ohmidog!

The German shepherd thrown from an overpass onto Interstate 40 earlier this month is being adopted by the state trooper who was the first to come to his aid.

The dog has been named Rookie.

Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Jennifer Fisher plans to bring him home to her family, News9 reports.

The search for the person who threw the dog onto the highway in Oklahoma City — it was witnessed by a truck driver — continues, and the reward for information leading to an arrest has grown to $7,500.

Rookie had a fracture to his rear left leg and internal bleeding, and was treated and operated on at Oklahoma State University Veterinary College Teaching Hospital.

Anyone with information about the crime is asked to call the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s office at (405)-869-2501.

WSVN-TV –

A small dog who fell off Miami’s Brickell Avenue drawbridge as it was being opened was found alive and well the next day.

The mixed breed dog, wearing a pink sweater when she was thought to have plunged into the water, was found in a restricted area below the bridge. Bridge operators say the dog apparently landed on a cement slab.

David Bernstein stopped at the Brickell Avenue drawbridge Tuesday night and saw the dog going across it as it began opening.

He said he tried calling the dog back, and, along with other motorists, who were yelling and honking, tried to alert the bridge operator.

But the bridge continued rising and the dog continued across it.

The dog slid and appeared to have fallen into the Miami River.

Bernstein spent the next hour searching for the dog, without success. On Wednesday, he returned and talked to a drawbridge operator who checked the service areas under the bridge.

“And she said, the dog’s in there, five stories down,” Bernstein told the Miami Herald, “and I was just, I was blown away.”

The dog was taken to a veterinarian, who cleaned her up and pronounced her healthy. No owners have yet come forward.

You know we can’t pass up a homeless person and dog story — whether it’s one we stumble upon, or one somebody else has.

Erik Lacitis, of the Seattle Times, came across such a pair living in a 14-foot aluminum rowboat, anchored in a foot of water, under the pillars of the Highway 520 bridge.

There, William Kaphaem — who prefers his Mohawk name, “Three Stars” — lives, cocoon-like, with his  dog, Lulu, under a brown plastic tarp that, inside, affords a few feet of headroom and, outside, blends in with the muddy shore.

The story appeared in the Times yesterday.

Inside his rowboat home, Three Stars, who is 51, reads by lantern light and listens to baseball games on a battery-powered radio. Across the boat’s benches, he has laid a sheet of plywood that serves as his bed. Three Stars has five spinning rods he uses to catch perch, bass and the occasional trout, and a collapsible trap for catching crawdads.

Among the some 2,400 homeless counted living outside this January in the Seattle area, the newspaper says, his one of the more unusual living arrangements.

Three Stars told the reporter he moved onto the rowboat because he needed someplace to store his stuff.

“I’ve got a lot of stuff. I didn’t want to schlep it around town like some tramp,” he said. “I’ve got more dignity than that.”

He lives on $636 a month SSI, and until last year he was renting a room. But when the owner of the home died, he had to look for a new place.

Three Stars told Lacitis he’s prone to talking too much. He said he has held ”40 jobs in two years, and I got fired in all of them … Burger King, grocery store … sometimes I can’t shut my face.”

He grew up in Massachusetts and Florida, and came to Seattle to be a street musician. He used to play, with Lulu at his side, on the sidewalk outside of Pacific Place in downtown Seattle — until his wrist started falling asleep. Three Stars says Lulu is a mixture of wolf and husky, and is almost 10 years old.

Three Stars says he likes the solitude of the living arrangement he shares with Lulu.

“It’s a very peaceful experience.”

(Photo by Mark Harrison / Seattle Times)

After communing with the trees in Redwood Country, Ace and I rushed through the rest of northern California — high-tailing it through Marijuana Country, barreling through Wine Country and feeling a bit like the Joads as, being occupants of what was clearly the dirtiest car on the highway, we rolled through Rich Folk Country.

Humboldt, Mendocino and Marin Counties were but a blur as we hurried south — trying to get to the Monterey area in time for an appointment. We stopped in the San Francisco area only long enough to eat lunch and try to get a photograph of Ace at the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was a chicken salad sandwich that did me in — more specifically, the bread on which it was piled. My troublesome dental cap came off again — as it has every week or so, after which I put in in my pocket and, later, glue it back on.

