ohmidog!

Reports out of the Philippines indicate most of the remaining dogs seized from a Korean-run dogfighting operation are getting a second chance.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports that at least two agencies are trying to rehabilitate some of the 223 pit bulls rescued in police raids on March 30.

Members of the Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), who were first on the scene after the raid, put down 33 dogs they said were sick, badly injured, and dangerously aggressive.

Since then, the newspaper reports, Compassion and Responsibility for Animals (CARA) and the Island Rescue Organization (IRO) have taken over the care of the Laguna pit bulls and have decided to try to save as many of the dogs as possible.

The raid and arrests in San Pablo City and Calauan, Laguna, angered many Philippine animal advocates — especially upon learning some of the suspects were on bail after being arrested on charges of running an online dog fighting operation in December.

“Aside from not wanting to see dogs fight,” Parsons says, “I think what enraged a lot more Filipinos was that this was done by people who had already been arrested, and are still operating with impunity here.”

Island Rescue Organization, already rehabilitating the 61 surviving pit bulls seized in the earlier raid, has taken over the care of the Laguna pit bulls.

“We will try and do what we can in the best way we can,” Nancy Cu-unjieng of Compassion and Responsibility for Animals told the Inquirer, ““and we’ve decided that we must give the dogs a chance to survive.”

Others are are stepping foward to assist.

Henry Monzones, who belongs to the group, Laguna Search and Rescue, has been visiting the site daily to help with head counts and to help design new shelters for the dogs.

In the meantime, the animals are still confined in the steel drums they were found in, but donated tarpaulins and nets are being pitched to shield them from the sun. Some of the dogs had died from heatstroke.

The large tarps were donated by Jay Lim, a businessman and dog trainer with the Philippine Mondioring Association, and his friend, Frenchman Julien Bourraux.

“What I love about pit bulls is, no matter what they’ve been through, if you show them love and respect, they’re willing to forgive anything … There’s definitely hope for these guys — we just have to convince people they’re not killers.”

Veterinarians and animal welfare workers today euthanized at least nine of the 300 pit bulls rescued from a dogfighting ring in the Philippines — and they expect to euthanize dozens more — primarily because of there are no facilities in which to rehabilitate them.

Anna Cabrera, of the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, said 17 of the seized dogs had been put down a day after the raids.

Noting that some of the rescued dogs had been seized before from dogfighting operations, Cabrera said she feared many of them — if simply adopted out — could again end up facing “a fate worse than death.”

How many more will still be euthanized depends on their health, behavior, their potential to be rehabilitated, and the animal welfare group’s supply of drugs — reportedly only enough to euthanize 70 animals, the Associated Press reported.

Police arrested eight South Koreans suspected of running an illegal online gambling operations in which players outside the Philippines bet on dogs fighting at the compound. 

Welfare society veterinarian Wilford Almora said many of the pit bulls had injuries from previous fights, including ripped ears and tongues.

He said his group had enough drugs to euthanize 70 dogs, and had put down at least nine Tuesday afternoon with 13 more planned before they finished later in the evening.

“We are not in a hurry. We just want to make sure that the ones we put to sleep are the ones that deserve to be put to sleep based on their medical condition,” he said.

Cabrera said it was not possible to care for all the pit bulls that were rescued and it would be irresponsible to allow the injured animals to be adopted.

Most of the dogs were seized from a 5-acre coffee plantation in San Pablo city, where they were kept in metal fuel drums and tied to heavy steel chains. Police also recovered 30 dogs from an arena in the nearby town of Calauan where a dogfight was about to begin.

More than 300 dogs were rescued in the separate raids. The eight suspects, charged with animal cruelty and gambling, are being turned over to immigration officials.

If convicted of illegal gambling, they face a maximum of 12 years in prison. The charge of animal cruelty carries a penalty of up to two years. No one in the Philippines has ever served time for animal cruelty, the Associated Press reported.

(Photo: Philippine Animal Welfare Society)

While there’s an old one hanging on my wall, and while I served as a juror once, I have little to say these days about Pulitzer Prizes.

The Pawlitzer Prizes are another matter, though, and, since they don’t really exist, I hereby bestow one on the Toledo Blade.

