ohmidog!

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has cited Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center for violating the Animal Welfare Act after a monkey escaped from a university research laboratory.

Wake Forest Baptist is appealing the findings, the medical center told the Winston-Salem Journal Wednesday.

The citation was for failing to house the monkey safely and securely, but it wasn’t clear what punishment, if any, the medical center faces.

An inspection report noted the latch of the monkey’s cage was “easily manipulated to open.” Staff at the primate center have since installed a chain with a secure latch to the center’s outside corridors to prevent further escapes, the report said.

Under the federal law, failure to correct problems documented by inspectors can result in fines and confiscation of animals.

The 8-pound female macaque — used to breed other monkeys for research purposes — got out of her cage at the Wake Forest Primate Center on June 29. She opened a latch on her cage, then managed to open a chain-link fence and get out of the center, officials said.

She roamed the woods for 11 days before she was captured.

The federal action is the result of a complaint filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“We had hoped that WFU would honor the monkey’s indomitable spirit by sending her to an accredited sanctuary after she was recaptured, but the university has not given any indication that it is pursuing this compassionate option,” said a PETA spokesman.

(Photo by Crystal Hughes, via Fox 8) 

The city council in Elephant Butte, New Mexico, has scheduled a meeting this month on what to do about Blue — an Australian cattle dog who doesn’t have a home and apparently doesn’t want one.

Blue’s not totally destitute. He has an air conditioned dog house, $1,800 in savings, a Facebook page and a lawyer, who’s now working to get him an exemption from local leash laws so he can continue his free and rambling lifestyle.

Abandoned as a puppy 10 years ago, Blue, also known as Bluedog, was left at Casa Taco and cared for by the owner, who died two years ago, according to the Associated Press.

Janice Conner, co-owner of Butte General Store and Marina, took over feeding Blue after that. But when a citizen complained about Blue following her and her dog on walks, someone in the city decided that Blue should receive a citation for being off leash, and issued it to Conner’s husband, Bob Owen.

Albuquerque attorney Hilary Noskin offered her legal services, and is trying to get Owen, who doesn’t officially own the dog, off the hook — and win an exemption that would allow Blue to live out the rest of his years, preferably untethered, in front of the store he now calls home.

“He’s one of my favorite clients,” says Noskin. “He is a sweet, sweet dog. He doesn’t meet any vicious dog standards. Somebody said he snarls … but I am not sure I believe that.”

City Manager Alan Briley says the city has received complaints about Blue snapping and growling and almost being hit by cars crossing the street.

Blue has resisted efforts to adopt him, always making his way back to  the store. Local residents have donated more than $1,800 his care, Conner said, and they’ve also built him a dog house with heating pads for the winter and air conditioning for the summer.

“Everybody just loves this dog. People who can’t afford a dog bring their kids here to play with Blue. … He is the only dog I know who got four plates of Thanksgiving dinner at his dog house,” she said.

Conner says she has collected more than 1,100 signatures in support of Blue, who is on Facebook as Bluedog EB-Mascot.

“He was here before we became a city” she said, “so all we are asking for is for the city to grandfather him in as a representative of the community.”

(Photo: From Blue’s Facebook page)

It’s not every day a police dog is subpoenaed to testify in court, and rarer yet, we’d guess, for a judge to actually approve such a thing, but that’s what happened in Florida last week.

A Charlotte County Sheriff’s Department K-9, named Azor, was brought into Judge Peter Bell’s courtroom when his presence was requested by a man fighting a traffic ticket.

The defendant, Rodney McGee, subpoenaed the dog as a defense witness after he was stopped in February for failure to use a turn signal.

Azor’s handler, suspecting McGee might have had drugs in the car, brought the dog along to give the car a sniff or two. No drugs were detected, and McGee was sent on his way with a traffic ticket.

McGee said he wanted the dog brought to his hearing so he could test its sniffing skills.

“I was hoping they would let me plant marijuana in the courthouse to see if he could find drugs,” McGee said. What relevance that has to his alleged failure to use his turn signal isn’t clear.

Judge Bell apparently saw it that way, too, declining McGee’s request and letting Azor depart the courtroom.

McGee lost the case. He was fined $300 for failure to use his turn signal.

That, as you can see in this news report, didn’t seem to bother him too much.

Max, the Argentine mastiff who was impounded last week after biting a Denver television news anchor on the face, is headed home and won’t face any serious consequences.

Denver environmental health spokeswoman Meghan Hughes said Thursday the dog will go home this weekend after completing a 10-day mandatory quarantine, the Associated Press reported.

Kyle Dyer of KUSA-TV received 70 stitches after she was bitten in the face by the 85-pound dog while doing a live in-studio interview with the dog’s owner and a firefighter who had rescued the dog from an icy pond the day before.

Hughes says the dog’s owner, Michael Robinson, was cited with failure to have his dog on a leash. He’s due in court Feb. 29.

Four dogs owned by Arizona Cardinals linebacker Joey Porter got loose from his Bakersfield, Calif., residence over the Fourth of July weekend and killed a neighbor’s dog.

Porter was cited for not having the dogs on a leash, county Animal Control spokeswoman Kim Rodriguez told the Bakersfield Californian. She said it was unclear how the dogs got out of their kennel.

Porter’s dogs were large and appeared to be half mastiff, half pit bull, she said.

Rodriguez said she doesn’t know what kind of arrangement Porter reached with the neighbor whose dog was killed.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, two of Porter’s dogs got loose from his home in Pennsylvania in 2006 and killed a miniature horse on a nearby farm.

