ohmidog!

Stray dogs. Stray humans. Lori Weise encountered them both when she started work 16 years ago at a furniture factory on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row, where homeless dogs and humans were both often treated with something less than respect.

So she created Downtown Dog Rescue — right there in the back of the factory — in the hopes that, through trapping strays, and persuading the homeless to get their dogs spay or neutered, she and her co-workers could make a dent in the homeless dog problem, if not the homeless human one.

She posted fliers promising free pizza for those who brought their dogs in. In addition to paying for thousands of surgeries, the rescue organization has placed or fostered thousands of dogs. And because homeless people can’t a dog license without an address, Weise used the factory’s address to get those dog’s registered. The address of the company, Modernica, was used to license 300 dogs.

The Associated Press, in a story by reporter Sue Manning, took a look this week at Downtown Dog Rescue — both where it has been and where it is going.

The shelter is still located in the back of Modernica, but with homeless people having left downtown Weise now brings shelter services to Compton, where for the last two years it has helped fund a monthly spay and neuter clinic, run by the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care & Control.

In 2011, the clinic sterilized close to 800 dogs, according to Weise, and the euthanasia rate for pit bulls at the county shelter dropped 30 percent.

DDR also holds weekly obedience classes at the Los Angeles Coliseum, teaching owners basic commands, agility, and other urban survival skills. The class draws between 30 and 50 dogs a week.

Downtown Dog Rescue has grown from a couple of kennels to 22. The furniture company has grown, too. Owners and brothers Frank and Jay Novak don’t consider themselves activists for either dogs or the homeless, but they say the work Weise has done helps define the company.

“She never talks down to people,” Novak said. “She is so genuine. I think people are impressed by her sincerity and people know none of the money (close to $200,000 in donations a year) goes to administrative costs.”

Eight months ago, Modernica began moving its production plant to Vernon, and they’ve promised Weise a half-acre where she can build a new shelter there. For now, the dogs remain in the downtown factory, where the company’s prop department will stay.

“She is fearless. She will go into neighborhoods nobody in their right mind would go into. She just goes with her conviction and knowledge she is going to help somebody,” said Carole Pearson, founder and president of Los Angeles-based Dawg Squad.

Most of the men Weise befriended 15 years ago are in prisons or hospitals or have died, the Associated Press story notes. But many of them left the streets — voluntarily or not — with the knowledge their dogs would be taken care of.

“I promised a lot of the men as long as their dogs are alive, they will have a good place to live and I’ll love them,” Weise said.

It’s not the first place you might look for a missing dachshund, but 12 feet up a tree is where his owner found him Monday.

Owner Mimi Austin and her friends had spent hours searching for Cappy, a long-haired rescued dachshund who disappeared from her South Carolina home about 6 p.m.

It was after midnight when Austin, along with her neighbor, Kim Bonturi, and Bonturi’s golden retriever, heard barking while searching nearby Beaufort National Cemetery.

The barking stopped when they approached a big oak tree, surrounded by brush, which they began searching through.

But they didn’t find the dog until they decided to look in a new direction — up.

Seeing the dog on a limb, Bonturi returned home and came back with an eight-foot ladder, but it wasn’t quite tall  enough to reach the dog.

Police arrived, and eventually firefighters, with a bigger ladder.

“They got there, and this was a little dachshund. In a tree. Just sitting up there on a branch,” Beaufort/Port Royal Fire Department spokesman John Robinson told the Beaufort Gazette. “So Ross Vezin got a ladder and leaned it up the tree, and the dog started licking him in the face and came on down.”

Bonturi, who works with Chain Free Beaufort, a nonprofit dedicated to helping animals, said Cappy appeared fine.

“She was just happy to be in her mom’s arms,” she said.

We don’t know the story behind this video — it seems nobody does — but that isn’t stopping anyone from voicing opinions about it.

On the surface, it appears to show a dog saving a puppy from a swimming pool.

Did the puppy need saving? Was it thrown into the pool? If the pup was drowning, why didn’t whoever was doing the videotaping try to save it?

Don’t expect to find any answers. Every story we looked up was  just assumption and conjecture. More and more that seems to have become the norm, online, for what we once called news: “Post first and ask questions later, if at all.”

“Hero Lifeguard Dog Saves Puppy From Drowning in Pool,” says the Huffington Post.

“Dog saves puppy in pool while owner nonchalantly films,” MSN’s headline said.

The  accompanying stories contain no facts, but lots of  speculation — even more of which can be found in their comment sections.

Our guess is it’s a backyard trick that dog and owner have done before — why else have the video camera at the ready? And based on the splash in the middle of the pool at the beginning of the video, it does appear the pup was tossed in.

So, unlike some commenters, we aren’t sure that the dog’s owner should be tracked down and arrested, or that the golden retriever should immediately be awarded a trophy — at least not until a fact or two surfaces.

Actor Mickey Rourke says he plans to raise millions — and donate $250,000 himself — to build a dog shelter in Romania.

Rourke, in Romania filming the thriller “Dead in Tombstone,” made the decision after finding a stray dog on the set, named Foxy, and adopting it.