The newspaper’s report Sunday, asking and answering the question of how many dogs are put down at the local shelter under the mistaken belief they are pit bulls, is the kind of probing, hard-hitting doggie journalism we need more of — as opposed to celebrity dogs, costumed dogs, ugly dogs and cute dogs.

(It’s also the kind of journalism we need more of, in these times of fading newspapers and diminishing depth.)

The story raises some serious questions about how many supposed pit bulls have been and are being euthanized at the Lucas County Animal Shelter, where the decision of who’s a pit bull — as at most shelters — is based on an educated guess, or often an uneducated one, reached solely on the basis of looks.

The story shows that looks can be deceiving.

Written by Tanya Irwin, it’s a piece that should be required reading at every animal shelter. It starts like this:

Lucas is lucky to be alive.

The dog, owned by Laurie and George Hughes of Rossford, was one of the first “pit bull” puppies spared by the Lucas County dog warden in January, 2010, after the county commissioners changed a long-standing policy under which all “pit bulls,” no matter their age or temperament, were automatically destroyed.

The irony is that Lucas, who was transferred to the Toledo Area Humane Society, isn’t a “pit bull.”

As the story points out, recent changes in local and state law mean dogs designated as pit bulls will no longer get an automatic death sentence when they arrive at a county shelter. In practice, though, and somewhat less automatically, they still are often euthanized, due to factors like an overabundance of their kind at shelters.

The newspaper conducted DNA tests on six dogs that were originally labeled as pit bulls by the Lucas County dog warden. Using the Mars Veterinary Wisdom Panel Insights DNA test, it determined only one was predominantly American Staffordshire terrier and Staffordshire bull terrier. Two had some “pit,” and three of the dogs had no “pit bull” breed in them at all

Lucas, it turned out, is predominantly a boxer-bullmastiff mix.

“We really don’t care what breed he is, he’s a good dog and we love him,” said Hughes.  “I think it’s awful what people say about ‘pit bulls’ or dogs that look like ‘pit bulls.’ It’s like racism, except against dogs.”

Two other dogs, despite their labels, were pit-free: Carly, who turned out to be an American bulldog -American Eskimo mix, and Bandit, whose breeds were boxer, Scottish terrier, Chinook, Doberman pinscher, black Russian terrier, Irish setter, Glen of Imaal terrier, and dogue de Bordeaux.

Based on factors like a large head or broad chest, dogs are being mislabeled as pit bulls – a subjective judgment that, in the case of Toledo and Lucas County, and many other jurisdictions, can determine whether a dog lives or dies. It often also determines, in communities across America, whether you can rent, the cost of your insurance, and even whether you’re allowed into town in the first place.

Then you have the “pit bull mix,” an equally dangerous designation, also used to unfairly ban, restrict or single out dogs. Is it based on having a majority of pit bull blood, a small percentage (as my dog does, according to our own experiences with DNA testing), or any at all?  No. It’s also most often a guess, based on looks, that allows even more dogs to be discriminated against.

Former Lucas County Dog Warden Tom Skeldon, who departed the office amid complaints over its high kill rate and his insistence that all dogs he deemed pit bulls must be killed, said he never considered the DNA tests to be reliable, and therefore made no use of them.

Dr. Angela Hughes, a veterinarian and the veterinary genetics research manager at Mars Veterinary, told the newspaper that the reliability of the tests has increased over the past four years, and now stands at about  80 to 85 percent in the case of the cheek-swab tests.

That’s a far better record than many an animal shelter probably has. At most of them, classifying a dog’s breed is a guessing game. Dogs shouldn’t be put to death based on a guess. In Lucas County, the article notes, thousands may have been.

“It’s impossible to know how many dogs Mr. Skeldon killed claiming they were pit bulls when they weren’t, but based on the kill rate during his more than 20 years as warden, the fact that close to half the dogs at the pound traditionally have been labeled pit bulls, and the DNA tests The Blade performed, easily thousands of dogs could have been killed because they were mislabeled pit bull.”

The Lucas County dog warden’s office continues to euthanize perceived pit bulls because it is “at capacity for ‘pit bull-type’ dogs.” Dog Warden Julie Lyle told the newspaper that — despite Ohio having recently revamped a law that labeled all pit bulls dangerous –  the shelter has yet to begin adopting out pit bulls.

The state’s new dangerous dog law, which brings an end to pit bulls being automatically designated as dangerous, goes into effect May 21. But even then, pit bulls, due to their numbers, will likely remain the type of dog most often euthanized.

