ohmidog!

After eluding authorities for 11 days, the laboratory monkey who escaped from a Wake Forest University research facility has been captured and returned to the school’s Primate Center.

The one-foot tall, 8-pound macaque was caught this afternoon near Frye Bridge Road in Davidson County after being shot with three tranquilizer darts. three shots from on Tuesday afternoon.

Forsyth County Animal Control responded to the neighborhood after a teenaged girl spotted the monkey in a tree in her family’s yard, Fox News reported.

The 16-year-old monkey is kept at the center as a breeder, producing more monkeys that are used for medical testing.

(Photo: By Cassidy Garwood, via Fox News)

Pennsylvania wildlife officers have broken out the cages and tranquilizer darts in an attempt to catch a wolf-like creature who has started calling Philadelphia’s Pennypack Park home.

The animal, most likely a wolf hybrid that escaped or was abandoned, started showing up at the park about three months ago.

Game Commission spokesman Jerry Feaser said that, though the animal hasn’t attacked anyone, they are taking the  situation seriously.

“Any animal that has wild instincts does have the potential to be aggressive,” he said.

Whether it’s a wolf-dog hybrid won’t be known for certain until DNA can be tested, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Feaser cautioned residents to stay away, and not to feed the creature.

Staff from the Wolf Sanctuary in Lititz, Pa., were also attempting to capture the creature, which “got a little wobbly” after eating a hot dog they provided, laced with tranquilizers. Whenever anyone got close though, the animal retreated into the woods.

Sharon Newman Ehrlich, a high school biology teacher who lives near the park and has seen the creature several times, said it seemed “very docile, not dangerous at all.”

When it approached her lhasa apso-poodle mix, all it did was take a sniff.

(Photo: Alejandro A. Alvarez / Philadelphia Inquirer)

What Fayetteville, North Carolina, sees as a scourge, St. Louis, Missouri, sees as art.

I’m over-stating, and over-generalizing, but it’s interesting to me — and indicative of our collective schizophrenia when it comes to dogs — to compare what’s going on in the two cities when it comes to strays.

Fayetteville is making plans to round them up. The city council is considering contracting with a private outfit out of Texas that will send four “hunters” to track them down, shoot them with tranquilizer darts and turn them over to the county animal control office, where, most likely, they will be euthanized.

St. Louis is having an art exhibit.

Stray Rescue of St. Louis, an organization that rescues and adopts out dogs that have been abandoned, abused or found wandering the streets (all, amazingly, without the aid of tranquilizer guns), is holding it’s second installment of “Urban Wanderers,” a fundraising exhibition in which area artists paint, photograph and sculpt images of dogs in its care.

In conjunction with the Saint Louis University Museum of Art, the exhibit opened July 15 and runs through August 28.

The focus of this year’s exhibit is the bully breeds, and the misconceptions surrounding them.

“Urban Wanderers will showcase pit bulls’ many positive characteristics, such as gentleness, loyalty, attentiveness, and athleticism, and attempt to dispel the false perception that the pit bull is born aggressive and dangerous. The pit bull is proof that dogs thrust into dog fighting and other deplorable conditions are victims of human callousness and cruelty.”

The artworks include the painting above, by Michelle Streiff, of Pietra, a dog who was found abandoned in the backyard of a vacant house at the age of six months.

Despite being on her own, living as a stray, in the wild, she’s “outgoing, playful, friendly, loving and just an all around wonderful girl,” according to the staff of Stray Rescue’s shelter, where she’s available for adoption.

(You can find and bid on all the featured artwork — including some by the dogs themselves — via this page.)

The art displayed in the exhibition, at Saint Louis University Museum of Art, can be bid on until August 28.  All proceeds will benefit Stray Rescue of St. Louis, funding its efforts to pull dogs off the streets, socialize them and find them new homes.

Stray Rescue of St. Louis was founded by Randy Grim, a former flight attendant-turned groomer-turned full time dog rescuer. He has written two books, Miracle Dog and “Don’t dump the Dog,” and is the subject of another, “The Man Who Talks to Dogs.”

“Feral dogs are the untouchables; they are the ones who ”belong” to no one,” he writes. “They are the hold-outs, the animals under-funded pounds can’t catch and overburdened humane shelters can’t deal with. They colonize whatever neighborhoods afford them the best shelter, the most food and the least amount of contact with human beings. They exist, like genetic castaways, in the evolutionary no-man’s-land between domesticity and wildness. They are completely, utterly, alone.”

For more of his take on feral dogs — the extent of the problem, how to capture them, and rehabilitate them, and how to address the problem without nooses, guns, violence and euthanasia — you can look at this web page he put together.

Professional dog hunters from Texas (where else?) may be called in to help “solve” Fayetteville, N.C.’s  stray dog problem.

A Fort Worth, Texas-based outfit called the “Dangerous Animal Task Force,” or DATF, for short, offered its services to the city in a letter last week to Mayor Tony Chavonne, the Fayetteville Observer reported.

The Observer reported earlier this month that up to 150 “wild dogs” are roaming city neighborhoods, ”killing pets and threatening residents,” and that the county’s Animal Services Department had limited resources to capture the feral canines.

(There is no city animal control office, which may help explain why there’s a problem in the first place.)

DATF (no, that’s not them in the photo — just a generic posse) has proposed sending four representatives to the city who would spend two weeks hunting the dogs with tranquilizer darts.

The darts would include GPS chips that — assuming the darts stay intact — would allow the hunters to find animals who kept running after being shot. The animals would then be taken to the county animal shelter.

I’m sure you can guess what would happen there — although that part of it isn’t being talked about much.

City Manager Dale Iman briefed the City Council this week about the “task force,” saying,  ”I think we have a good chance of making an impact.” The  two-week “deployment” — to use DATF’s terminology —  would cost $29,000, with the city and county splitting the cost.

According to the group’s letter, its mission is to assist law enforcement and other local authorities in emergency situations, natural disasters and other events in which dangerous animals are involved.

The company’s website — it does not appear to be a non-profit organization, though it does seek donations – is a pretty bare bones affair, peppered with photos of violent animals and Homeland Security and FEMA logos. It offers no information in the way of actual cases it has handled.

Nobody asked me, but my advice to Fayetteville would be to think hard about calling in hired guns. Their shoot- first-ask-questions-later approach could easily lead to some pets being bagged along with the so-called feral dogs — and while the professional hunters will only be tranquilizing them, some missing and wandering pets could be swept up, and subjected to step two.

Rather than a gun-toting dog posse, wouldn’t it make more sense to seek help from a group like Best Friends Animal Society or the Humane Society of the United States, who could evaluate the animals as individuals, rather than as trophies?

There was a time in America when bounties were placed on dogs. Calling in gunmen is a little too reminiscent of that for me.

I’m not disputing that many or even most of the dogs to be hunted are dangerous — but does a generation or two living back in the wild make them hopeless cases?

If Michael Vick’s dogs, after what they went through, could be rehabilitated and become family pets, don’t these deserve a chance? And why isn’t anyone speaking up for them?