ohmidog!

A state representative from Charlotte says he’s already getting “beaten up” for a bill he filed this week that would restrict ownership of six breeds of dog the proposed legislation deems aggressive.

House Bill 956 would create a new “aggressive dog” classification for pit bulls, Rottweilers, mastiffs, chows, Presa Canarios, wolf hybrids and any dogs “that are predominantly” a mix of those, WRAL reports.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rodney Moore, D-Mecklenburg, said of those breeds, ”I don’t want to say those were the ones with the most incidents, but they were the most prevalent by the feedback that I’ve gotten.”

In other words, the proposed legislation doesn’t let facts get in the way.

Under the bill, prospective “aggressive breed” owners would have to undergo a criminal background check, apply and pay for a special state permit, notify their property insurer, and take a 4-hour education course before adopting, buying, or “otherwise taking possession of” one of the dogs.

Moore said the idea was brought to him by a concerned constituent.

“There needs to be some kind of accountability,” Moore said. “A lot of people breed them the wrong way. You have very harsh incidents of these dogs maiming children, maiming older folks, and sometimes even turning on their owner.”

The bill calls for county sheriff’s to provide the criminal background checks and report the findings to the state Department of Insurance. It would have the authority to deny a permit to anyone whose background check “is not suitable for the ownership of a dog belonging to an aggressive dog breed.”

The “aggressive dog permit” could cost as much as $25. Under the bill, the Department of Insurance could require additional insurance coverage be taken out by owners of the dogs.

“I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about it, saying I’m trying to blacklist these dogs, and that’s not the intent,” Moore said. “It’s just to let people take responsibility for owning those breeds.”

The representative’s email address is Rodney.Moore@ncleg.net

Once called H.D. — for Homeless Dog — and now known as Bear-Bear, a chow mix has been living for years with the homeless who come, go and camp along the railroad tracks on the southern edge of downtown Greensboro.

Greensboro News-Record columnist Jeri Rowe says it has been at least four years since he first noticed Bear-Bear — a reclusive sort, a bit skittish when it comes to outsiders — and some say she has been around for as many as eight.

“I’ve tried to get close,” Rowe wrote in a column about the dog yesterday. “Can’t. She runs away and disappears like the wind. But minutes later, she’ll reappear out of nowhere — staring, making sure I don’t get anywhere close … Bear-Bear is like an afternoon shadow. She bobs and weaves in between the spindly oaks beside the homeless camp and disappears only to come back minutes later, atop her knoll of dirt to lie in the sun.”

Bear-Bear serves as guardian and mascot of the homeless encampment and, in exchange, gets enough handouts to survive — like dog biscuits, spaghetti, Hamburger Helper and whatever else her human counterparts might be able to scrounge up, Rowe noted:

“She fascinates me. She’s beautiful with a thick coat of fur that shines black, brown, cinnamon and cream in the winter sun…But what gets me is … that the very people who desperately need help are the very people who help her.”

Rowe writes that he ran into the dog most recently while attending a seminar on homelessness at the Interactive Resource Center, which provides services to the needy, sometimes more than 250 of them a day.

Rowe talked with one of Bear-Bear’s caretakers  — a 48-year-old man who has gout in both legs, walks with a cane,and has a bad heart. The first time they met, Rowe wrote, the man, named Keith, wore a t-shirt that said “Don’t Analyze Me. It’s a Deep Dark Hole, and You Don’t Want To Go There.”

Keith lives in a tent near the hole Bear-Bear sleeps in, and shares his food with her:

“I’m out here, and I get help, so why not help her?” Keith told him. “Ain’t an abundant supply of wild animals to eat, and we know she has to eat. We feed her. Everybody loves her…

“She is pretty smart. She has survived like we have, and you know, it goes to show you, it don’t make no difference how hard it gets. You can still survive through thick and thin.”

(Photo: H. Scott Hoffman / Greensboro News-Record)

An Indiana man left his son in the hospital while he went to exact revenge on the dog that bit the boy, police say.

Determined to kill the dog, the man, from Michigan City, stabbed the animal and attempted to strangle it, but was interrupted by police, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

The dog’s injuries were so severe it had to be euthanized, said a spokesman for the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.