This time, unless it’s somewhere in my duffel bag, I seem to have lost it.

There is a direct correlation between how much of a hurry you are in and how many things go wrong. Everybody knows this. Few do anything about it. One in a hurry is more likely to leave something behind, make a mistake, forget an important chore, or behave in a reckless manner. Eighty-seven percent of bad things that happen are a result of people being in too much of a hurry.

Maybe it’s not exactly 87 percent, but it’s a lot.

This is the kind of elementary, any-doofus-knows logic that self-help authors write books about — often speedily, and with errors. It’s nose-on-your-face obvious. And yet we — often at the encouragement of our employers — don’t slow down. Not a whit.

And definitely not on Highway 101, where, since we were southbound, we couldn’t get to the official scenic vista point — unless we were willing to cross the Golden Gate, and pay its tolls, three times.

Instead, we took the last exit before the bridge and drove up a hill that’s part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, then walked up a trail that takes one to the edge of a cliff overlooking the bridge.

Low hanging clouds obscured the arches, and a wispy cold white haze climbed the mountainside and drifted right through us. A foghorn bellowed up from somewhere below every minute or so, making Ace stop in his tracks and look around. After about 10 blasts, he got used to it.

We spent 30 minutes among the clouds, then hiked back down to the car, whizzed across the bridge and through San Francisco,  seeing some familiar sights but only fleetingly and through dirty car windows. As we got back along the coast, on Highway 1, we were back in the clouds, winding along a cliffside highway past San Pedro Mountain. All the way to Half Moon Bay, almost into Santa Cruz, the fog clung to the coast like silver Spandex on a bicyclist’s behind.

I thought about all I was missing — partly because of the view-obscuring fog, partly because of my rush through San Francisco. I didn’t see a single seal. I didn’t get to mosey along Fisherman’s Wharf.

I realized if I hadn’t spent time there before, I wouldn’t be having the regrets. But I had, and they were good times, and now, just like my tongue kept reaching up to probe the gap in my grin, just as my hand kept searching my pocket for the missing cap, just as I rued that I no longer had the chops for sourdough rolls, I was focused on the void.

Voids aren’t a good thing to focus on.

So I turned on the radio, and “Uncle John’s Band” by the Grateful Dead was playing, and it was the long version, and when I got to Monterey, I cleaned my car windows, ate some Vietnamese food and snuggled with Ace on the Motel 6 bedspread.

I was still on the lookout for my fake tooth, but my outlook was improved.

A Maryland man who threw a  teacup Chihuahua off a bridge was sentenced in Frederick, Maryland to four months in jail.

The dog, named Zoey, was never found after the incident and was presumed to have been killed.

David Beers, 35, was sentenced yesterday to  a three-year year term, but the judge suspended all but four months of it and ordered the unemployed cell tower technician to pay a $1,000 fine, perform 300 hours of community service and make restitution of $318 to the dog’s owners, Timothy and Caisha Wantz.

Beers apologized for stealing the dog in a fit of anger after the Wantzes ordered him off their property in rural Jefferson last year, according to the Associated Press. Beers had pulled into their driveway to make a cell phone call.

Beers put the dog in his car and threw it off a bridge and into a creek on the way home. He pleaded guilty to felony animal cruelty.

A man who threw a four-pound teacup Chihuahua named Zoey off a bridge in Maryland has entered a guilty plea, avoiding a trial scheduled to begin this week.

David Michael Beers, 35, of Brunswick , faces a maximum of 4 1/2 years in prison — three years for animal cruelty and 18 months for theft of the dog.

Judge G. Edward Dwyer Jr. has scheduled sentencing for June 7, giving him time to review a psychological evaluation of Beers. At that time, he will hear from Zoey’s owner, the Frederick News-Post reported.

During a hearing yesterday in Frederick County Circuit Court, Assistant State’s Attorney Colleen K. Swanson said she will seek some priosn time for Beers, to be followed by three years of probation. Swanson also wants Beers to complete an anger management program.

Beers was scheduled to go on trial today, but he instead entered a guilty plea.

Beers told investigators he got angry when the dog’s owners ordered him off their property, on which he had stopped in his car to use his cell phone. He left, but came back later and grabbed the dog, throwing it over a Catoctin Creek bridge as he drove home. The dog was never found.

