ohmidog!

An Iowa couple whose dog was stolen when they were visiting San Antonio has gotten her back — though exactly how isn’t clear.

James Maschmann and his wife were visiting the city in February when they stopped to eat, parking their car at a Cracker Barrel and leaving their 4-year-old shih-poo inside, with the windows cracked.

When they returned, Katie Jo was missing along with Maschmann’s cellphone, according to the San Antonio Express-News

Last week, the couple posted an ad on Craigslist, offering  $1,000 for the dog’s return. San Antonio police  also issued an alert last week, releasing surveillance video of a white pick up truck seen in the parking lot and asking people to come forward with any information about Katie Jo.

Police haven’t said how Katie Jo was found, or whether anyone was charged in the theft.

But according to a Facebook page dedicated to Katie Jo’s return, the animal was recovered and returned early Monday:

“Katie Jo is home safe and sound!! Thank you to everyone for the thoughts and prayers! We are absolutely overjoyed to have her back!”

A poodle mix struck by a Toyota Camry became wedged in the car’s grill and survived an 11-mile ride in Rhode Island.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever seen anything like this,” East Providence Animal Control Officer Will Muggle told East Bay Newspapers.

 ”Considering the speed the driver said he was going and the distance he traveled, for her to survive is definitely a miracle.”

Authorities said the Toyota was traveling about 50 miles per hour when the small dog — a poodle-Bichon Frise mix — darted in front of it. The driver said he had little time to react. Unsure whether his car had struck the dog, he stopped, got out, checked the front of the car, saw nothing and assumed the dog had run off. He continued on his way from Taunton to East Providence.

But the dog was there, stuck in the recessed air intake section just below the car’s front grill and above the car’s license plate frame. Eleven miles later, when another motorist told him at a stop light that there was a dog in his grill, the driver headed straight to the East Providence police station.

Animal control officer Muggle was called to the scene.

“It was difficult to get her out of there, not only because of how she was stuck in there, but because she was grabbing on pretty tight,” Muggle said.

“The driver of the car was pretty shaken up about the whole thing,” he added. “He came back the next day to check on her to make sure she was alright.”

The dog — she’s being called Lucky — was taken to the East Bay Animal Hospital and later transferred to Bay State Animal Hospital for additional testing.

Muggle said the dog had a concussion, a small cut above her eye and a slight tear in her intestine. She has recovered and been returned to the custody of animal control. A search for the dog’s owner is underway.

An electronic tracking device implanted under her skin indicated she may have at one point lived in Kentucky, but no registered owners were listed.

If no owner is found likely by the end of the week, the dog will be put up for adoption.

Anyone with information about the dog’s owner, or interested in adopting her, can call East Providence Animal Control at 401-435-7675 or 401-435-7676.

An Illinois man has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for beating his Lhasa Apso.

James Robert Wesolaski, 51, of Des Plaines, entered a guilty plea on torture and cruelty charges for pinning his small dog to the ground in front of his home in early June and punching him four or five times.

He was also ordered not to own a pet or live in a residence with any animal for 20 years, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Police, called to the home by witnesses, found the dog, named Teddy, with swollen, bleeding eyes and broken capillaries, indicating he had been choked.

Wesolaski told police that he was having a bad day and beat the dog because it got outside.

Police took the dog, along with two others inside the home, to Northwest Animal Hospital in Des Plaines, where they were treated. Teddy has made a full recovery and been adopted by a new family, as have Wesolaski’s other two dogs.

Authorities also said Wesolaski’s June arrest violated his probation from an incident earlier this year in which he admitted to trying to take a Taser away from a police officer.

Judge Lauren Edidin also advised Wesolaski to get anger-management counseling and treatment for alcohol abuse.

In a tragic story out of Florida, a recovered dog is providing a lone note of solace to a grieving family.

Barney, a Vizsla, was jogging with his owner, Donna Chen, a mother of three, when she was killed by a drunk driver.

Somehow, Barney ended up in the Gulf of Mexico after the accident, where he was found by a kayaker, about a half mile offshore from Sarasota.

“I thought maybe he had fallen off a boat or something” Rory O’Connor told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News. “I knew it was probably trouble, because you know, he was coming straight toward me and he had a look of terror in his eyes.”

O’Connor, of Bellingham, Wash., inadvertently recorded the rescue and put it on YouTube, before knowing anything about the rest of the story:

Through his microchip, Barney was reunited with the Chen family, members of which say his presence is helping them through the grief.

