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Caught raiding a chicken coop in rural Wyoming, a blue heeler named Bo was shot twice, tossed in a barrel, doused with gasoline and set on fire.

According to the Washakie County Sheriff’s Office, an 18-year-old neighbor shot the dog — after returning home and finding it was going after the family chickens.

Then, thinking Bo was dead, he asked his father what to do with the dog’s body.

“I said, ‘Burn it,’” the father, Mike Gerber, told the Casper Star-Tribune. ” …We have had other predators come around — and even our chickens that the dog had killed — how we got rid of them was we just burned them.”

His son, Wesley Gerber, dragged the dog to a burn barrel in the front yard, doused the dog with gasoline, and threw in a match.

“The next thing you know, the dog comes popping up out of there in flames,”  Mike Gerber told the newspaper. Bo ran around in a circle, and then home.

Ben and Abby Redland, Bo’s owners, said when Bo ran into the house “there was this terrible smell … His hair was melted and fallling out. He was still smoldering.” 

Bo was rushed to a vet. Bullets had grazed his cheek and back, and he had third-degree burns over most of his body. “Bo was in such shock, the vet didn’t think he’d make it,” Abby Redland told the Los Angeles Times.

Since the incident — back in December, in rural Worland, Wyoming, 150 miles north of Casper — three-year-old Bo has fully recovered, though he has a few scars.

The Redlands have taken out a restraining order on the Gerbers. And they’re pushing to change Wyoming law and introduce measures that require those who shoot pets to at least contact the animal’s owners.

“I wish it never happened,” Mike Gerber said. “The decisions being made were made fast. Maybe if they would’ve been thought through more clearly, we would’ve done things differently.”

(Photo: By Abby Redland, via Los Angeles Times)

Inundated with angry calls and emails, the Austin police department has reassigned the officer involved in the fatal shooting of a dog Saturday.

In addition to taking a closer look at the incident, in which a blue heeler named Cisco was shot by an officer who had responded to wrong address,  the department says it is re-examining its policies.

“This incident has drawn a lot of attention,” Assistant Police Chief David Carter told the Austin American-Statesman.

“We’ve received a lot of calls, a lot of emails from people who are very concerned. And we are, too,” he said.

Cisco, owned by Michael Paxton, was shot  by officer Thomas Griffin, who was responding to a call about a domestic disturbance. Griffin arrived at the wrong address by mistake and said he shot the dog after it charged him.

Paxton denies that Cisco behaved aggressively, but reports indicate that at least two complaints had previously been filed with animal control about the dog — one by a woman who claimed she’d been bitten when she tried to pet him in a parking lot.

While originally discounting Paxton’s version of events and saying the officer acted properly, police officials showed a more conciliatory tone Wednesday.

“The bottom line is, we have a citizen who was going about his business, who was not involved in criminal or suspicious activity,” Carter said. “And he loses his dog. … That’s a big deal, and we recognize that.”

Carter said the official review includes the 911 call and how dispatchers responded to it, the officer’s tactics and what happened afterward. Carter said the department is also examining its policies and training for animal encounters.

The review will also look at whether the recent shooting death of an Austin officer might have resulted in “hypervigilance” on Griffin’s part when he encountered the dog, Police Chief Art Acevedo said.

The shooting garnered national attention. A Facebook page called “Justice for Cisco” has more than 71,000 supporters that have left messages of support and, often, outrage.

Acevedo offered condolences to Cisco’s owner during an interview on the “Dudley and Bob Morning Show” on KLBJ FM Radio.

“My heart goes out to him. I think if you ask everybody in the department, believe it or not, we’re animal lovers, just like everybody else,” Acevedo said

Michael Paxton says he and his Australian cattle dog, Cisco, were playing Frisbee in his backyard when a police officer approached.

The officer, he says, pointed a gun at him and told him to put his hands in the air. That was about the time Cisco ran over and started barking at the officer, KXAN reports.

Paxton says he assured the officer that his dog would not hurt him, but when Cisco approached the officer fired, killing the dog with one shot.

The entire incident took place Saturday afternoon on Paxton’s property in Austin.

