ohmidog!

The starving stray dog rescuers initially dubbed Java, because of the coffee can around her neck, has been renamed Olivia, and she’s recovering from her surgery Monday.

Authorities estimate she spent a month with the can encasing her neck and cutting into her ears. She apparently gave birth to a litter during that time, though it’s not likely any pups survived, based on the emaciated condition Olivia was found in.

But she’s been making steady improvement since having surgery Monday. “She’s really doing remarkably well,” a board member with Animal Allies of Texas told the Dallas Morning News.

According to Animal Allies, Dallas Animal Control is not investigating whether the dog was abused because there is no evidence the can was intentionally placed on her head.

Olivia — believed to be a one-to-two-year-old shepherd mix – was found by a citizen  Sunday near Dowdy Ferry Road and Interstate 20, said to be a common dog dumping ground.

Vets expect Olivia, who still needs to be treated for heartworm and spayed, to spend another week at Metro Paws Animal Hospital. After that, she will be fostered by one of the veterinary technicians.

It could be up to four months before she is put up for adoption.

Contributions to Olivia’s care can be made through the Animal Allies website or by calling Metro Paws at 214-887-1400.

(Photos: Animal Allies)

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.”

She’s smaller than a can of soda, and wasn’t breathing when she was born at a northern California animal sanctuary, but a palm-sized puppy who’s been named Beyonce Knowles is getting stronger each day.

“She’s the smallest dog I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Beth De Caprio of the Grace Foundation in El Dorado Hills.

Beyonce’s mother, along with two other dogs were pulled from a shelter in Devore, California, where they likely would have been euthanized if not rescued.

When she was born, Beyonce was about a quarter of the size of the other pups in the litter, and she wasn’t breathing. A vet was able to resuscitate her.

The photos of Beyonce accompanying this post were taken by Lisa Van Dyke of  ED Dog Photography. She was visiting the foundation Saturday when she was asked to take a photo of Beyonce, who she describes as a premature Chihuahua mix.

To show how small she was, Van Dyke grabbed some props, like a girl scout cookie, coin, iPhone and soda can.

Foundation officials say Beyonce, was the last of four puppies in the litter, born March 8. She has been bottle fed around the clock since then.

For more information on the Grace Foundation, you can visit  its website, or its Facebook page:

To see Van Dyke’s photos — of Beyonce and more — visit her website, Eddogphotography.com

An eccentric Czech scientist says a single-celled parasite that can be passed on through contact with cat feces can lead people to behave in strange and destructive ways.

And Jaroslav Flegr has more than studies to back up his theory. He has the parasite — Toxoplasma gondii (or Toxo for short).

Flegr and his work are profiled in a fascinating (and scary) article this month in The Atlantic, which describes the 63-year-old evolutionary biologist as a “sloppy dresser … with the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought” and “frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.”

Flegr, the article says, has pursued his theory for decades in relative obscurity — partly because he’s not much of a conversationalist and rarely goes to scientific conferences, partly, he says, because people just don’t want to hear it.

“There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet.”

His theory is gaining credence, though, The Atlantic reports.

That parasites can be passed on through cat feces is nothing new, as the article notes:

Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death … (It’s) the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

Flegr thinks that, even in its latent stage, the parasite may be messing with the connections between our neurons, affecting our response to frightening situations, our outgoingness, our trust of others and our preference for certain scents.

He thinks the organism is a factor in car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. All tolled, he says, it might be, in an indirect kind of way, killing a million people a year.

Flegr had long wondered about his own behavior. Sometimes, he didn’t move out of the way of oncoming traffic, and exhibited other behaviors that might be described as self-destructive. He began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was manipulating his personality.

In 1990, he joined the biology faculty of Charles University, which was a leader in documenting the health effects of T. gondii and in developing methods for detecting the parasite.

Colleagues searching for infected individuals on whom to test their improved diagnostic kits asked him to volunteer, and that’s when he confirmed he had the parasite.

Read more »

It’s far cuter than the  dog-riding monkey, but we’re not suggesting they become a halftime show.

A dog in remote north-eastern Bangladesh has become a minor celebrity by breastfeeding a baby monkey back to health.

The monkey, just a few days old, was rescued from angry villagers, who had seized it after a group of monkeys damaged a rice field, the dog’s owner told AFP today.

The news agency reports that scores of people have flocked to Shipar Reza’s house in Bishwanathpur village to witness the addition to the litter of his dog Mintu, who is also mother to seven puppies.