The 29-year-old man, who wasn’t identified, will be charged with felony cruelty to an animal. Police did not release information on the injured boy or the extent of his injuries.

Police said the suspect’s son and daughter were spending the weekend with his mother and stepfather. On Friday night, the couple’s shepherd-chow mix was eating a bone when the boy lay down on the floor next to it. The dog bit him in the face, according to the police report.

The suspect told police he became enraged when he arrived at the hospital and saw his son’s injuries.

He left and went to his ex-wife’s home, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, took the dog into the backyard and stabbed it in the side, he told officers. He had his arm around the animal’s throat and was choking it when officers, who’d been told what he was doing, arrived at the home and stopped him.

An elementary school teacher called police and confessed to beating his dog to death after the Lab-Chow mix soiled himself, authorities said.

“Why did I do this? I’m an animal,” the fourth grade teacher reportedly told officers.

Derek Fierro, a teacher at Eugene Field Elementary School in Rogers Park, was ordered held in lieu of $200,000 bail Saturday. He faces a felony count of aggravated cruelty to animals and was ordered by a judge to not possess or have contact with any animals.

About 3 a.m. on Friday, Fierro, 25, called police and told them he had beaten his dog to death at his home in Lake View, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

When police arrived, he handed officers his car keys and they found the dog Fierro adopted, named Doc, in his trunk, according to court documents.

Police said Fierro told them he beat the dog with his fists after he returned home and found that the dog had defecated on himself.

“I got home and he had eaten through every piece of paper,” Fierro told officers. “He (defecated on) himself, so I put him in a tub. I was gonna give him a bath, and he didn’t want to get in the bath and I got mad.”

(Photo: Chicago Canine Rescue Foundation)

(An update to this story can be found here.) 

Apparently gunning down stray dogs on the streets wasn’t enough for the dog unfriendly officials of Cumberland County, North Carolina.

Now they want to slay, within 72 hours, every dog that comes into the shelter who is, or appears to be a mix of: 

American Staffordshire terrier, Rottweiller, Akita, chow chow, Doberman pinscher, German shepherd, Great Dane, Presa Canario, Siberian husky or mastiff. There’s a convenient catch-all pit bull category as well.

They’re not doing it yet, despite what you may be reading on the misinformation highway.

But they’re talking about it.

The county’s Animal Control Board is recommending that authorities limit the adoption of the above dog breeds, or, as one county official referred to them, ”attack animals.” (Clearly, they haven’t met many Great Danes.)

The idea is only in the discussion stages, but many websites are reporting –erroneously — that the new policy goes into effect today.

“I’ve probably had 1,500 emails,” said John Lauby, director of Cumberland County Animal Control. (Here’s hoping he gets about 150,000 more.)

Lauby told a Fayetteville Observer columnist that misinformation on the Internet led people to believe the county will ban adoption of pit bulls and other breeds starting Monday, and immediately euthanize any members of those breeds in the shelter.

In reality, the county hasn’t taken that medieval step, it’s just considering it.

“We’re looking at a list of animals used as attack animals,” County Commissioner Charles Evans said. “It has been suggested that something needs to be done about those.”

The recommendation would have to make its way through a committe and then require approval by the county commissioners before going into effect. But it’s scheduled to be introduced at a meeting tonight. (6 p.m., at Cumberland County Animal Services, 4704 Corporation Drive, Fayetteville).

Lauby said animal control constantly receives calls from residents complaining about dogs behaving aggressively or running loose, preventing people from getting into their cars.

“We have an inordinate number of pit bulls in the county that are chasing people, chasing dogs, they’re on school grounds and generally bother people,” he said. “The reality is that about 80 percent of our calls are related to that particular breed.”

Complaints from the public also led Cumberland County to hire an outside contractor to capture stray dogs in and around Fayetteville — a massive roundup that started in August and, at last report, led to more dogs being gunned down than caught alive.

Fayetteville doesn’t have its own animal control department, instead relying on the county office to handle dog-related issues.

As I’ve implied before, that might be part of the problem — the problem, in my view, being not just too many uncontrolled dogs, but too many unenlightened public servants, who see dogs as foes and death as a solution.

