ohmidog!

I think that I shall never see
a tree unscathed by doggie pee

                         – Not Joyce Kilmer

Maybe there are some out there — a tree or two that, in their lifetimes, have somehow avoided ever being annointed by dog.

But, sharing the country with 75 million dogs, as both trees and we do, that is unlikely — and even more so in paved-over urban areas, where dogs sometimes outnumber trees, the living things they seem to most like to pee on.

For centuries, there seems to have been an unwritten agreement — a pee-ful coexistence — between dogs and trees. But, at least for half a century or so, there have been worries expressed about the cumulative effect of the continual sprinkling that some trees undergo, especially those in densely populated urban areas.

Some were recently voiced by a Philadelphia woman with an interesting perspective. Carrie Maria owns Monster Minders, a Philadelphia dog-walking service, and she’s a graduate of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Tree Tenders program.

“Urine is highly acidic,” Maria wrote on the  The Monster Minders blog. “Simply put, dogs’ urine ‘burns’ the tree’s trunk to the point that the tree becomes susceptible to diseases, pests, dehydration and nutrient loss.”

Maria’s report drew the attention of The Atlantic, which ran a lengthy piece on its blog, Atlantic Cities, complete with photos she had taken of disfigured trees in her neighborhood she says are likely victims of pee-blight.

We can’t confirm that the damaged trees she photographed (pictured here) are solely victims of dog pee — and neither could experts. But we give her credit for speaking up for the underdog, which in this particular case is trees.

“Your dog ‘marks’ the tree, then another dog walks by 10 minutes later, smells your dog’s scent and hits it again, 15 minutes later and another dog walks by, hits it again.  This goes on day in and day out …  One dog’s scent ends up on a tree and others just keep marking it, over and over until the tree is compromised.”

Where I live — not in a real big city, not downtown — the yard in front of my apartment has huge oak trees, planted probably a good half century ago, or more. Ace pees on his favorite one regularly, but it’s so well-established it doesn’t seem to mind, and show no signs of damage.

About this time of year, the oak trees start raining acorns, and every once in a while one drops and hits Ace in the head. He jumps up and looks around, unaware he has been the victim of poetic justice.

Impervious as the big oaks in my yard may be, saplings in cities — the ones growing in a few square feet of dirt, the ones that have become potty stops for dozens of dogs daily — are another story.

“Repeated hits with urine basically causes an ‘open wound’ right on the base on the tree.  Since the bombardment from pee is semi-constant in an urban environment, the trees never have a chance to heal from past damage.  These wounds open the trees up to a slew of diseases that they just can’t fight off.” Maria wrote.

Her solution: Curb your dog.

It’s an old phrase, and one that – outside of places like New York — lots of people don’t even understand. It means to pee where the street meets the curb. And while that may lead to gutters running yellow, and car tires taking on a pee-scent, thereby attracting more to dogs to take aim on them, Maria finds that preferable to the tree assault.

“It’s simple.  Redirect your dog when he/she is headed for a tree,” Maria says. ”Teach your dog to ‘curb it.’”

How big a factor is dog pee, compared to all the other hazards urban trees face — like road salt, car doors, poor soil, limited room to grow and youths with pen knives? As the Atlantic Cities blog points out, experts aren’t sure:

“Whether pee hurts trees is a question that’s attracted virtually no research attention since its earliest mention in the academic literature …”

The post mentions one presentation, way back in 1959, in which a plant pathologist named Pascal Pirone warned of the dangers. In ‘Why shade trees die along city streets,’ a presentation given at the International Shade Tree Conference, he said ‘dog canker’ could kill trees up to 6 inches in diameter.”

But the Atlantic post also quoted a staff member at the Smithsonian Institution’s horticulture department as saying the trunk damage shown in Maria’s photos could have come from a number of causes, “including mechanical damage [i.e. mowers, car doors, pedestrians], southwest injury, disease [cankers], and insects [borers].”

While the extent of the harm caused by dog urine remains untallied, most experts agree it can’t be helping trees.

“We deal with it in the sense that I imagine trees get added stress or maybe anxiety” from dogs, says John Thomas, associate director at Washington, D.C.’s Urban Forestry Administration. “I don’t know how much dog urine you need to kill a tree. But there’s definitely something there…. Somebody could definitely get a masters or Ph.D. out of studying it.”

(Photos: Top photo by John Woestendiek; tree photos by Carrie Maria / Monster Minders)

The assault against the Humane Society of the United States has become a double-barreled one, with two  groups publicly urging Americans to donate their money to individual animal shelters instead of the national animal welfare organization.

HumaneWatch, a project of the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), is issuing a “consumer alert,” in the form of a national television ad (above), reminding Americans to be wary of “the deceptive fundraising practices of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).”