The day after the baby monkey was rescued by from an angry mob, it  joined the other puppies as they fed off  Mintu. Since then, it has also started sleeping with Mintu and other puppies.

(Photo: AFP)

You wouldn’t expect any sort of a happy ending to a story that involves a litter of kittens being sealed into an empty bag of Meow Mix, dumped on a country road in Iowa and run over by oncoming traffic.

But two kittens survived, thanks to a dog, according to this report that aired on NBC2.

A dog named Reagan found the bag, dragged it home and then whined until his owner opened it.

“It was gruesome, quite gruesome,” said Linda Blakely of Iowa’s Raccoon Valley Animal Sanctuary, where the cats, three months later, now reside. Their names are Tipper and Skipper.

Two or three other cats didn’t survive, but apparently Reagan the retriever was more interested in the lives that lingered than the blood and guts.

“The instinct of the dog was to nurture and not kill …With all the blood some dogs would have responded to the scent,” said Blakely. “Reagan the dog is a hero.”

The kittens were so weak they had to be fed with a bottle every two hours at first, but now, as you can see in the video, they’re looking quite healthy.

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When a Florida woman stopped to check out some puppies being offered for sale on the side of the road, for $50 each, she noticed a plastic trash bag off to the side.

And it was moving.

She asked about it, and the not-so-honorable vendor reluctantly showed her what was inside — a member of the litter who, not being able to walk, was apparently destined for the trash heap.

Perhaps to save himself a trip to the Dumpster, the vendor gave the young pit bull to the woman, who immediately took the dog to Seminole County Animal Services, where he was diagnosed with Swimmer Puppy Syndrome.

With help from Dolly’s Foundation, a pit bull rescue, the dog was taken  to Hip Dog in Winter Park, where he began a regimen of massages and hydrotherapy.

The therapy paid off. Now named Harper, the dog, at 10 1/2 weeks of age, recently took his first steps. He’ll be put up for adoption in about a month.

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.”

The proposal to establish a DNA database of every dog who resides in Baltimore’s Scarlett Place Condominiums — all in hopes of figuring out who’s not picking up their dog’s poop — appears to have been dumped.

At a meeting of the condo’s board this week, the proposal was tabled and the decision was made to to pursue more “realistic and acceptable” alternatives.

While the meeting was closed to the public, a resident correspondent reports on the Baltimore Sun’s Unleashed blog that the board chairman said that other alternatives to finding the culprit would receive further study.

Under the proposal, every dog in Scarlett Place would have had to provide a DNA sample. Any unpicked-up poop found at the building would then be sent to an out of state laboratory for comparison. The owner of the dog linked to the poop would then face fines.

Unleashed author Jill Rosen wrote that, after breaking the story, she was originally invited to attend the meeting, but uninvited when the story developed legs, appearing in publications and on websites across the globe, thereby, in my view, bringing the luxury condominium the embarassment it deserved.

Richard Hopp, a Scarlett Place resident, reported to Unleashed that the condo board, in a standing room only meeting, ”tabled the proposal.” Not a single resident spoke in favor of it, he said, and the board member who came up with the idea wasn’t present.

“For what it is worth, my take on this is that the board members realized they had really ‘stepped in it’ with their doggy DNA proposal,” Hopp reported, “and in order to save face, they tabled the matter, rather than just vote it down and move on…”

A dog seen wandering around Danville, Virginia last week with a plastic container stuck over his head — in the fashion of a spaceman or deep sea diver — has been captured and relieved of his involuntary helmet.

A police officer captured the dog Friday morning, after a resident spotted him and called for help.

He’s now in the custody of the the Danville Humane Society, which has named him “Jughead.”

The Humane Society had been trying to catch “Jughead” all week because the plastic container — similar to one cheese puffs might come in — was preventing him from eating or drinking. They’d offered a $500 reward to anyone who could capture him.

Danville Police Officer Mike Smith captured the dog Friday after a woman spotted him resting on a porch on Colquhoun Street, the Danville News reported.

“He was eager to drink. He seems to be doing better now. He seems to have come around a little bit. He was very scared and very shy when we first saw him but he seems to be doing better now, Danville Humane Society Director Paulette Dean said.

The Humane Society says it will put Jughead — believed to be a pit bull-chow mix, about four years old — up for adoption if no owner is found.

Dean said Jughead wasn’t the first animal to get entrapped in litter. The society has had cases of stray cats, a fox and a raccoon getting their head stuck in containers.

“There are dangers of littering,” she said. “People need to keep their trash contained.”

And their dogs, too.