While there are reports that the officer, answering a domestic disturbance call, responded to the wrong house, Austin police would neither confirm nor deny that over the weekend, saying only that they were reviewing the incident.

Paxton and friends, meanwhile, have set up a  Justice For Cisco Facebook page that has more than 14,000 likes.

APD spokesman Anthony Hipolito said an investigation is continuing, and told the Austin American-Statesman, “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

Paxton insists the officer had no reason to question him or shoot his dog.

“He had a Taser. He had pepper spray. I don’t understand why, in broad daylight, he pulled a gun on me. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t hiding,” Paxton told ABCNews.com today. “I was just saying, ‘I live here.’ I was panicking. I was afraid for my life.”

Paxton said the officer said he was responding to report of a man choking a woman. Paxton does not have a girlfriend and believes the report came from his neighbor’s house.

Paxton said the officer did not apologize; nor did a sergeant who arrived and told Paxton the officer was within his rights to shoot the dog. Paxton said he has not heard from the police since the incident.

“I don’t get it,”  Steven Clay Romero said when ordered held without bond  yesterday on charges of killing a dog by dragging it behind a pickup truck for two miles at  the Colorado National Monument.

Here’s hoping, if convicted, he does get it — and all else he might deserve.

Romero, 37, of Fruita, Colo., is scheduled for a detention hearing and arraignment Monday afternoon.

Upon Romero’s expression of bewilderment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer rose from her seat at the bail hearing, walked toward Romero and tossed a copy of the charges on the table in front of him, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

Romero, who told U.S. Magistrate Judge Laird Milburn that he is a truck driver, expressed concern about sitting in jail over the weekend.

“So, in other words I’ll be sitting in jail and probably lose my job, too?” Romero asked Milburn.

“Yes,” the judge answered.

According to an arrest affidavit, after the dogs dragged body was found, a review of video surveillance at a park entrance showed a double-cab pickup entering the park early Wednesday with a dog and exiting 12 minutes later without one.

The affidavit said the dog, a shepherd-blue heeler mix named Buddy, had been stolen in Delta by an associate of Romero’s and taken to a home in Fruita where Romero was staying.

A resident of Delta recognized the dog from a photo of his body online and contacted authorities. A witness to the dog’s theft provided officials with a license plate number, which led them to a home in Fruita where Romero was staying. National Park Service rangers went to the Fruita home and found paw prints in the snow in the front yard and rope similar to that used to tie the dog to the truck.

The rangers interviewed Romero’s sister, who told them Romero said he was going to kill the dog. “She stated he left with the dog late last night and returned home a half hour later without it,” the affidavit said. The affidavit makes no mention of a motive for killing the dog.

A news release from monument officials said Romero was arrested Thursday morning at the Mesa County Justice Center after he appeared for an unrelated criminal case. He faces a maximum three years in prison, a fine up to $100,000 and a year of mandatory parole if convicted on a federal charge of felony cruelty to animals.

Romero was arrested six times in the past seven years by police in Montrose and Grand Junction on a variety of charges, including weapons offenses, traffic violations and drug distribution, according to court records.

(For subsequent posts and all of our coverage of Buddy, click here.)

It may not look like it, but Chris Rickard, a farmer in Australia, said the fight he put up to save his dog from an angry kangaroo that was trying to drown it, ended in a draw.

Rickard, 49, said he was walking his blue heeler Rocky on Sunday morning when they surprised a sleeping kangaroo in Arthur’s Creek, northeast of Melbourne. The dog chased the animal into a pond, where the kangaroo then turned and pinned the pet underwater. Rickard dove in and tried to pull his dog free, but the kangaroo turned on him, too.

Rickard said he managed to end the attack , and save his dog, when he elbowed the kangaroo in the throat as it tried to hold him under water, The Herald Sun reported.

“I thought I might take a hit or two dragging the dog out from under his grip, but I didn’t expect him to actually attack me,” Rickard said. “I was stuck having to hold onto the dog with both hands because it was half drowned and I couldn’t really see anything because the kangaroo just ripped into me.”

You can see a video of Rickard, recounting the incident from his hospital bed, here.

(Photo via Herald Sun)

Skidboot the Amazing Dog – More free videos are here

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.