A dog thrown off a bridge in Lithuania. A dog dragged to death at Colorado National Monument. A dog viciously kicked in a New York elevator.

We’ve shown you all of those in recent weeks at ohmidog! — because, though they are graphic and disturbing, we believe that they need to be seen.

So now we bring you this one of Lucky and Misty, dog and cat — graphic in a way that won’t turn your stomach, graphic in a way that we could use a little more of, graphic in a way that, maybe, we humans could learn from.

Global New Year’s Resolution: Be more like Lucky and Misty.

Despite earlier reports that she was expected to survive, the dog thrown off a bridge in Lithuania has died, according to the Lithuanian website that has been credited with helping to track down the man who was videotaped doing the deed.

The man seen in the video, believed to be Svajunas Beniukas, 22, was filmed by friends as he joked about proving “dogs can fly,” then throwing the dog – named Pipiras, which means Pepper — off the side of the bridge.

Miraculously, the dog, whose whimpers can be heard on the video, survived, until this weekend.

I haven’t found an English version of the story yet, but ohmidog! readers inform me that this article on the website 15min.lt reports her death. A rough translation of the article into English can be found here.

The dog, who reportedly belonged to a neighbor of the suspect, received treatment for multiple fractures and internal injuries. According to reports, Beniuk was upset with the dog for attacking his mother’s chickens.

The dog was dropped from a bridge in the Vilkija district in Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania.

After the video appeared on Lithuanian websites, and then around the world, dog lovers helped identify the man as Beniukas. Upon learning of the hunt online, he turned himself in to police.

The dog had allegedly killed some of his mother’s chickens at her home in the village of Seredzius.

Beniukas, who lives in Kaunas, has been charged with animal cruelty. If convicted, he faces up to a year in jail.

(WARNING: This video is graphic and disturbing)

A man in Lithuania who arranged to have himself filmed throwing a dog over the side of a bridge — and then posted the video online — was forced to turn himself in today after internet groups tracked him down and outed him.

The video, posted on Lithuanian websites, quickly spread across the Internet, prompting Facebook groups and others to call for him to be brought to justice.

The film, which appeared to have been taken from a mobile phone, showed the man carrying the dog to the side of the bridge. He speaks to the camera, making jokes about the videotaping, and how it will prove dogs can fly, while the dog rests calmly in his arms. Then he nonchalantly drops the dog over the side of the bridge.

The dog survived the fall and its whimpers can be heard on the video.

Outraged viewers on Lithuanian websites and international sites such as Reddit.com chased after the man’s identity, and police, with help from web users, determined the dog was dropped from a bridge in the Vilkija district in the city of Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania.

Police said a website they identified as www.15.min.lt was instrumental in identifying the man as Svajunas Beniuk.

The dog was rescued, received treatment for multiple fractures and internal injuries and was expected to survive. Beniuk was expected to be charged with animal cruelty, according to MailOnline.

(Note: The dog, named Pepper, later died. The updated story can be found here.)

A Louisville man with a lengthy arrest record has been charged with second-degree cruelty to animals for allegedly throwing a pit bull off the Clark Memorial Bridge into the Ohio River.

Damon D. Bledsoe, 39, of 210 E. Ormsby Ave., was arrested Tuesday morning and arraigned Wednesday.

Four witnesses contacted Louisville’s Metro Animal Services to report that Bledsoe allegedly spoke of throwing the dog off the bridge, and allegedly threatened to do the same to a witnesses’ cats.

The dog survived the 80-foot fall to the river and was adopted by a waitress at a nearby Joe’s Crab Shack who witnessed the rescue.

Court records show Bledsoe has been arrested on 99 separate charges since 2002, ranging from domestic violence to disorderly conduct to theft to public intoxication, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Kelsey Westbrook, the waitress who adopted the pit bull and named her Sunny, said the dog has recovered from her minor injuries and is “as happy as she can be.”

“She’s a 60-pound lapdog. … She’s got a little bit of separation anxiety, which I think is expected given what she’s been through. I think she trusts me now and knows I’m not going to leave her or put her in danger.”

Earlier this summer, Westbrook faced the loss of her apartment because she had adopted the pit bull, but she said the building got a new landlord who has let her and Sunny remain.