According to the Bucharest Herald, Rourke said the shelter will be called The Wild Dogs of Romania Sanctuary and that it will not be a money-making operation.

He also said he will come to Romania whenever necessary to see how the project is going.

Rourke has already found several partners for the project, including two Romanian veterinarians.

The actor said the shelter will be as large as a football field and will be able to host thousands of dogs. The Herald reported that Rourke is already in contact with an investor who will sell him a plot of land south of the capital.

Rourke’s a hard core dog lover who, after receiving the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in The Wrestler, took time to acknowledge his dogs in his acceptance speech –  “the ones that are here, that aren’t here anymore, because sometimes when a man’s alone, that’s all you got is your dog. And they meant the world to me.”

He credits his Chihuahua Loki, who passed away in 2009, with helping him battle years of depression.

There’s a new pug in the neighborhood.

This handsome boy is Brutus, estimated to be 10 years old, though he looks and acts much younger.

He was delivered Saturday by Mid Atlantic Pug Rescue to our friend Martha, who lives around the corner, and whose previous pug was once featured on these pages

Butch was one of the first dogs Ace met when we moved to Winston-Salem. He was 15 years old, blind, deaf and possibly had suffered a stroke, which would explain his tendency to veer in one direction. He died in November.

Butch

Martha said then she was going to get another dog soon, and that it would definitely be another pug.

But four months passed by.

For whatever reason — between the onset of winter, the loss of Butch, and some health problems of her own — we didn’t see Martha outside much after that.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when we started seeing her walking around the block again, without a dog.

Last week, she stopped at my door to give me the news. Her back problems were much better, and she’d applied to adopt a pug living in a Mid Atlantic Pug Rescue foster home in another part of the state.

A volunteer was scheduled to visit her for a home inspection, and Martha asked if I would be one of her references, which the organization also requires.

I was more than happy to do that, having seen not only the love she showed to Butch, but that she had that special kind of patience that seems to run through the veins of those who take in old and disabled dogs.

Brutus arrived Saturday, and though Martha had been told his hearing and eyesight may be fading, he seemed in possession of both.

She outfitted him in a purple leash and harness she had bought, and took him on a couple of spins through the neighborhood Saturday.

That night, he didn’t hesitate to sleep on her bed.

On Sunday, they took five walks — and real walks, as opposed to a the few minutes in the front yard that sufficed for Butch towards the end.

Martha says she has mistakenly called Brutus Butch a few times, just as she once called Butch by the same name of her pug before him, whose name also started with a “B.”

But Brutus was quick to leave his mark on the neighborhood — both in the way dogs normally do that, and through his own distinct personality.

Yesterday, they were going to the vet for a check-up.

I haven’t talked to Martha since then, but I suspect the vet diagnosed what I did — a new twinkle in both of their eyes.

Four months ago, Bobby was dragging himself through the streets of Nicaragua.

The big white and tan dog would use his front legs to get from one place to another — not that he had any place to go.

Now, due to an inspiring chain of events, he’s getting treatment in Florida, before moving to a forever home in Oklahoma.

“A perfect storm of generosity helped by social media” is how the Florida Times-Union describes it.

First, Bobby was taken to Casas Lupita, a shelter that is part of a project called Building New Hope. There, his backside was fitted with a cart that restored his freedom of movement.

They contacted World Vets, a nonprofit group that brings veterinarians to impoverished areas, which posted information about Bobby on its Facebook page.

Patti Snyder, a veterinarian at North Florida Neurology in Orange Park, Florida, saw the story and pictures, and World Vets was contacted with an offer.

“If someone can get him to Jacksonville, we’ll treat him.”

Jill Murray, a veterinary technician in Stillwater, Oklahoma, saw the post too, and offered to give the 70-pound dog, estimated to be about 5 years old, a forever home.

Money was raised to send Bobby from Nicaragua to Jacksonville, and other offers of help were made and accepted, including one from a volunteer with The London Sanctuary, a Jacksonville-based large breed dog rescue group, which offered to provide Bobby with transporation once his plane landed.

Diane Meyboom, a caretaker from Casas Lupita, accompanied Bobby on the flight and went along Tuesday for tests conducted at North Florida Neurology.

“We’re so happy,” said Meyboom. “We don’t even know if surgery is possible, but even if it’s not, we just know he’s going to get the best treatment.”

Vets are awaiting the results, and say they will do what they can to try and restore feeling and movement to Bobby’s rear legs before sending him to his new home in Oklahoma.

(Photo: Diane Meyboom sits inside an enclosure with Bobby at North Florida Neurology in Orange Park; by Kelly Jordan / The Times-Union)

Darak, a white, mixed-breed dog who took three bullets and was run over by a car while living as a stray in Afghanistan, was reunited with one of the men responsible for sending him to the U.S.

“Hey, buddy,” Kyle Huttenlocker, a 30-year-old security company employee just back to Indiana from Kabul said. “Remember me?”

Darak, it appeared, did,  according to a story published in the Greenfield Daily Reporter.

