ohmidog!

If you think dogs don’t really love, and don’t really mourn, watch this and think again.

Bella, the dog, is dealing with the loss of her good friend Beavis, a beaver.

According to Bella’s owner, who posted the video on YouTube, Bella and Beavis played ball together, shared living quarters, and ate together. “They lived and loved together for quite a while. Beavis died this morning, and Bella has been in mourning for hours.”

While two other dogs that show up in the video don’t seem particularly bereft, Bella appears — at least to our human eyes — to be taking the death of Beavis pretty hard, licking and nuzzling the motionless beaver and remaining at its side.

Looks an awful lot like grieving to me.

They say love is blind. I’m not sure, with humans, that’s always the case. But it does seem to be with dogs.

That could help explain the apparent affection these dachshund pups are showing to a creature that, at least in the eyes of this beholder,  is not one of God’s, or evolution’s, most eye-pleasing creations.

Then again, in the eyes of Cheesecake, a capybara who lives at Rocky Ridge Refuge, maybe these dachshunds aren’t the cutest things on the planet, either.

That hasn’t stopped the giant rodent from serving as mom, babysitter and guardian for the pups, who were among a litter of eight, left in a Tupperware container outside a church erlier this month.

The photos were posted to Facebook by the Arkansas-based animal rescue group that took in all eight puppies, four of which were quickly adopted.

The remaining four stayed at the refuge under the care of founder Janice Wolf, who turned to Cheescake for some assistance.

“Saturday was warm and sunny here, so I put Cheesecake in charge of the Doxie pups for the day,” she wrote on the rescue’s Facebook page.

Ever since then the pups have been snuggling with the capybara, either unaware she is a rodent (the largest type of rodent in the world), or thinking that doesn’t much matter.

(Photos: Rocky Ridge Refuge)

Closer, the trashy magazine that brought you Kate Middleton’s breasts, is making news again — this time with a story about a 44-year-old California woman who breastfeeds her pug.

The Oct. 20th U.K. edition of Closer features an interview with Terri Graham, a mother of two human children.

Breastfeeding her pug Spider, she says, makes her feel like a better mom.

“Having Spider suckle on my boob means I finally feel complete and a better mother,” said Graham, who was unable to breastfeed her children for reasons unexplained.

Graham said she has been breastfeeding Spider for two years — ever since the dog licked a bottle of breast milk she had pumped for her newborn son. Apparently, Spider liked it so much, she decided to let him start drinking directly from the source.

There’s definitely a boundary line between what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to how close we get to our dogs, and how humanly we treate them — and we meant humanly there, not humanely. I don’t assume to be the one who defines that line, but, in my humble view, this crosses it.

Even though we “ooh” and “aww” when we see a female dog take on the feeding responsibilities to newborn animals of other species, most of us will probably “euuwwww” at this example.

The significant difference between those cases and this, of course, is that a nine-year-old pug doesn’t require breast milk to grow, and the surrogate mama dogs in those cases don’t generally seek headlines.

This, in my view, is fairly outrageous, which accounts for the story’s popularity. We seem to have an appetite for the outrageous, and no shortage of media happy to serve it up and let us suckle. A photo of the article about Graham was posted to a Reddit forum devoted to strange news, and it quickly rose to the site’s front page.  It was subsequently regurgitated by The Huffington Post, and given good play by Doghatersunite.com, a website that says it serves “people who hate dog-loving idiots and their Darwin-defying fleabags.”

One has to wonder how the original publication got onto this story:  A phoned-in tip? Peering through a window? Logging into breastfeedingyourdog.com? (Just kidding, there’s no such website.) Or did the subject of the story, sensing the magazine’s zeal for boob coverage, volunteer the information?

All said, while the case of the breastfeeding pug raises some interesting questions, one should probably consider the source — not just tabloid readers, but  especially Spider — and perhaps seek their nourishment elsewhere.

Sydney, a beagle-terrier mix in Michigan, has taken on the job of nursing five kittens.

The dog’s owner, Heather Rector, of Portage, brought the kittens home last week after they were rescued from a construction site.

Sydney’s maternal instincts — she has had three litters of her own — kicked right in.

And, stranger yet, she started lactating, her owner says.

“Two days of them being here, she was fully lactating, and … she hasn’t stopped lactating yet,” Rector said.

Sydney is feeding and bathing the kittens and won’t let them wander far without bringing them back to her bed.

Rector, a new mother herself, says she’s proud of Sydney’s compassion.  ”You don’t see a lot of people or animals do that anymore, and I think she did the exact thing I would have done.”

In the virtual world, you can, with a few well-placed clicks, pick your house, your car, your clothes, your physique, hair style and persona.

You can go out for a night on the town, in the setting of your choice, looking for love, or a fight, or any of thousands of other adventures — all of which are under your control.

Or you can spend a quiet evening at virtual home with your virtual pet — like a Panda-chow, or a tiger-husky, whose behavior, traits, appearance and even species combination are all changeable at your whim.

The video above is a preview for Sims 3 Pets, hitting the market today.

At the risk of sounding like an old man (one can’t criticize video games or apps without sounding like an old man), at the risk of being told by countless commenters that it’s only a game (yes, I realize that), I find it bothersome (and I don’t just mean that annoying narration).

In a way, I find what Sims 3 Pets does with dogs and cats nearly as troubling as that dogfighting app that led to so much controversy.