“This is our one piece, our one link to Donna,” said Chen’s sister-in-law, Colette MacPhail. “For Barney, he’s going to have his own adjustments. He’s just a piece that came back for us.”

Chispita is home!

And by now, maybe, Arlene Corona has put some clothes on.

The woman who donned a bikini to bring attention to her lost dog has been reunited with her Chihuahua, NBC in San Diego reports.

And while the news outlet seems to question why Arlene remained in her bikini, at the intersection, holding a sign seeking the return of her dog for hours after the dog was found, there are multiple explanations for that.

Corona’s mother picked up the white Chihuahua around noon Tuesday at the Carlsbad animal shelter.

As of  3:45 p.m, the bikini-clad Corona was still at the intersection.

Taking a few jabs from Internet commenters about that, Corona – who continued her bikini vigil even after a man who claimed to have the dog texted her photos of his genitals – offered an explanation in a Facebook post: Read more »

Thanks to a newspaper and a good samaritan, a Chihuahua named Boo’kie was returned home last week after the pickup truck he was in was stolen from a Wal Mart parking lot in Winston-Salem, N.C.

John Jenkins, a 67-year-old cancer patient who’d gone to the store to fill a prescription, spent two sleepless night after Boo’kie, his 7-year-old Chihuahua, disappeared.

The dog had helped him through the death of his wife, in 2009, and his battle with throat and esophageal cancer.

He and friends had searched all last Monday and Tuesday for the dog.

On Tuesday night, Vanessa Calvery, a personal chef, was driving home from delivering meals when she saw a Chihuahua standing in the middle of a road in the rain near her home in Rural Hall.

Calvery, who has two Chihuahuas of her own, stopped her car, bundled the dog up, brought him home, cooked him chicken and made him a bed in her TV room.

The next day, Calvery, who was laid off from her full time job on Jan. 1, took the dog to the Animal Care Clinic in Rural Hall, where she takes her own dogs, because one of his  paws seemed swollen.

One of the veterinarians at the clinic, Preston Roberts, recognized Boo’kie from a story about his disappearance that ran on the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal on Wednesday.

That story, by reporter Laura Graff, noted Boo’kie had one paw larger than the other, a result of frostbite when he was a puppy. The vets office called Jenkins, whose number was published in the story.

By then, Jenkins had gotten his truck back, after it was found abandoned. He got the call just after returning home from getting new keys made.

When he picked the dogs up, he saw that the animal clinic had given Boo’kie a new collar, and implanted a microchip under his skin.

“They done everything, and they charged me nothing,” he said.

Jenkins, according to the Journal’s follow up story, also by Graff,  had offered a $500 reward for Boo’kie’s safe return.

He tried to give it to Calvery when he met her at the clinic.

She turned it down.

(Photo by David Rolfe / Winston-Salem Journal)

A Georgia jewelry store’s mascot gobbled up $10,000 worth of diamonds, but, uh, returned them the next day.

Honey Bun is a regular at John Ross Jewelers in Albany, known for greeting customers that come into the store, which — like Honey Bun — is owned by Chuck and Ann Roberts.

Customers sometimes hide treats in their purses for Honey Bun, which he tracks down and gobbles up. Two weeks ago, he gobbled up something else entirely.

“A customer came in, and I jumped up out of my chair and came out here to wait on him, and I left the chair where he could jump up on my chair, and jump up on my desk,” Chuck Roberts told WALB.

On the desk were four pairs of loose diamonds, about a carat each. When Roberts returned, only three packs remained, and an empty one was on the floor.

“We looked all over and there weren’t any diamonds, so immediately I knew he’d eaten them.”

The Roberts took Honey Bun in for X-rays, which indicated she was a likely suspect.

“The next afternoon sure enough the earring back and two diamonds were ‘recovered,’ no panic,” Robert said, putting matters delicately.

“I haven’t scolded him to this day and I won’t,” Roberts said “…It’s my fault for leaving the chair there.”

Fadidle, a miniature pinscher who disappeared from her home in Salt Lake City eight months ago, was found in San Diego and flown home to reunite with her owner.

“It’s wonderful,” Sharalyn Cooper said Saturday as she held the quivering 2-year-old min pin in her arms at Salt Lake International Airport.

Cooper said her dog often roamed the immediate neighborhood, but one day last October she didn’t come home. Cooper searched, put up flyers and checked with area animal shelters, all without luck.

“We had a hard time,” Cooper said. “She’s our baby. It was pretty tough.”

