl Rove, country singers Dolly Parton and Alan Jackson and other stars. Olympic gold medalists Michael Phelps and Nastia Liukin guest star in the final holiday doggie video from the White House.

Barney is shown in cutout animation as an Olympic vaulter, swimmer and synchronized diver with fellow terrier Miss Beazley, both in red swimsuits.

He also dreams of sinking the final putt to secure the Ryder Cup, with the entire U.S. Ryder Cup team chanting “Barney, Barney, Barney!”

The Barney Cam spot introduced Monday starts with President George W. Bush, his wife, Laura, and their daughters, Jenna and Barbara, reminiscing about their times together in the White House, then sending Barney off to decorate and nap.

Whether George W. Bush is leaving the White House in disgrace is a matter best left for the political pundits — a group I am proud to say I don’t belong to — but as for his dog Barney, it seems he is definitely going out on a low note.

In addition to nipping a television journalist (good boy, Barney) this month, it has been revealed that, back in September, there was another biting incident — this one involving a public relations director (attaboy!).

Heather Walker, the public relations director for the Boston Celtics basketball team, has revealed how America’s First Dog bit her wrist and drew blood after she tried to pat him during a White House ceremony honoring the team’s 17th NBA championship.

“I walked into the White House and in the first area you walk into, there are Miss Beazley and Barney,”  Walker said. “They were sitting on this Oriental rug, and I just reached down to pat Barney and he attacked me.”

Both Miss Beazley and Barney are Scottish terriers.

Walker, who had her wrist wrapped with a bandage by a Boston Celtics trainer, spoke about her ordeal on Friday, just days after Barney bit Reuters television reporter John Decker’s finger when he reached down to pat the seemingly docile hound.

Walker said she had wanted to keep the Sept. 19 incident under wraps, but her hometown newspaper, The Salem (Mass.) News, reported it Friday, according to the Associated Press. 

Barney, despite starring in several White House Christmas videos and having his own official website, isn’t likely to go down as one of the most beloved first pets.

Karl Rove once described him as “a lump,” while former Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who owns a black labrador called Koni, is said to have remarked that such a small dog was unfitting for a world leader, the London Telegraph reports.

(Photo from www.barney.gov)