The solution?

Dr. Amy Marder, director for the Center for Shelter Dogs, has proposed that dogs adopted from shelters in the United States simply be identified as “American shelter dogs.”

The North Shore Animal League in New York has done away with the pit bull label, in part because it’s not actually a breed, anyway. Instead the league refers to dogs who have “the look” as terrier mixes.

Lucas County dog warden Lyle thinks that approach is deceptive.

“When people think of terriers, they think of small, cuddly dogs, not large dogs,” Lyle said.

She said that, unless a breed is mentioned by people surrendering a dog, she and her deputies designate what breed a dog is. Currently about 40 percent of the dogs the pound takes in are designated as pit bulls.

Lyle said she was not surprised that there were cases they had gotten wrong. Overall,  she said, she thinks she and her staff have done a good job deciding who is a pit bull and who is not. She said she doesn’t see any reason for the pound to change how it identifies a dog’s breed.

I can think of three: Lucas, Carly and Bandit.

(Graphic from the Toledo Blade; photo by Lori King / Toledo Blade)

Last month, an animal control officer in Joliet, Illinois, took a dog home from the township’s animal shelter, fearing it had been wrongly labeled aggressive and was going to euthanized.

He got fired for doing so.

Yesterday township officials, while not offering Bryan Jones his job of 14 years back, decided to let him keep the dog — a three-year-old long-haired Chihuahua.

“Wow cool. I’m just excited now,” said Jones, who has named the dog Chewy. “He’s been doing great. This will be good.”

According to the Herald-News, Jones didn’t think the dog was aggressive, even though a veterinary technician had come to that decision.

On Feb. 27, Jones said, he saw the dog with a “caution: I may bite” sign on its cage. A vet technician said the dog had snapped at a visitor. Jones said he played with the dog that week without incident. Fearing the dog would be euthanized, Jones took it home with him on March 2 without notifying anyone.

On March 5, township Animal Control Director Sarah Gimbel sent Jones a text asking if he had the Chihuahua. He admitted he did. On March 9, Gimbel called Jones and told him to bring the dog back. When told he would be fired if he refused to return the dog, he still declined to do so.

The township will send Jones a letter with his final pay, minus the dog’s adoption fees.

(Photo: Matthew Grotto /Sun-Times Media)

Commissioners in Athens County, Ohio, have voted to end the practice of euthanizing dogs in a gas chamber, and to switch to lethal injection.

The commissioners decided Thursday that the county dog shelter will no longer euthanize with carbon monoxide.

“We’ve been working on this since October and the fact that the commissioners have finally listened to the citizens of Athens County and that our dogs are going to be treated humanely … it’s amazing,” Sarah Robles, co-founder of Athens County Animal Advocates, told WOUB.

A resident of the county, Les Cornwell, offered to pay for the dismantling of the gas chamber.

He even agreed to rebuild it should the county — as it has done before – decides to return to using the gas chamber, the Athens News reported.

The county had attempted to switch to lethal injection earlier, but says rising costs forced it to return to gassing.

A year after 56 sled dogs were uncovered in a mass grave near Whistler, the British Columbia government has introduced a revised “code of practice” for the sled dog industry.

The Sled Dog Code of Practice sets standards for the care of dogs used for sledding, including new limits on tethering, and stricter regulations on the use of euthanasia, The Canadian Press reports.

But many believe the changes (see our comments below) don’t go nearly far enough.

The British Columbia SPCA uncovered 56 dead dogs last year, some of which had been shot, some with their throats cut. The mass grave came to light after an employee filed a worker’s compensation claim saying he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after killing the animals in a company-ordered cull.

“This document, both the code and the regulations, will help inform the industry (and) provide minimum standards that will improve working dogs’ welfare,” said Marcie Moriarty, general manager of cruelty investigations for the SPCA.

Moriarty, who helped develop the code, said it will lead to an end to near continuous tethering, which has been one of the main concerns about the industry. Under the new regulations sled dogs must get at least one opportunity a day to be off their tethers to socialize and exercise.

The new code imposes no limits on the number of dogs a sled dog operation can have, and it doesn’t stop sledding operations from culling their workers (dogs), but it emphasizes that killing sled dogs shouldn’t be used as a primary means of population control.