Maybe it’s the army base influence. In any event, someone needs to usher Cumberland County into modern times.

In a way, the proposed policy — while it it lists some new ”public enemy” breeds, like the husky, and some returning ones, like the shepherd — would only formalize what’s already common practice in the county.

Since April, Cumberland County Animal Control has taken in nearly 1,300 pit bulls, but only 124 have been adopted. The shelter has taken in 180 Rottweilers since then, only 26 of whom were adopted. Of 96 chow chows received at the shelter since April, 15 have been adopted, according to the Fayetteville Observer.

The rest are euthanized.

Now, some want to make it official, banning the adoption of any of those breeds and guaranteeing a death sentence for all of them, or any mixes thereof — all based on what will likely be, judging from the wisdom they’ve shown so far, an uneducated guess.

In addition to complaints, worries about liability issues are also behind the proposal. The county fears it might be held responsible for any damage done by dogs adopted from its shelter. Most shelters handle that with a simple waiver.

Petitions against the policy can be found on several websites, including our-compass.org and change.org.

If you’d like to give Cumberland County officials a piece of your mind — and it appears they could use it — continue reading for contact information.

Read more »

Name: Bailey

Age: 2 1/2 years

Breed: Corgi-Chow mix

Encountered: At Washington Park, in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Backstory: Ace and I were visiting Winston-Salem’s dog park when Bailey came trotting in — a demure little thing with a pretty close to ground level view of the world.

Built like a fire hydrant with short stocky legs and a neck as big as her head, she was adopted by her owner from the Forsyth County Humane Society a couple of years ago.

Despite being short of stature, she had no trouble leaping a foot-high barrier, and, with two more leaps, jumping up on a picnic table, at which point she towered over Ace and all the other dogs, who she seemed content to lay there and watch.

Roadside Encounters is a regular feature of Travels With Ace. To see them all, click here.

Rescued by firefighters, an Akita-chow mix named Hachi had burns over 60 percent of his body when he arrived at a southern California animal hospital.

That was back in the fall of 2009 when the dog was pulled from a Gardena auto shop that had been set ablaze in an apparent suicide.

Over the weeks he received treatment for his burns at the Affordable Animal Hospital in Torrance, dozens of people expressed interest in adopting him — but no one followed through. About a year ago, Hachi — after surviving the fire, after prolonged and costly medical treatment — appeared headed for a sadly ironic end.

When Faith Summerson, founder of Pal Rescue, heard Hachi was about to be euthanized by the county shelter due to lack of space, she stepped forward, and Hachi was rescued again.

She picked him up and sought to find him a forever home  – keeping him in one of her kennels and later at her own home.

Pal Rescue was founded in 1995 and has helped find homes for over 3,000 cats and dogs. Hachi, though — despite gaining notoriety on the Internet, because of his unusual appearnace, as the “Terminator” dog — didn’t appear destined to become one of them.

Until last month, when his year and a half wait ended.

After his story appeared on the news, Pal Rescue reports, they heard from a man who had recently lost his own dog. While many had offered him dogs to fill the void of his previous dog’s death, he had turned them all down, opting to wait instead for a dog  who truly needed him — one not everybody else would want.

Call it rescue No. 3 for Hachi, a dog named, after his first rescue, for the legendary Akita, Hachiko, who waited every day at a train station in Japan for his master to return from work — and continued to do so for another 10 years after his master’s death.

The rescue organization reports that  Hachi’s new dad is “a very dedicated and experienced dog owner that has had many beloved dogs in his lifetime, and always gravitated to the ones most in need.”

“The two hit it off immediately when we home delivered Hachi yesterday … Hachi was at ease the moment he walked in the door.”

You can find Hachi’s full story at petfinder.com

The Arizona Humane Society is seeking a home for a blind dog who fell into a 20-foot sinkhole.

Now dubbed “Sinkhole Sam,” the dog was rescued from the hole in March after children heard his cries. Humane Society officials say that, other than being blind, Sam was found to be in good health.