The television ad campaign comes a week after the newly formed Humane Society for Shelter Pets (HSSP) took out full page ads in national newspapers, making the same claim.

Both groups have a connection to Washington lobbyist Richard Berman. He’s the founder and operator of the CCF, and acknowledges that his public relations firm helped get HSSP of the ground.

Both the Humane Watch and HSSP ads make the point that only 1 percent of money donated to HSUS ends up going to care for cats and dogs at local shelters, even though those animals are most commonly featured in HSUS fundraising appeals.

CCF says it examined 28 HSUS ads that ran from January 2009 through September 2011 and found that more than 85 percent of the animals shown in the ads were shelter dogs and cats.

Humane Watch says HSUS fundraising appeals perpetuate the misperception that HSUS is an organization that primarily supports pet shelters.

“HSUS uses emotionally manipulative ads to raise money on the backs of abandoned and abused dogs and cats, yet it gives just one penny of each dollar it raises to local pet shelters,” said CCF Senior Research Analyst J. Justin Wilson. “HumaneWatch.org wants to ensure that donations go to support the cause donors intend. If they want their dollars to aid cats and dogs in their community they should give directly to local pet shelters instead of inadvertently bankrolling HSUS’s aggressive animal rights agenda.”

HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle denies that HSUS advertising is misleading, and while he doesn’t dispute that only 1 percent of donations are passed on to local shelters, points out that the organization’s mission extends to protecting all animals, and that much more money is spent on its dog-related campaigns, such as those against dogfighting and puppy mills.

Last week, on his blog, Pacelle blasted Berman – both professionally and personally –  portraying him as intent on undermining the reputation of HSUS because many of its causes run contrary to industries Berman represents:

In forming his new group, [Rick Berman] hasn’t come out and said he likes cruelty. He’s hoping you forgot his efforts to defend sealing, puppy mills, and other forms of abuse. But today, by saying all animal welfare money should go to animal shelters, he’s saying that no money should go to combat puppy mills, animal fighting ventures, factory farms, captive hunts, the exotic animal trade, the fur trade, or other animal welfare problems.

Berman repeated Pacelle’s above remark, and Pacelle’s references to him as a “con man” and “king of charity fraud,” on his blog — at the same time labeling those comments libelous:

“… I realized last week that when it comes to ‘nasty,’ I’m a novice. If you really want to learn something about how to wage a nasty (and I mean vicious) battle, look no further than Wayne Pacelle, CEO of The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). In the past his organization has hired people to stalk and photograph me at my home, hired unemployed journalists to write hit pieces about me, filed erroneous and failed ethics complaints, and he has made reams of false and libelous claims about my organization’s motives and our funders. But recently he’s taken his personal brand of intimidation and harassment to a whole new level.”

Bermann acknowledged that his firm, Berman and Company, helped get HSSP off the ground.  But he said while he supports new organization, he neither runs nor manages it.

Berman contacted ohmidog! last week, demanding that Pacelle’s “false and defamatory” remarks be removed from this website. We declined to do so, but did offer to publish his response in its entirety.

It follows: 

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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.

It’s not often that I share the personal frustrations of being a dog-blogger — especially one who tries to stand out from the crowd by keeping a lid on the pablum and fluff, and presenting from time to time some stories of depth about important dog-related issues.

Yesterday was a case in point.

I posted three items — about the daily average for ohmidog!

One was a mention of an upcoming motorcycle ride, sponsored by a motorcycle club and Baltimore’s Anti-Animal Abuse Task Force, to raise money for abused and abandoned dogs.

One was a story about a day of global protest against eating dogs in South Korea.

One was an update on a story I wrote a few years back after meeting in Los Angeles a homeless man and his three legged pit bull (her fourth leg was lost as a result of a police shooting). Both have fallen ill and need help.

I was especially proud of the latter two, as they both contained some original reporting, and original photographs, and displayed a little first hand knowledge I had gathered, mostly during the year and a half I was working on my book.

Checking my Google Analytics, as I do from time to time, I saw this morning that the dog-eating post (of global significance) drew 116 views; the post on Michael and Topaz (of national significance) got 46 views; and the post on the fundraising motorcyle ride (of local significance) got 16 views.

What drew most readers to ohmidog! yesterday — 676 of them — was a post, nearly 50 days old, about Jennifer Aniston getting her dog Norman’s name tatooed on her foot.

Thereby showing you the significance of celebrities. It blows my mind.

How people try to remember and memorialize their dogs is a legitimate story — and a large part of the book I wrote — and the fact that more people are going the tattoo route, as the New York Post reported this week, is worthy of note.

But let’s face it, it was Jennifer Aniston that brought me those readers — and while I appreciate her, and those readers who dropped by, it bugs me that her foot tattoo so overshadowed two stories of deeper importance and deeper humanity. But, despite all that’s in the bowl, they chose only that.

My little corner of the universe, or the Internet, serves it seems as a microcosm of what’s happened to the news media, which, to survive, has caved in to the pressure to give readers easily consumable, barely newsworthy bits of what they want, rather than fully fleshed out stories on topics of greater importance to the species, be it human or dog.

Looking at my Analytics — and I think it’s OK to share this proprietary information, given that I am the proprietor — a total of 435 pages and posts were viewed yesterday, 1,941 views in all.

The vast majority, though, were focused on Jennifer Aniston’s foot.

For those consumed with numbers, and getting them to increase, and paying the bills, the thinking would reasonably follow: We need more Jennifer Aniston, more tattoos, more feet, or more of whoever or whatever else is, at this given moment, “trending.”

Here’s one of the things that has happened. News organizations, and bloggers, see what’s “trending” and base their coverage on that, thereby making it “trend” even more, while items of higher significance — worth some digging up — fall unseen by the wayside.

Add to that the fact that those who write strictly for the Internet, often, are no longer writing for humans. Instead of writing for quality, instead of writing, even, for readers, they’re writing for robots — those search engine Peruse-a-trons that scan our words, mathematically determine their import and influence how many readers come our way.

Add to that the fact that average online writer now spends more time touting what he has written via social networks and elsewhere than actually writing what he has written. Time once spent on research and the craft of writing is now mostly absorbed by shouting about and hyping what one has written, even if that “writing” was little more than a cut and paste job.

We’ll even admit to doing some of that — what is now called “aggregating,” what was once called plagiarism. We’ll admit to touting stories we’re proud of on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll even admit to, once in a while, posting a story because we think it will draw a crowd.

Were ohmidog! a true money-making venture — which in some ways would make more sense than being poor and principled — we might follow the route that so many have, bringing you a steady diet of the cute, the happy, the adorable and the celebrity-related.

But, Jennifer Aniston aside, we plan to continue to vary our fare — presenting the cute, from time to time; the uplifting, as often as we can find it; but also the cruel and depraved acts of humans that lead to animal suffering.

If, in the three years we’ve existed (did I mention we’ve just turned 3?) and in the 3,000 posts we’ve posted, ohmidog! has shown anything, it is this: the depths to which humans can sink and the heights to which they can rise when it comes to dogs.

We’re going to keep doing that.

And you can tattoo that on your foot.

With a deep bass toot, the ferry to Connecticut began churning across Long Island Sound. I leaned over the railing and, as the water rushed by, felt a deep sense of accomplishment — for the ground we’ve already covered and that which we will be covering in the second phase of our trip.

Ace not being around — he was inside the car in the ferry’s gut — I gave myself, figuratively, of course, a pat on the back. This was a good idea — my highly original plan to copy (more or less) John Steinbeck’s trip. Others have retraced the route, and written about it, but I had the foresight to be starting off exactly 50 years to the day after Steinbeck did.

I had just settled on a bench, and had stopped patting myself, when Bill Steigerwald walked by, camera around his neck, notepad at his side, taking it all in and looking at passengers that way reporters look at people — like they are cuts of meat that might be worth tasting — as he pursued his highly original plan … to copy John Steinbeck’s trip.

So we sat and talked, comparing notes about our highly original plans to copy John Steinbeck’s trip. We decided, I think, that we liked each other, and concluded that though our goals our similar — a book, somewhere down the road – we weren’t barking up, or peeing on, the same tree.

Steigerwald, like me, was a career newspaper guy. We both accepted buyout offers from our newspapers — he in 2009, from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, me in 2008 from the Baltimore Sun — in hopes that, if we continued our writerly ways, we might survive in 21st Century America without having to become fast food cooks, Wal-Mart greeters, or strip club flaks. And both of us are now self-subsidizing our travels in hopes that some day, in some way, somebody might want to buy what we want to write.

We are both brilliant, in a stupid kind of way; or maybe we’re stupid, in a brilliant kind of way.

Steigerwald, who is traveling doglessly, is reporting on his trip — which will be a more precise retracing of Steinbeck’s route than mine — for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he also once worked. He, like me, is blogging about it daily.

Bill is 62, five years older than me, but I think we’re both among a large group of once-and-maybe-still-somewhat-idealistic baby boomer former reporters who jumped ship amid the industry’s downward spiral. Now we’re seeking a flotation device. In my case, at least, I’ve continued doing what I’ve always done — write stories — even though I’m not paid (other than by my fine advertisers) for it. I wonder if people who have left other careers do that — keep plying their trade even though the salary and benefits have stopped.  To some extent, I think yes. One’s job gets in one’s blood. So retired lawyers probably keep arguing long after their last case closed. Former politicians probably continue to lie. TV weather reporters likely continue to make erroneous forecasts.

Possibly the whistling ferry loader in charge of getting cars aboard the boat yesterday will keep whistling, waving his arms, complaining about “f***in’ management” and saying things like, “Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll wave youse up,” for at least several months after he starts drawing a pension.

With writers, though, I think that runs even deeper — either because we see it as somehow noble, or because we don’t know how do do anything else. Like dogs, we tend to keep following and sniffing along the trail we are on. It’s not a totally mindless pursuit. We do what we know how to do. We know there might be something good ahead.

Not knowing, either, how to board a ferry, I just followed the shouted orders yesterday. I didn’t get a ticket in advance, so I paid $61 for my sound crossing; Bill, clearly a better planner than me, paid $49.

I took him down to the bowels of the ferry, and we compared vehicles. He has a red sport utility much like the one I’m in, but his backseat — because he’s not toting a dog — is open, with a large mattress he can sleep on. I showed him my dog, then took Ace up on the deck, which I had assumed wasn’t allowed, but actually was.

Bill fell for Ace, but, as he wrote today, was kind of glad – after seeing how much space my dog took up in my vehicle — that he didn’t have a dog along.

We parted ways — both intent on continuing our highly original plans to copy John Steinbeck’s trip — agreeing to try to meet up again in Maine or Michigan or Montana. As he plans to complete his trip in six weeks, I’ll probably be lagging behind, though.

As I waited my turn to pull off the ferry, I wondered what Charley — now buried behind John Steinbeck’s house in Sag Harbor – would make of it all: all these literary/scholarly/newspaper/blogging types who, over the years, have seen fit to repeat the trek that he made with his master.

Silly humans, he might think, following their so-called instincts, which aren’t very good in the first place.

My guess is he would get a good doggie chuckle out of it all. He’d probably break into a poodle smile.

“Ftt,” he’d say.

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)

I was honored to learn today that ohmidog! is in the running for a “Mobbie” — a new series of awards for the best blogs in Maryland, sponsored by the Baltimore Sun.

I’m even more honored to learn that we are in the category “misfits.”

Click the link on the top of our leftside rail to vote for us, though I should point out it does requiring logging in and setting up an account with the Sun – meaning not that you have to subscribe, only that they will probably bug you to later.

As I am a good week late learning of this competition, and as dogs don’t get to vote, I don’t hold out much hope of  besting the other “misfits.”

But a respectable showing would be nice — at least topping, say, “The Baltimore Sewing Examiner.”

There’s a new animal blogger in town, and she used to be my boss.

Mary Corey, the Baltimore Sun’s features editor has taken over my old Sun blog (“Mutts”), given it a new name (“Unleashed,” not to be confused with the sister paper Los Angeles Times pet and animal blog) and is off and running.

The revamped blog launched last week with a poignant debut entry on the death, two months ago, of Mary’s dog, Gracie.

We’ve added Unleashed to our blogroll, and we wish Mary all the best in her new venture.

 
We thought we’d take this occasion — our 500th post — to bring you up to date on how ohmidog! is doing. We are, after all, turning six months old on Sunday.

Since we started in August, our readership — both in terms of visitors and page views — has been doubling about every month. In the last month alone, nearly 35,000 of you stopped by, visiting nearly 50,000 pages. We’ve hooked up with 10 sponsors, whose advertisements can be seen running down the rail to the left. We’ve become an official news organization, at least in the eyes of Google, which  now includes our posts in its “news” search.

We’ve (temporarily at least) reclaimed our banner space — used for advertising in most blogs – and instituted a “best of ohmidog!” feature that has proven popular. Our “Behave!” column kicked off last month, a monthly feature about dog training and behavioral issues. (You can find the link to its archives on the tabs on our right-side rail.)

We’ve done our best to keep up with local purveyors of dog goods and services, which we list for free in our “Doggie directory,” and tried as well to keep up with area dog-related events (see “Doggie Doings”) — also findable through the tabs on the right. We’ve done a bit of doggie do-gooding, taking part in BARCStoberfest as an official sponsor and raising money for BARCS Franky Fund for sick and injured animals.

We’ve held true to our mission — staying on top of dog news (and sometimes even having it first) and, while not proclaiming ourselves spokesman for dogs, watching out for their interests and well-being and making the public aware of any threats thereto.

We also have avoided using fancy words like “thereto,” at least up to now.

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