ohmidog!

A pit bull mix who was kicked and slapped by her owner on an apartment house elevator — that’s the surveillance video above — has been adopted by a young New York couple.

Richard Palacios, a 33-year-old SoHo waiter, and his fiance, Natalya Prokenpenko, 24, adopted the dog Friday, according to the New York Post.

“We didn’t know her story … When we saw the video, my fiancée started crying,” Prokopenko said.

The dog, who appears pretty happy with the new developments, is now known as Hazel.

Prokenpenko said as soon as they entered their Queens home with Hazel she “started kissing me, kissing my fiancé.”

Hazel’s beating on the elevator at East Harlem’s Wagner Houses, was recorded by police department surveillance cameras last August, and led to the arrest of  Brian Freeman, 28. Hazel was taken from him and placed in a shelter then.

She had a cracked rib and bruises, but vets said she didn’t seem to have been subjected to prior abuse.

Freeman, who worked in a security job at a homeless shelter and was in college, entered a guilty plea last week to a reduced charge of misdemeanor trespassing. A  judge indicated he would sentence Freeman to term of 25 days community service at his sentencing on Feb. 5.

 (Photo: Brigitte Stelzer / New York Post)

The founder of Paws and Stripes — a nonprofit organization that provides disabled veterans with service dogs — says both he and his service dog, Sarge, were mistreated by United Airlines.

After waiting 48 hours in Dulles Airport due to cancellations and delays, Jim Stanek said he approached a ticket counter to get  help understanding his revised itinerary.

He says he explained was having difficulty reading it.

“He said, ‘Just read it’ and I said, ‘Sir I can’t read it,’ and he said, ‘What are you retarded?’” Stanek recalled.

Wounded in battle, Stanek suffers from a brain injury that makes it difficult for him to concentrate under stress.

In addition to the insult, Stanek says, Sarge was kicked twice by United employees, leaving her “shaking like a leaf. It’s like she has PTSD.”

Stanek said the second, and harder kick came on a shuttle bus that was taking him from one terminal to another. An employee in a United uniform kicked the dog, he said.

“He said he was afraid of dogs,” Stanek said.  “(He) kicked her so hard on the rib cage, that she literally jumped up into my lap.”

Stanek is encouraging others to register their concerns about how he and his dog were treated.

“I’m not asking for a red carpet, just treat me the way I’m supposed to be treated,” he said in a video he put together, recounting the incident.

Paws and Stripes works to provide service dogs for veterans with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. The dogs are obtained only from shelters, and are trained by professionals to become service dogs.

Here’s Stanek’s account of what happened:

The North Carolina Highway Patrol officer who was fired in 2007 after being videotaped kicking his drug-sniffing dog has returned to work.

Charles Jones will be a sergeant in the patrol’s special operations unit, reconstructing accidents, Highway Patrol spokesman Jeff Gordon said Monday.

His rehiring is in response to a court order issued in February. A Superior Court judge, the state personnel commission and an administrative law judge all ruled that Jones should get his job back with the Highway Patrol, according to the Raleigh News and Observer.

The video of Jones kicking his canine partner, Ricoh, was posted on YouTube, leading then-Gov. Mike Easley to get involved. Jones superiors have testified that the governor’s involvement led them to fire Jones, who they had planned to only discipline.

Jones was filmed kicking Ricoh and suspending him by a leash attached to a railing with his rear paws on the ground. The dog had refused to release a piece of fire hose he had been given as a reward for alerting officers to the presence of drugs, according to court documents.

Jones maintained that he was acting within patrol policy. He appealed the decision to dismiss him and won — a decision most recently upheld by a state appeals court.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled today that Charles Jones, shown above kicking his State Highway Patrol dog in September 2007, and fired shortly thereafter, should be reinstated.

And with back pay.

Jones was fired after another trooper turned over two 15-second video clips of him suspending his K-9 partner, Ricoh, from a railing and repeatedly kicking him to force him to release a chew toy.

In 2008, the State Personnel Commission found Jones’ punishment too harsh and ordered that he be reinstated.

Tuesday’s ruling is the latest in a series, all of which agreed the Highway Patrol did not have cause to terminate Jones’ employment. (Ricoh didn’t get a vote.) You can find the full text of the ruling here.

Patrol leaders said they initially planned to discipline Jones but decided to fire him when then-Gov. Mike Easley’s office intervened.

In its ruling, the court noted testimony from Jones’ former supervisor, Lt. Col. Cecil Lockley, who said, “They want him gone … the decision regarding Sgt. Jones’ career was predetermined, not by the patrol’s disciplinary process but by an outside entity.”

Lockley called Jones’ method of disciplining Ricoh “ugly,” but said it did not fall outside the realm of patrol-accepted training techniques.

The appeals court agreed with a lower court ruling that ”the training method used by Jones on Ricoh in this matter, while appearing excessive and extreme to the general public, is not unreasonably outside of or substantially different from several of the training techniques that are tested, trained and approved for use by the Patrol.”

It concluded, “Jones acted consistently with his training, and used compliance techniques on Ricoh similar to those used by all Patrol members who were canine handlers.”

We’d hope that the highway patrol has redefined the boundaries of its realm of training techniques –  as it stated it would after the case came to public attention.

A rebuilding of the K-9 unit was promised, and an end to the kind of rough training tactics — swinging, suspending and kicking of patrol dogs — that the video depicts. New training procedures, they said, would specifically prohibit punching, kicking, beating and choking of dogs.

Leave it to the Sun to melt the Snowman.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Frosty the Snowman — so rudely removed from the Chestertown Christmas parade — has a history of tangling with police, and that Saturday’s arrest, after he allegedly kicked at a police dog and butted his snowman head against an officer, was his fifth this year

The man beneath the Frosty costume, Kevin Michael Walsh, 52, of Chestertown, has performed off an on at the Christmas parade for 10 years.