 
Here’s an odd little story — and one that raises more questions than it answers –out of Chattanooga, where a dog apparently decided to eat a police car.

Police officer Clayton Holmes was sitting in his parked patrol car Sunday night — either to work on reports or to catch speeders on radar (the story seems to say both), when he suddenly felt his vehicle shaking.

He got out to investigate and found a bulldog had chewed two tires and the entire front bumper off the car.

(While cynics will wonder how the dog was able to consume so much of the police car so quickly, and speculate the officer was napping, we would never suggest such a thing.)

When another police car arrived, the dog attacked it, as well as two cars belonging to citizens who were driving by, police say.

Officers used pepper spray and a tazer on the dog, but neither seemed to faze it. Eventually McKamey Animal Center personnel responded to the scene and managed to capture the bulldog (how they did so isn’t described).

They also took into custody two other dogs that they say had managed to get through a fence of a nearby welding shop.

The owner of the dogs, Nancy Emerling, was issued a citation.

(Click  for an updated version of this story)

(Photo: Chattanooga Police Department)

A woman in Australia who received a $200 citation for unregistered dogs thinks the inspectors who cited her may have been barking up the wrong tree.

The two dogs in Mishka Gamble’s front yard are fiberglass.

Gamble does have a dog, a 15-year old shih-tzu who rarely goes outside, and then only uses the backyard. She thinks the inspectors mistook her fiberglass dogs — a Staffordshire terrier and a blue heeler — for the real thing.

Gamble told The Cairns Post she was shocked when she received a notice saying she had seven days to pay $200 for the registration of two dogs. “I certainly don’t have two dogs,” she said.

“I’ve got a fiberglass pig and sheep. Do I need to register them too?”

Earlier this month, the Cairns Regional Council came under fire for its dog audit after issuing 61 advisory notices to homes that, it turned out, didn’t have dogs. One resident was given a notice for having a cat bowl in the yard.

Gamble said she had since registered her “real” dog.

(Photo from The Cairns Post/CHRIS HYDE)

New York City had its usual share of murder and mayhem Monday, but some police officers chose to focus their crimefighting efforts on one particular evil scourge: an uncrated pug in a subway station.

A Brooklyn woman carrying her dog, Dempsey, in her arms was handcuffed, hauled to a transit police station house and cited for not having her pet pug in a container.

Chrissie Brodigan, 32, who writes for The Huffington Post and other websites, said she was bruised on her arms when an officer handcuffed her in the Bedford Avenue train station in Williamsburg about 5 p.m. on Monday. “He punched me in the back,” she told the Daily News. “He kicked my ankles apart.”

Dogs have to be in a “container” while in city subways, police said. Brodigan said the 15-pound dog was out of his carrier because he had been sick.

Brodigan, who admits to reacting rudely to being busted, was also cited for disorderly conduct and failure to identify herself.

Brodigan was handcuffed by Joel Witriol, the NYPD’s first Hasidic officer, who she says repeatedly told her, “If you’re going to act like a woman, I’m going to treat you like a woman.”

What was initially a proud moment for Linda Brown turned sour not long after Joe Biden bought his new German shepherd puppy from her kennel in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Brown says the sale led to a visit every month from the state Department of Agriculture, death threats from animal rights activists, and loads of criticism.

“I thought when Joe Biden bought a puppy from me, what an honor,” Brown told the Chester County Daily Local News. “Out of millions of breeders in the country, in the world, he picked me.”

But as soon as the purchase was publicized, the criticism started — first of then vice president-elect Biden, for purchasing from a breeder, and for the Secret Service contingent that arrived at Brown’s Wolf Den Kennel with him; then of Brown, whose kennel was cited for record-keeping problems and warned about maintenance and sanitation shortfalls by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

“I was cited for a piece of kibble on the floor and five strands of dog hair. They took a picture of that, they walked around, snapped pictures and don’t tell you why,” said Brown.

According to Philly Dawg, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s dog blog, the violations found included dogs kept in outside pens with ice accumulation, broken fencing, shredded aluminum capping, and holes in pens large enough for a dog to escape. One large dog’s only shelter was an airline travel crate in which he could not stand erect.

Brown racked up five citations after December for numerous kennel violations and a slew of warnings for other problems including an “immediate grooming” order for a St. Bernard to “prevent the dog from harboring infectious and contagious disease.”

Brown was warned about the problems in a Jan. 5 inspection. When investigators returned to the kennel in Spring City in Jan. 22 they found conditions had not improved. They also found incomplete sales and health records, prompting three more citations –  one each for records, drainage and maintenance. Brown also received two citations in December – the same week that Biden purchased the six-week-old puppy.

According to Philly Dawg, Brown, who also operates as JoLindy’s German Shepherds, had 85 dogs on the property on Jan. 22 and reported 188 dogs sold in the past 12 months. She holds the largest state commercial kennel license that allows her to keep or sell an unlimited number of dogs. 

Brown’s case was heard by District Justice James DeAngelo in South Coventry on March 31. She was found “not guilty” for each citation, the judge’s office confirmed Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture said Brown was inspected in December because of a complaint. He declined to release the name of the person who complained. He said the inspectors returned as a matter of follow-up to determine if the matters had been addressed

Brown’s kennel, Wolf Den, was inspected twice a year by the agency and had satisfactory reports until December 2008 when it was rated unsatisfactory in seven of 26 areas, according to the inspection records on the agency’s website.

Brown, who spent $4,000 on lawyers to fight the citations, says she doesn’t plan to sell any more dogs to high profile clients. “Never, never, never again,” she said.