It’s a reflection of the same wrongheaded (in my view) mindset that we can do whatever we want to with dogs as long as it (A) entertains us, (B) makes money, (C) makes our lives easier, or (D) is done in the name of science.

It’s that mindset that leads to dogs as fashion accessories, dogs being abandoned when fads change, cruel laboratory experiments, greyhound racing, dogfighting, puppy mills, over breeding and, yes, cloning.

It’s thinking that dogs and all animals exist to serve our whims — however fleeting, selfish or bizarre those whims may be.

“Lighten up dude, it’s just a video game,” you might say. “It’s just a fantasy.”

And you’d have a point.

But (A) experimenting with and exploiting dogs doesn’t just happen in video games; and (B) Sims is not really the target of my tirade, for the game is just the latest rendition of a recurring theme in our society.

Of course, if it weren’t for man’s self-serving tinkering, we wouldn’t have dogs at all. It was man that shaped the wolf into all the diverse shapes and sizes we have now — and I’m not for doing away with any of them.

But somewhere — at least in real life, if not in video games — all the tinkering needs to stop.

We don’t need tiger-retrievers, or panda-chows — whether it’s the result of creative hair-styling and dye jobs, or inter-species experiments, or cell manipulation.

We don’t need robot dogs, or gladiator dogs, or fluorescent dogs, or dogs so inbred that they are unhealthy caricatures of themselves, or dogs created in a laboratory from the harvested cells of a deceased pet.

We don’t need to reinvent the dog, redesign the dog, ressurect the dog or even fine tune the dog. It’s fine as it is, and much of man’s meddling — whether it’s to make dogs more predictable, produce look-alike, act-alike cookie cutter versions of them, or invent new versions that are low-drool or non-allergenic — is an insult to that.

It’s even more of an arrogant pursuit when you stop and consider that the species that probably needs the most work is us. Maybe it’s our inability to control what happens among our fellow humans that makes us so prone to inflicting control over dogs, nature, or whatever else we can.

Here is something I said before, somewhere: If there is even a remote chance of controlling something, humans wanted to control it, preferably remotely.

In Sims 3 Pets, players can create and control over a hundred different kinds of cats and dogs, and can breed and share them with friends providing endless possibilities to create “new and exciting” breeds.

One can customize the pet’s coat, shape, pattern, color; the size of its ears, tail, snout, eyes, and more. You can also choose their behavior pattern, traits and control their bodily functions.

Dogs can even get jobs and make money.

And most creepy of all, pets can be shaped via virtual interspecies breeding, resulting in skunk-cats and panda-chows.

(If you think mixing species, fluorescent dogs and cloning are too far fetched to ever happen, I’d refer you to my book, DOG, INC.: the Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend. They all already have.

It would be too much to ask, given that pesky First Amendment and all, that gamemakers refrain from virtual interspecies breeding.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow limit all forms of novelty dogs — and other bad human concepts like war — to the confines of computerized games?

Unfortunately, that seems out of our control.

A rescued dog in eastern Missouri adopted an orphaned baby raccoon as her own after losing one of her puppies during labor.

The dog, named Sasha, had been surrendered to a shelter with what was suspected of being a tumor.

But after she was rescued by a group in St. Peters called SNUGGLE (Special Needs Under Gentle Guided Love Everyday) ultrasound tests showed the lump was two soon-to-be-born pups.

Only one of the puppies survived.

Around then, a baby raccoon who’d been found under a carport was brought to the same veterinarian.

“We started off bottle feeding it and just couldn’t keep up with its needs,” veterinarian Dr. Kelly Hogan said. So they offered Sasha the job. Both Sasha and her pup accepted the raccoon as one of their own.

“Even when he started making little raccoon kind of noises, she didn’t have a problem with it,” Hogan said. “And she loves him. She’s protective of him now.”

Eventually, the raccoon will be transferred to a wildlife rescue group and then released into the wild.

As SNUGGLE’s Sharon Maag sees it, Sasha — having been rescued herself — is returning the favor.

“We saved her life, and she saved the raccoon’s life … It’s the circle of life. I think that’s the way it goes.”

If that one got you all worked up — what with all that high energy and yapping — here’s one to calm you down again.

A stray dog in Canada didn’t let getting hit by a car keep her from nursing her litter of five pups.

And one kitten.

Esperanza, as she’s been named (Spanish for “Hope”), was found on a central Alberta reserve by Criss Gerwing, who runs a small animal rescue group. The dog, a white shepherd mix, led Gerwing to her pups, and a kitten that, somehow, ended up nestled in with the rest of the litter.

“I cried because she was in such bad condition with her leg, but she was obviously nursing her puppies and this kitten,” Gerwing said.

The Winnipeg Free Press reports that Gerwing took all the animals to the Edmonton Humane Society, where veterinarians thought they’d have to amputate the mother dog’s bad leg. But a local veterinarian, Dr. Milton Ness, saying she was “a special soul”  volunteered to perform surgery to save her leg.

“She is such a sweet, sweet dog,” Shawna Randolph at the humane society said. “She has such a wonderful personality.”

Shyla, a Chihuahua mix in New Zealand, has undertaken the nursing of seven kittens born to a stray.

The kittens were taken in by a Pets n Vets clinic to save them from being euthanized, and Shyla, who has nursed a previous litter of kittens, was called to duty.