An eye doctor confirmed his blindness and also diagnosed him with glaucoma. Both his eyes were removed by a veterinarian to ease pressure and avoid complications later in life, KTAR in Phoenix reported.

Sam, a four-year-old Australian shepherd-chow mix, will be available for adoption beginning at 11 a.m. today at the Sunnyslope Facility located at 9226 N. 13th Ave., Phoenix.

“Sam is a resilient dog who has persevered through a tough couple of months,” said Kimberly Searles, spokesperson for the AHS. “His sweet personality has won the hearts of our staff and we just know he’s going to make a great pet for someone.”

The adoption fee is $110 and includes neutering, the first set of vaccinations, leash, collar, ID tag and a free follow-up veterinary exam.

To view other animals available for adoption at the Arizona Humane Society, visit azhumane.org

If your dog is fat — and statistics indicate nearly half are — you might want to check Dr. Ernie Ward’s  recent online chat, sponsored by the Washington Post.

About 45 percent of all adult dogs and 58 percent of cats are overweight.  That’s 34 million fat dogs and 54 million fat cats — all at risk for diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, kidney disease, cancer and more.

Ward recently published a book on the pet obesity epidemic, “Chow Hounds: Why Our Dogs Are Getting Fatter – A Vet’s Plan to Save Their Lives” (2010 HCI Publishing).

Here are a few excerpts from his online chat:  

“No one is getting enough physical activity in this country. This is why owning a dog is a great incentive for exercise. All dogs need at least 20-30 minutes of aerobic intensity walking per day. Larger breeds often need much more… 

“Neutering and spaying reduces a dog or cat’s metabolic rate by  25-35%. This is why you can not feed according to pet food labels. These guidelines are made for intact adult pets. In my book, I go into considerable detail on how to calculate the exact number of calories your pet needs each day based on its lifestyle…

“Most dogs eat until the are full and tend not to overeat. The reasons that dogs overeat are largely due to the changes in dog food formulation, hence the term ‘Kibble Crack’ I use in Chow Hounds. I go into great detail on how pet food companies have added sugar and fat to trick a dog’s normal appetite…”

Then there was this exchange, and I can only hope both were joking:

Q. ”I like to carry my little dog around in my purse. Is there anything I could get for the dog to exercise while in the purse? You know, like a wheel for him to run in?”

 A. “I recently patented the ‘pocket treadmill.’ I would be glad to sell you a prototype.”

Ward directs those wanting to learn more to the Association for Pet Obesity’s website, to visit his own website, or, of course, to read his book.

Gucci, the dog who helped make animal abuse a felony in Alabama, died Wednesday.

Doug James — Gucci’s rescuer and owner — said he made the difficult decision to euthanize the dog, who recently turned 16.

“I had dreaded it, and put if off for two or three days,”  James, who lives in Mobile told the Times Daily. “His kidneys were failing him.”

James caught some youths torturing the chow-husky mix one night in 1994. The youths hanged the dog by his neck and set him on fire.

The incident triggered a campaign for animal rights that resulted in the Pet Protection Act, better known as the “Gucci Law,” in Alabama.

The act , making animal cruelty a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison, was signed by then-Gov. Don Siegelman on May 19, 2000 – the sixth anniversary of the attack – as Gucci looked on.

Gucci’s celebrity continued after that, with appearances at schools, on ”The Maury Povich Show” and “Inside Edition.” He also played played “Sandy” in Mobile theatrical productions of “Little Orphan Annie.”

The dog was only 12 weeks old when he was beaten, hung in a tree by his neck, doused with lighter fluid and set on fire.  Two of the three abusers received sentences of community service, while a third — the lone adult — was sentenced to six months in jail.

“If ever there was a dog that should hate people it should be Gucci, but he loved everyone,” said Brenda Cashdollar, vice president of Friends of the Mobile Animal Shelter.

Cashdollar told Al.com that Gucci was unable to walk by the time of his 15th birthday, but still wagged his tail in response to those who greeted him. A party planned to mark his 16th birthday Saturday at B&B Pet Stop in Mobile will now serve as a memorial event, organizers said.

Gucci will be cremated, James said, and his ashes will be placed in a memorial garden planned at the Mobile Animal Shelter.