Then, two months ago, came a call came from the San Diego Humane Society.

Athena Davis, an employee at the humane society said the dog was brought to them by a “Good Samaritan.”  They placed the animal on a stray hold, but then discovered she had been microchipped and were able to track down Cooper, the Deseret News reports. 

Because the dog was on ringworm watch, her return was delayed until this past weekend. Davis accompanied the dog to Salt Lake City.

“She’s the best little girl,” Davis told Cooper when she handed the dog over.

“I’m just so excited we were able to do it and make it happen,” Davis said of returning Fadidle. “It’s one of the more unusual things I’ve done, but I enjoyed it.” She noted that, without Fadidle’s microchip, the reunion might never have taken place.

“We see a lot of different things,” Davis said. “When it works out this way, it’s really touching.”

Cooper said she has wondered a lot about how Fadidle disappeared, and ended up in California. She suspects, she was stolen

“I’d love to hear what she has to say about this whole thing,” Cooper said. 

(Photo: Jeffrey D. Allred / Deseret News)

A 7-year-old mutt who went missing in mid-November from his home in Colorado was reunited with his owner yesterday after being found in Salinas, Calif. — about 1,200 miles away.

Nobody knows where Buster Brown was for the past six months, or how he made it from Boulder to Salinas, but that’s all water under the bridge, or pavement under the paws, as the case may be.

Buster and his owner, Samantha Squires, reunited at Denver International Airport Friday.

“I never gave up on him and I thought about him every day,” she said as she awaited his arrival. “It wouldn’t be surprising to me that he was looking for us the whole time.”

Buster, who Squires rescued as a puppy, vanished from her back yard on Nov. 19 while she was out jogging, according to the Daily Camera.

Squires said she feared the worst –  that a mountain lion might have attacked Buster. Three weeks ago, she adopted a new dog.

Meanwhile in Salinas, Peter Ochoa noticed a strange dog sitting on his front porch.

“He laid there staring at me like, ‘Are you going to take me in?’”

Ochoa approached Buster Brown, told him to sit, and then shook his paw. Ochoa’s family gave Buster some water and called animal control, and volunteered to take Buster in if a new home couldn’t be found for him.

Staff at the Salinas Animal Shelter found a microchip in Buster Brown, but the numbers they called were no longer in service. Instead the shelter sent a certified letter to the last known address associated with the microchip.

That letter ended up at Squires’ current address. She called the shelter and confirmed they had Buster, who had somehow gained 13 pounds during his mysterious absence.

Squires was trying to arrange transportation home for Buster when Frontier Air Lines offered to fly him for free.

Squires suspects Buster probably got a ride to California — otherwise, she calculated, he would have had to travel about seven miles a day.

“My guess is he lived in a couple of homes and was a stray toward the end,” Squires said. “People would take care of him — he’s just a doggy you want to love.”

Max, a miniature schnauzer missing since he was stolen along with Bill Lorimer’s car a week ago in Arizona, has been found and reunited with his owner.

The dog, who turns 3 on Tuesday, was inside Lorimer’s SUV when it was stolen at a gas station April 10, according to the East Valley Tribune.

After searching for the dog for a week, Lorimer received a call Monday from a construction worker who found Max in Mesa on his way to work.

The worker, Rolando Artalejo, took the dog home to his wife and daughter who had seen earlier reports about the missing dog and were able to get in touch with Lorimer.

“As soon as they called, I was there in about two minutes,” Lorimer said. “I didn’t know who was happier – him seeing me or me seeing him. He jumped up on me and knocked my glasses off. That little booger was so tickled to see me, he couldn’t stop licking me.”

Lorimer, 72, a U.S. Navy Veteran and retired plumber who has congestive heart failure, believes Max was trying to make his way back home when he was found, just a few blocks from where he lives.

Lorimer, a week earlier, had left his car running outside a gas station and stepped inside for coffee. When he came back out, his car and dog were gone.

When Lorimer recovered the vehicle later that day, Max was not inside. One of the car thieves called him and told him where he could find his car, which had run out of gas, but they said they had let the dog out of the car at an apartment complex.

“I told them I didn’t give a damn about my car. I just wanted my dog back,” Lorimer said. “I can replace my car, but not my dog. I was devastated.”

Once back home, Max went to his favorite resting spot, under the coffee table.

“I’ve had him since he was three and a half months old,” Lorimer said. “I didn’t think I was going to find him. He means more to me than my own life.”

(Photo by Tim Hacker / East Valley Tribune)