The quick answer is no. Despite a recent boo boo — actually a boo boo repeated from 2006 — in one of her “dog-friendly” recipes, Rachel Ray, whether you find her endearing or annoying, appears to be a true dog person, dog lover and dog philanthropist.

That one of her recipes — reprinted alongside a profile of Ray in this month’s Modern Dog magazine — calls for onions, which can be toxic to dogs, was an unfortunate oversight, a result of either the conflicting information that’s out there or a reflection of Ray’s learning curve when it comes to canines.

The recipe in question, “Isaboo’s Butternut Squash Mac and Cheddar,” originally appeared in Ray’s own magazine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, which runs a “pet friendly” recipe in every issue — a meal you can make for both you and your dog to eat.

The macaroni and cheese dish, which calls for half an onion, was the first of those to appear in the magazine, back in March 2006.

Ray also has her own dog food company, Rachael Ray Nutrish, some of the profits from which go to her own rescue organization, as she’s quick to point out on her website:

“There are no fillers.  No junk.  Just lots of good, wholesome stuff. How cool is that? And you know me.  I’m all about giving back, so some of the proceeds from Rachael Ray Nutrish go to charities that take care of animals who have no one else to look out for them.  Wow.  How good do you feel now?”

But back to poisoning dogs.

After the onion episode came to light, we went back and checked all the “dog-friendly” recipes Ray has published in her magazine, starting in April 2006 — all 27 of them — and we’re pleased to report that none of them are likely to kill your dog.

True, some of them call for avocados, which are toxic to dogs, and scallions, which are toxic to dogs, and nutmeg, high levels of which can result in seizures, tremors, central nervous system problems and death.

But almost always those recipes point out — either in the ingredient list or in the directions — to use those items only in the human portions.

Read more »

Here’s an accidentally artsy photo I took at the park recently. It’s Ace (the brown blur) wrestling with Soju (the grey blur). Soju is a Great Dane, and one of Ace’s favorite wrestling partners.

You can see Soju — he’s named after the distilled beverage, native to Korea — elsewhere on this page, as he, along with his owner, is featured in one of our advertisements.

I could tell you what my camera settings were, and attempt to sound like a skilled photographer, but it was just on automatic, and the sun was going down. So the slow shutter speed, I think, accounts for ghostly streaks in the image –  not unlike how things might look if you had too much soju.

We started the New Year off not with a bang, but with a gun.

My girlfriend, Tamara, went out back to feed the feral cats on New Year’s morning, and there, next to our urban compost heap, buried beneath some rocks, was what appeared to be a gun, or at least piece of one.

Having seen more than our share of television police dramas, we didn’t touch it, but I did — after calling the Baltimore police — take these pictures.

An officer arrived at our home, a rowhouse in South Baltimore, within minutes. He walked through our back yard, through a gate and into the small area where, if we try really hard, we can park our cars. We pointed out the firearm, which was apparently hidden there on New Year’s Eve, and he reached under the rocks and picked it up — without rubber gloves, without using a pencil. (I was sure he was going to use a pencil.)

It was an older looking firearm, made of wood — somewhere between pistol and rifle — with a small grip and a long barrel, not a sawed off shotgun, but resembling that. The officer, saying it looked capable of firing, took it into custody, then walked through the alley with it, rather than back through our house. He didn’t want it to discharge in our house, he said. But maybe he just wanted to avoid Ace, who had jumped up on him a couple of times when he arrived.

Within a few minutes of his departure, the feral cats were back, enjoying a meal.

Jasmine — the pit bull who went from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation to life with a young family of four in suburban Baltimore — graces the cover of this month’s Sports Illustrated.

One of three Vick dogs turned over to the Baltimore rescue organization Recycled Love for rehabilitation, Jasmine ended up in the home of Catalina Stirling, a 35-year-old artist and Recycled Love volunteer who, upon first meeting Jasmine, crawled into the cage where the dog cowered beneath a blanket.

The Sports Illustrated article looks at what has become of the 51 dogs seized from Vick’s Virginia estate — dogs that even some animal welfare organizations were saying had been so brutalized that euthanasia, not rehabilitation, was the only solution.

Jasmine was likely born at Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels and, because of her youth, was a “bait dog,” used to provide practice matches for the fighting dogs, spending the rest of the time chained to a car axle in the nearby woods.

During evaluations of the Vick dogs, Jasmine was being considered for sanctuary with Best Friends in Utah, where the most severely traumatized dogs were sent, when Recycled Love volunteers went to see her and the other dogs being held at the Washington (DC) Animal Rescue League.

Stirling, seeing the dog under the blanket, crawled into the cage and began massaging and whispering to her, and Jasmine seemed to respond. The dog was turned over to Recycled Love, then sent to live with Stirling, her husband, two young children, two other dogs and a cat.

For months, Jasmine sat in her cage in Stirling’s house and refused to come out. “I had to pick her up and carry her outside so she could go to the bathroom,” Stirling says. “She wouldn’t even stand up until I had walked away. There’s a little hole in the yard, and once she was done, she would go lie in the hole.”

It was almost four months before Jasmine would get out of the cage by herself. Visits from another Vick dog living in Maryland, Sweet Pea, helped draw Jasmine out of her shell — enough so that after six months Stirling could finally take both dogs for a walk in a park near her house.

Jasmine is still fearful, the article says. She almost always walks with her head and tail down. She won’t let anyone approach her from behind, and she still spends most of the day in her pen, sitting there quietly, even thought the door is open.

In the end, 47 of the 51 Vick dogs were saved. Two died while in the shelters. One was destroyed because it was too violent; and another was euthanized for medical reasons. Twenty-two dogs went to Best Friends. The other 25 have been spread around the country. Ten went to California with BAD RAP. Fourteen of the 25 have been placed in permanent homes, and the rest are in foster care.

(To  learn more about the Vick dogs, you can check out ohmidog!’s earlier incarnation, Mutts.)

The rural North Texas town of Ferris — about 20 miles south of Dallas — has approved a policy that allows authorities to shoot “wild” roaming dogs.

Ferris City Manager David Chavez said the Ellis County town approved the policy because it was becoming a dumping ground for unwanted pets. People drive out to the country to release pets they no longer want, but the starving animals breed, form packs and wind up scavenging for food, he said.

Ferris Police Chief Frank Mooney said the city would shoot only “potentially violent dogs,” and only as a last resort — after attempts to humanely capture the animal had failed.

This is a case, once again, of dogs being punished for the acts of humans; it’s the sort of thing you might expect in Baghdad, or maybe Alaska; and it’s full of faulty reasoning.

Every dog (like every human) is “potentially violent,” especially when it sees a lynch mob coming after it. My dog once roamed the streets himself, and gentle as he is, I’m sure he might have given indications otherwise if someone came after him with a rope or pole, much less a shotgun, which the new policy permits. I’m not entirely sure smalltown Texas lawmen should be acting as judge, jury and executioner.

As you might expect, the new policy has enraged animal welfare advocates.

“It’s unfathomable to me that the city of Ferris just outlandishly wants to go out and shoot these stray dogs,” Niloofar Asgharian, a board member of the nonprofit Animal Connection of Texas, said in a story in the Dallas Morning News. “It doesn’t do anything except that these dogs end up dying a slow, miserable death.”

Animal welfare advocates have suggested trapping the animals and better enforcing laws that prohibit dumping dogs.

“It seems like a cruel punishment to the animal when the blame is on people,” said Sherwin Daryani, the executive director of Operation Kindness.

There are 50 to 100 feral dogs roaming Ferris’ streets, said Misty Clark, the city’s lone animal control officer.

The town of Ferris can be reached through this contact form.

(Image: From dallasartsreview.com, ”Stray Dog,” a painting by Roger Winter, an artist and teacher from Denison, Texas, who served on the faculty of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

From ohmidog!

 (with apologies to my brother and sister)

 Photo: John (with guitar), Kathryn (with Santa), and Ted (with bobblehead dog), circa 1965

(Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared Friday, but was taken off the ohmidog! website after it recieved so many visits that our server crashed. That, and our subsequent transition to a new and more powerful server, explains any ohmidog! outage you may have experienced in the past few days. We’re back, stronger than ever, and just in time for the holidays. We weren’t about to let the glitch steal Christmas.)

Modern Dog magazine has pulled a Rachel Ray recipe billed as dog-friendly from their website after realizing it called for onions, which can be toxic to dogs.

The recipe accompanied a fawning article about Ray, her “stratospheric” rise to fame via the Food Network, her love for dogs and her new line of dog food, “Rachael Ray Nutrish:”

“Other celebrities may opt for a namesake clothing line, but for an animal lover like Ray, this is far more gratifying … The same qualities that make Ray’s signature dishes appealing are present in her new line of dog food and snacks: they’re made of fresh, real food.”

At the bottom of the article a Ray recipe appeared for “Isaboo’s Butternut Squash Mac and Cheddar,” which calls for half an onion.

“I know it sounds odd, but my girl loved butternut squash!” Ray writes in introducing the recipe. “One of the most comforting traits of our puppy Isaboo is that she’s crazy-nuts for butternut squash, too. Using frozen squash makes this sweet, creamy pasta possible year-round. Always check with your vet about which foods are appropriate for you to share with your pet.”

But apparently neither Ray nor the editors at Modern Dog checked the ingredients of the recipe, which has since been taken off line. You can see the current version of the article here, the cached (original) version here.

This mistake, and remake of the web page — without the recipe — was pointed out by Devouring Seattle, a food blog published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In a year’s time, Chiara Sforza went from bank vice president to dogwalker — not that we at ohmidog! see that, in terms of honorable professions, as any sort of a plunge — and she wrote about her unexpected change in career paths in Sunday’s New York Times.

Sforza had been with Deutsche Bank for eight years. She was laid off in the summer of 2007 when the work her department did was outsourced to Manilla.

After collecting unemployment, and being rejected as “over-qualified” by many employers, she ended up six months ago in the employ of Fetch Pet Care of New Jersey Gold Coast in Fort Lee.

“Pet-sitting and dog-walking give me an opportunity to do something different,” she wrote in a first person feature the Times calls “Preoccupations.” I’m tired of going to work every day in jobs where I have to worry if my position is going to be outsourced, and the new job is actually working out well…

“I don’t make anywhere near my corporate salary, but this job is perfect for now. I have a little flexibility because I have savings. Being happy while making some money is more important to me right now than making a lot of money and being miserable. At this stage in my life I’m willing to make the sacrifice …  I get so much gratification from walking dogs. They’re so appreciative of the simplest things you do for them.”

It’s getting nasty out there. But it’s nice to know that at least in some cases, when one door closes, another one does indeed open — and it’s nicer yet when there’s a dog behind it.

There’s a media firestorm rising out of vice-president-elect Joe Biden’s purchase of a German shepherd pup from a Pennsylvania breeder, but, as with many media firestorms, this one may be more smoke than fire.

At its center is this question: Did Joe Biden by his dog from a puppy mill?

Puppy mill is a subjective term. Some use it to describe large scale breeding operations where the welfare of dogs runs a distant second to making a profit. Some use it to describe any commercial breeding operation.

Linda Brown owner of the kennel in Chester County, Pa., insists that violations found after Biden purchased his dog — during a regularly scheduled inspection — mostly pertained to record-keeping, and she says they were the first she ever received.

That hasn’t stopped either over-zealous animal rights activists, or overworked journalists, from slapping the “puppy mill” label on Brown’s operation.

“Joe Biden hooks up with bad dog breeder,” read the headline in yesterday’s Baltimore Examiner — or at least in its online version. The story beneath the headline doesn’t substantiate that at all. Read more »

The saga of my dog Ace, though already told, may be in for some revision.

My Baltimore Sun series on Ace’s roots — which traced everything from how he ended up in the city animal shelter to the breeds that, according to a DNA test, were in him — originally appeared last year. (You can find the video version of “Hey, Mister, What Kind of Dog is That?” on our dog-umentaries page.)

Now, with advances in technology, were going to reexamine Ace’s earliest chapters. The simple cheek swab DNA test we gave him in connection with the earlier project, which checked for 38 breeds, showed only two — Chow and Rottweiler.

Now, we’re going to try the new and more sophisticated blood test, from Mars Veterinary — the Mars Wisdom Panel MX Mixed Breed Analysis – which can determine the presence of 157 breeds.

As a result, we may find out that there is more to Ace — breed-wise — than we originally thought, perhaps we’ll even find out what accounts for his size, which, height-wise, exceeds that of both of the breeds found in him.

Mastiff, horse and minivan were among the guesses last time around, in addition to the more common ones — Akita (which would explain his curly tail), shepherd and Great Dane (which would explain his size). As it turned out most people were wrong, at least according to the Canine Heritage Test.

This time around, we’re going to ask for guesses as well. Those who can name each and every breed — in the form of a comment on this entry – will win a free ohmidog! hooded sweatshirt.

In addition, we’re checking the DNA of our contest winner, Elliott. To guess his breeds, go here.

The process starts this weekend when the blood of Ace and Elliott will be drawn by Dr. Johnny Slaughter, mobile veterinarian, and we’ll give you updates along the way. When the results are in, we’ll all get together — likely at a bar — to hear the results.

Meantime, guess away. Here’s some info on Ace: He’s 121 pounds (having recently dropped a few), is about as tall as me (5′ 9″) when he stands on his hind legs. HIs tail makes a complete loop — at least when he’s happy. He works, off an on, as a therapy dog, loves all humans, and almost all dogs. He’s an Aries (we think) and likes long walks on the beach, watching birds and curling up with a good book, as long as somebody else is reading it.