But this year alone, according to the Sun, he has been convicted of “telephone misuse” for calling police in April and pretending to be a CNN reporter, and found guilty of disorderly conduct for standing outside the Town Hall in May banging pots and pans because he couldn’t get inside. Both incidents led to suspended jail sentences and probation.

The parade-related charges, though — three counts of second-degree assault and one count of resisting arrest — could, upon conviction, carry a sentence of as much as 33 years in prison.

“He likes to agitate police,” Deputy Police Chief William H. Dwyer Jr. told the Sun. “He’s just a town nuisance.”

Walsh, who once ran a watch business, describes himself as a political activist “exercising his right to free speech in a small town where officials don’t like being challenged,” according to the Sun.

Walsh said that upon noticing a police dog at the parade, he approached patrolman James H. Walker, who was standing on the corner with his K9, Henzo.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s not right to have a dog at the parade,’” Walsh told the Sun. “I don’t think a children’s parade should have police dogs.”

Police reports say Walsh made a “kicking motion” toward the dog; Walsh says he merely lost his balance in the costume.

After putting Henzo in his police car, the patrolman returned and removed Walsh from the parade — ostensibly to counsel him on the wisdom of antagonizing police dogs.

Deputy Chief Dwyer said Walsh then started “cussing” and became “verbally abusive” toward Walker, at which time he was arrested. He was released on his own recognizance later that day.

A man dressed up as Frosty the Snowman for the annual Christmas parade in Chestertown, Md., was removed from the festivities Saturday and charged with assault and disorderly conduct.

Police said the man beneath the costume — identified as Kevin Michael Walsh, 52, of Chestertown — scuffled with officers and kicked a police dog.

Sgt. John A. Dolgos told The Star Democrat of Easton (registration is required to read the article) that Walsh became agitated when a dog-handling officer tried to escort him away from the crowd.

Walsh said the officer began giving him a hard time after he made a joke about the police dog’s presence at the parade.

Walsh has dressed as Frosty in the Eastern Shore town’s Christmas parade for at least 10 years.

(Photo: Easton Star-Democrat)

The assistant district attorney prosecuting the case against Tiara Davis, accused of beating her Pomeranian on the elevator at a New York City housing project, broke into laughter in the courtroom yesterday.

While reading Davis’ statement about how she beat the dog, Assistant District Attorney Steven Constantiner began chuckling, the New York Daily News reported.

“He was laughing and had to turn away because he couldn’t control the laughter,” said, Stacy Schneider, a Legal Aid lawyer representing Davis. “I didn’t see any humor in the statement.”

Davis, 31, is charged with beating a 9-pound Pomeranian named Sparky into unconsciousness in an elevator at the Grant Houses in Manhattan. Police quoted her as saying: “It wasn’t like I was killing him or anything like that. I mean I wasn’t gonna really hurt him.”

Constantiner started laughing when he was reading part of Davis’ statement that described the dog relieving itself in the elevator.

“The assistant district attorney laughed briefly and unexpectedly while reading to the court the vulgarities the defendant used in her statement to police,” acknowledged Erin Duggan, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office. Constantiner declined comment.

Davis, a vocational counselor, pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor animal-cruelty charges. Her lawyer denied she  made the statements to police. Davis, who has since surrendered Sparky, was caught on video beating the 4-year-old dog and was arrested by the ASPCA. She faces up to a year in jail.

Her arrest came just after another resident of the Grant Houses, Chris Grant, was charged with animal cruelty in connection with beating a dog — an incident police say was caught on the elevator surveillance cameras earlier.

A sheriff’s deputy arrested on a DUI charge in Tennessee was thrown into a “K-9 cage” by state troopers who said it was for his own protection.

Samuel Monroe Bledsoe, 47, who has been terminated from his job as a deputy with the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office, allegedly tried to slam a squad car door on a trooper, kicked the inside of a squad car and was vomiting on himself, according to the Kingsport Times-News.

He was placed in a “K-9 cage” to prevent injury to himself or state property, according to a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer’s arrest report and a court affidavit.

Troopers said Bledsoe was found asleep in the front passenger seat of his wife’s car, and was unable to perform a sobriety test as instructed, even though it was explained to him 18 times. He was arrested and placed in the back seat of an officer’s cruiser.

On the way to Bristol Regional Medical Center for a blood test, the officer had to pull over twice because Bledsoe was kicking the cage and the door of the cruiser, police said. After the second stop, officers got approval to transfer Bledsoe to the back of the patrol unit, which was equipped to house a police dog.

 “Due to the K-9 cage being smaller,” they said, he was less likely to injure himself there.

For the past two weeks, on my way to the park with my dog, I’ve been stopping to see a cat.

He (or she) has been living underneath the wooden stairs in front of an empty rowhouse in South Baltimore, depending on the kindness of strangers, who have left him food and supplied him with a little cardboard house.

With temperatures dropping, and snow coming, and reports that he was getting kicked around on the street corner, I brought him home last night.

Now he needs a home.

Got one?

To inquire, contact me at muttsblog@verizon.net.

A dog thrown off a bridge in Lithuania. A dog dragged to death at Colorado National Monument. A dog viciously kicked in a New York elevator.

We’ve shown you all of those in recent weeks at ohmidog! — because, though they are graphic and disturbing, we believe that they need to be seen.

So now we bring you this one of Lucky and Misty, dog and cat — graphic in a way that won’t turn your stomach, graphic in a way that we could use a little more of, graphic in a way that, maybe, we humans could learn from.

Global New Year’s Resolution: Be more like Lucky and Misty.