(Photo: British Columbia SPCA)

A few hours after having his dog euthanized, soap opera actor Nick Santino took his own life.

Santino blamed oppressive rules instituted by his condo board for his decision to put his pit bull, Rocco, to sleep; and before taking an overdose of pills he left a note saying he had “betrayed his best friend,” according to the New York Post.

“Rocco trusted me and I failed him,” he wrote. “He didn’t deserve this.”

Pit bulls were banned from the building Santino lived in, One Lincoln Plaza, but he was allowed to keep Rocco through a grandfather clause. Since 2010, the condo board has also forbidden dogs from riding in the main elevator or being left alone in apartments for more than nine hours.

Santino had adopted Rocco, about five years old, from a shelter. Rocco was put to sleep on Santino’s 47th birthday. A few hours later, he killed himself in an apparent pill overdose, the Post reported.

A condo board member said the board feels no responsibility for the tragedy.

“I’m sorry the man is dead,” board member Marilyn Fireman told the Post, “but it has nothing to do with the pet policy.”

Relatives of Santino, who had roles on “All My Children” and “Guiding Light,” plan to place Rocco’s ashes beside Santino’s body when he is laid to rest.

Former state senator Tom Hayden urged California Gov. Jerry Brown not to repeal a state law that requires shelters to keep dogs and cats six days before euthanizing them.

Hayden posted a video online urging Gov. Brown – an avowed dog lover who features his Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Sutter, on the official governor’s website – to take a look at his own dog before repealing the legislation.

“Governor, I see you’re a dog owner. I can tell from the publicity that you love that dog, your wife loves that dog,” said Hayden, who wrote the 1998 bill while he was in the senate.  ”So stop and think: Thousands of dogs and cats are put to death needlessly every year … I urge you to look at your dog before you allow this bill that protects animals to die.”

The law lengthened the time animal shelters must hold stray animals before euthanizing them, generally from three days to six days. Its edicts were suspended by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2009.

The shelter law is one of about 30 local government mandates Gov. Brown is proposing to repeal next fiscal year to save money, according to the Sacramento Bee.

The state estimates it would save about $46 million from the shelter mandate alone.

Cats ended up in animal shelters in the United States less often and were euthanized less often in 2011, according to a report by PetHealth, Inc., a company that aggregates data from animal welfare organizations.

The report, to be published annually, noted a 6% decline over 2010 in overall cat intakes, including a 5 percent decline in owner surrenders and a 9 percent decline in strays.

Euthanasia of cats declined 11 percent in 2011.

For dogs, the report notes little change in 2010′s intake and surrender numbers. Dog adoptions increased 2 percent, while euthanasia of dogs declined 3 percent over the same period.

The 2011 year-end report aggregates data from 795 animal welfare organizations. Findings were based on 1,537,961 intakes and 1,508,754 outcomes for dogs and cats that entered or left animal welfare organizations in 2011.

“We are very excited to be able to offer the first annualized PetPoint Report to our network and the interested public,” Brad Grucelski, a company vice president, said in a press release. “From this larger pool of aggregate data we can see beyond monthly fluctuations in intake and outcome types and measure the widespread impact of animal welfare efforts in the United States.

“Based on the information disclosed here, 2011 was a good year for animal welfare,” he said, “and all key indicators point to continued success in 2012.”

A bomb-sniffing dog who had worked at both the U.S. Capitol and the White House escaped during his trip to a new home, but was recovered a few hours later.

The five-year-old shepherd — retired from duty early after killing a cat — slipped out of his collar and ran off from Detroit’s Metro Airport while his new owner, a Toledo woman, was taking him for a bathroom break.

It took animal control officers and police — two of whom were bitten in the process — about two hours to capture the dog, named Arco, after he was spotted running near train tracks in Romulus yesterday afternoon, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Arco is now at the Romulus Animal Shelter and will be quarantined for 10 days before being released back to his new owner.

The dog had arrived on a flight from Arizona, where he’d been under the care of Rescued Helpers, Inc.,  in Tucson for the past seven months.

According to WXYZ, the rescue organization stepped in when they heard Arco, after his government service was over, was to be euthanized.

Rescued Helpers vice president and founder Nadine Karsevar said Arco wasn’t aggressive and that, while under the organization’s care, had taken part in parades and other events.