In late 2010, Huttenlocker was in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for a security company hired by the State Department to protect the U.S. Embassy.

“There was a stray dog that lived in an alley right behind our camp that we were all very fond of,” said Huttenlocker, a Bloomington native who previously spent a year in Iraq as a member of the U.S. military.

Darak, who Huttenlocker and others named after the neighborhood they were in, was scrounging for food, and doing his best to avoid those who mistreated him. Given the affection he received, and bologna, he started calling the camp home.

“Afghans don’t treat dogs very well,” Huttenlocker said. “They throw rocks at them and hit them with sticks … Darak would hang out with us behind our camp, and bark at the Afghans whenever they walked by.”

One day Huttenlocker heard that Darak had been run over my an Afghan motorist. He and friends rushed to the area and found the dog hiding in a ditch.

Huttenlocker and his friends pooled their money and gave $400 to a dog rescue kennel in Kabul, which housed Darak for three weeks. The kennel contacted the Puppy Rescue Mission, a nonprofit organization that raises funds to help American soldiers bring dogs home.

The mission raised more than $4,500 to transport Darak to a veterinary clinic in Pakistan, then to the U.S. for more extensive treatment.

Three months ago, Huttenlocker’s mother, Beth Sherfield, picked up Darak at the Indianapolis International Airport.

Sherfield took Darak to a Bloomington veterinarian, who found he had a fractured spine, and that his abdomen contained three bullets. She then dropped him off at Wayport Kennels, where, as she hoped, another family that had heard his story came forward to adopt him.

“We needed another dog like we needed a hole in the head,” said Kathy Headley, who along with her husband, Steve, already had three dogs and three inside cats. But, she reports, they are all mostly getting along.

The Headleys paid $4,000 to an Indianapolis veterinary hospital to have Darak’s broken spine repaired and the bullets removed.

Upon seeing  Huttenlocker, who stopped by for a visit upon his return to the country, Darak limped over to him and began licking his hands.

“How you doing, Bub?” Huttenlocker said, scratching Darak behind the ears. “It’s good to see you again. You’re one lucky dog.”

(Photo: From the Chip-in page for Darak)

The video above was made last year, when Eldad and Audrey Hagar of Hope for Paws found a dog huddled amid some trash in South Los Angeles.

“She was just so defeated,” said Eldad Hagar, who captured the rescue on video. “…There seemed to be no hope there.”

As it turns out, and as you’ll see in the “after” video below, there was.

The Hagars, who estimate they’ve rescued more than 500 dogs through their organization, took the dog home and named her Fiona. They shaved off her grimy and matted fur, gave her a bath and, realizing she was blind, took her to a vet who told them it was possible that sight could be restored in one of her eyes.

A nationwide fundraising effort followed, and Fiona received a $4,000 eye surgery that replaced the lens in one of her eyes. Her other eye, badly damaged by glaucoma, had to be removed.

After that, Fiona — a poodle mix — was adopted and “is doing amazing,” Eldad says.

Eldad, 36, and his wife, Audrey, 37, are the founders of Hope For Paws, a Los Angeles-based animal rescue organization that takes in abused and neglected animals.

Hagar and his wife rescue several animals a week in the Los Angeles area, and often videotape the process. You can see some examples on their YouTube page.

You can also learn more about their oganization at the Hope For Paws website or Facebook page.

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

Remember this video, from a story we told you about back in October? On his balcony in Lincolnshire, a British man was videotaped as he beat his dog. After the video was posted on Facebook, an angry mob formed outside his house.

The man survived the mob, and the dog survived the man.

The Staffordshire bull terrier was seized by authorities, and turned out to be blind and deaf, making the behavior of his owner, Jonathan Bloomfield, 37, all the more repugnant.

Bloomfield avoided a prison sentence, but magistrates in Grimsby banned him from having a dog for 15 years.

Whatever happened to the dog? A lot, and it’s all good.

Butch, as he was previously known, was taken in by the RSPCA, where he was renamed Dodger. The RSPCA, after realizing he was deaf and almost totally blind, contacted specialists at the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket to see if there was any chance that the 18-month-old dog’s sight could be restored.

“Dodger is the most adorable dog,” Claudia Hartley, the AHT’s head of small animal ophthalmology explained. “As soon as he arrived I fell in love with him and it wasn’t long before he’d work his charm on the rest of the vets and nurses here.”

Both his deafness and his blindness are believed to be congential. Dodger was apparently born with cataracts — something that, unlike his deafness, could be repaired. The AHT’s vets performed cataract surgery on Dodger’s right eye, with good results.

Dodger returned to the AHT last month to have his left-eye operated on and initial signs are very good, according to the East Anglian Daily Times.

The RSPCA has started the process of looking for a new home for Dodger.

“Although Dodger can now see, he is still completely deaf, and he’ll need a special owner who can understand his very specific needs,” said Kirstyn Gaunt, deputy manager at the RSPCA Block Fen Animal Centre, where he is now housed.  “He has started to take on some basic sign language and he is a fast learner.”

Given the happy ending, we’ll end this post with a happier video: