ohmidog!

Poor Courteney Cox.

The former “Friends” star and her daughter Coco recently moved into a new 25th floor condo with their two dogs — and taking Hopper and Harley all the way down to the ground floor and outside to go to the bathroom late at night was just too difficult.

So she bought a pooch potty to put on her balcony, and when the Cavalier King Charles spaniels didn’t use the draining patch of artificial grass, she annointed it herself to get them interested.

That, at least, is what she said to Ellen DeGeneres in an interview that aired yesterday.

“I’m like, ‘How am I going to work this out? I could walk them at 10 p.m. at night but what if they have to go in the middle of the night?’” she said.

Apparently, solutions such as hiring a dog walker, or living somewhere with a yard, didn’t occur to the “Cougar Town” star.

Once the patch was in place, the dogs showed little interest in it, she said. “… Hopper and Harley would not go. I tried and I tried and it’s getting late and I can’t leave Coco in the condo by herself while I take them out so I just thought, ‘To hell with it. I’ll mark the grass.’”

Apparently, the idea of peeing in a jar, and then going out to pour it on the balcony patch, didn’t occur to her, either. Cox told DeGeneres she squatted on the balcony.

Given the product she’s using requires a new grass pad weekly, she told Ellen she’s worried she might have to keep reannointing them. “I didn’t think it through… but I will say Hopper peed on my pee.”

We have faith that Hopper and Harley, age 9 and 10, will be able to think it through, even without Cox marking every new patch, and — whether it’s 10 p.m. at night, or 6 a.m. in the morning — adjust to using the balcony potty.

(Photos: Screen grabs from Ellen DeGeneres show)

Until the last couple of weeks, Dan Rubin was among that minority of Americans who don’t let their pets into bed with them.

That’s right, I said minority, at least according to the American Pet Products Association (APPA), which earlier this year released the results of a survey showing nearly half of dog owners and 62 percent of cat owners share their beds with their pets.

That’s a pretty stunning figure — one that shows not just our increasing  closeness to our pets, but our willingness to proudly admit it, even to  survey-taking strangers inquiring about our bedroom habits.

But back to Dan (which is how his dog Harley is sometimes sleeping nowadays).

Dan is a friend of mine, a former colleague and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who never got into the practice of laying down with dogs, at least not in bed. He’s a dog lover, but he’s also a sleep lover, and the latter is more easily accomplished without a 113-pound dog squirming about, he notes.

A couple of weeks ago, Harley, his  five-year-old bouvier des Flandres, had leg surgery, Dan explained in his Monday column. And his vet declared stairs off limits for eight weeks.

That meant lonely nights for Harley, who — though not allowed in bed — was accustomed to at least sleeping on the same floor as his family.

Dan’s wife, Mimi, wasn’t about to let that happen. She announced she would sleep downstairs with Harley. Dan, like a dog, followed.

They moved all the furniture out of the TV room and replaced it with a futon mattress, then made a sleeping area for Harley, adjacent to it, topped with his favorite blanket.

But the first night, Dan found Harley on his pillow. A few nights later, Harley settled down on Mimi’s pillow, and they decided there was room for all three, kind of, even with the huge plastic cone Harley has to wear around his neck:

” … He has to wear one of those plastic lamp shades – at the vet’s they called it an Elizabethan collar. It’s about the size of a satellite dish, and he knocks about in the dark with the grace of a rutting Triceratops.”

Harley had surgery for a ruptured cranial cruciate ligament. It involved  planing the tibia and making a mechanical adjustment so his bones hinge without requiring the support of the damaged ligament, Dan explained.

With Dan’s man cave temporarily converted into a man/wife/dog cave, Dan says he has had to make sacrifices:

“…We can’t watch baseball in bed because Harley likes to rush the screen every time he sees a pitcher go into his windup. Best I can tell, he thinks they’ve got his ball.”

We wish Harley a full and speedy recovery. And we sincerely hope Dan doesn’t give him fleas.

Photo: Courtesy of Dan Rubin

From Washington’s Olympic Peninsula comes the story of Harley — a Chihuahua found on the side of a logging road with his throat slit.

The dog, bearing a four-inch gash on his tiny throat, was found Feb. 2, bleeding on the side of a road west of Port Angeles by Monte Mogi, a 75-year-old, Harley Davidson-riding, retired Air Force master sergeant.

Mogi took the dog to veterinarian Dr. Charles Schramm of Port Angeles, who threaded tight a 4-inch open slice across the center of the dog’s throat, according to the Peninsula Daily News

The cut appeared to be intentional. By slitting the dog’s throat, “maybe they thought they were euthanizing it,” said Schramm, adding that he’d never seen a similar injury.

Mogi paid the dog’s $464 veterinary bill, then called his daughter, a veterinary technician, and she drove the dog — dubbed Harley by then — back to his house. Already having eight dogs on his property, Mogi called Nancy Woods, who had cared for Mogi’s wife before her death.

Nancy and her husband Herb, though they’d sworn off dogs after their last one died,  offered to take in Harley — even though he appeared traumatized and was terrified of children.

Once Harley recuperated, they planned to find him a new owner. In mid-February they handed Harley over to a new family. The next day, they asked for him back.

“I had bonded with him,” Nnancy Woods said. “I was terrified for him. My heart just hurt for the trauma he had been through. I felt like he had been with us for two weeks, and then he was uprooted again. I felt horrible about that.”

Now Harley has the run of the Woods family’s rural property, which he shares with Bob, a rescued cat who’s larger than him. He’s doing well, the Woods say, though he’s timid, shakes when nervous and can’t really bark. He starts coughing when he tries to do so. 

Last weekend, the Woods reported, Harley slept under the covers with Nancy’s 7-year-old granddaughter.

Seems he’s beginning to realize that, however evil some of them might be, there are some good humans out there, too.

(Photo: Peninsula Daily News)

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Daniel Rubin was taking his dog Harley for a short morning walk. You know the kind. Hurry up and do your business … It’s cold … Gotta get to work. But — as will happen when new dog meets freshly fallen snow – the short walk turned into a long walk, an acquaintance turned into a friend, and, more important for Dan, taking the time to go down a new path or two turned into a column. Here’s what he posted on his Facebook page, which he later condensed into a column, which appears in today’s Inquirer.

Harley’s first step out the door is up — straight up — all 100-or-so loping, furry, orsine pounds of Bouvier twisting, leaping, soaring into the air. He looks back, wild-eyed and grinning.

To be a dog in the snow.

The idea was to walk him long enough so he could do his thing, then I could excavate the car and drive into town, where bad roads and deadline awaited.

But everytime this dog sees a blanket of snow, he’s seeing it for the first time. I’m not sure how bright he is. But he does know how to live.

We took the middle of the road, usually a whoosh of morning traffic, but there were no cars, no sound. There were no sidewalks yet either at 7 o’clock, just slight furrows in the virgin snow.

In the next block a lone figure shoveled the deep, airy powder. He was pink-faced and wore a beret, a field jacket, sweats and Wellies.

“Nice day for a walk,” he said, happily stopping for a moment.

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A western Maryland man has has been convicted of two counts of animal cruelty for fatally shooting two of his neighbors’ dogs who wandered onto his property.

A German shepherd named Harley was shot in May after he bolted after a rabbit, through a barbed wire fence and onto a neighbor’s property, according to WJZ-TV.

The neighbor, Jeffrey Hurd, of Washington County, had shot and killed another dog, a black lab belonging to the same family, ten months earlier, when it came on his property.

“We need to send a message out that you cannot brutally kill animals like that just for your own enjoyment,” said James Rudolph, whose family owned both dogs.

According to court documents, Hurd fired a high-powered rifle at Harley three times.

Hurd’s lawyer argued his client was trying to protect deer and wild turkeys being chased by the dogs.

Animal cruelty is now a felony in Maryland with a penalty of up to three years in prison. Because Hurd killed two dogs, he faces six years.