ohmidog!

Two German shepherds who grew up together, became impaired about the same time and ended up being surrendered by their owner, are looking for a new home — but it must be one they can share, their foster mom says.

Smokey lost his sight two years ago; River lost his hearing about the same time.

Now they depend on each other to get around.

“Smokey will follow the sound of River’s breathing, and River will come back and check on Smokey to make sure he gets out,” Tara Boals, a foster with Ruff Start Rescue, told KARE11. “He doesn’t even like to go out to the bathroom without his brother.”

Boals, who lives in Bloomington, Minn., said their previous owner was forced to sell his house and give up “his boys.” Taking over their temporary care, she promised the owner she’d make sure they stayed together.

“They will not leave here without each other,” she said. “If they have to stay here forever, until they are no longer with us, then that’s what’s going to happen.”

Because of Smokey’s blindness, the dogs need a quieter home with no stairs. Smokey is about 11; River’s slightly older.

You can learn more about Smokey and River, and donate to their care, at the Ruff Start Rescue website.

A North Dakota woman died trying to save her dog from the Sheyenne River.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jodi Kvien Opatz of Valley City called authorities Friday morning, asking for help getting her spaniel out of the river, near the Little Dam.

Dispatchers told her to wait for help to arrive, but Kvien Opatz said she was going to try to save the dog, said Valley City Fire Chief Gary Retterath.

“It was almost like a family member or a kid to her,” Ratterath told DL-Online. “You risk your life for someone you love, and she loved (the dog). I guess I believe that is what went through her mind.”

While crews were retrieving the woman’s body, the dog managed to pull itself out of the river, Retterath said.

Once the woman’s body was pulled from the river, the dog jumped back in and drowned.

“By the time we got to it, it was too late,” Retterath said. “It got into the undercurrent of the dam.”

(Photo: From the Facebook page of Jodi Kvien Opatz)

A Florida man will serve 40 days in jail for tying a 30-pound dumbbell to a dog’s neck and tossing him in the river.

Willie T. Bell, 41, of Palmetto, told police he was trying to make the dog stronger.

He pleaded no contest to the third-degree felony earlier this week, the Bradenton Herald reported.

Police in April spotted the two-year-old pit bull mix, named Blackie, in the Manatee River, not far from where Bell was fishing.

According to Palmetto police officer Micah Mathews’ report, the dogs snout was sticking up as it tried to tread water.

“Mr. Bell said he was trying to make the dog stronger,” Mathews wrote.
“The dog was unable to touch the ground and was not able to move the weight,” the officer wrote. “When I arrived I could see only the nose of the dog out of the water.”

On the officer’s request, Bell brought the dog to shore. Bell told the officer the dog had been swimming in place for about 15 minutes.

Mathews asked Bell the same question that’s probably running through your mind right now: Would he like to be anchored to a dumbbell and left in the water like that? Bell replied, “Hell no,” the police report states.

Bell was not the dog’s owner, animal control officials said.

The dog was returned to its original owner and animal control officials said it suffered no lasting physical damage.

There will always be a sourpuss or two who points out “it’s only a dog” and complains it’s a waste of taxpayer money, but I like this trend of rescue workers saving dogs — and capturing their own heroics on video.

It’s happened at least twice on Wednesday, so I can officially call it a trend.

In Fargo, North Dakota, a dog named Jake, clinging for dear life to a chunk of ice, was pulled from the partially frozen Red River by a fire department rescuer wearing a cam.

And in Lincoln County, N.C., the unidentified dog above was carried to safety after being stuck on a dam in the fast-moving South Fork River — all captured by a fire department member filming from the riverbank.

“This is B-Roll video that was shot at the scene of a rescue of a dog off of a low head dam in Lincoln County,” reads the description of the rescue.  ”Rescue crews successfully rescued this dog off of the dam and he was taken to a local vet for evaluation and treatment of a head injury and possible hypothermia.”

The video, like the one in Fargo, was posted on YouTube, for the public to see and the media to grab.

What with cutbacks to staff at newspapers and televisions stations, and an increasing reliance on reader/viewer-submitted news, this works out well all the way around. Citizens get served and protected and entertained. Firefighters, police and rescue personnel get some good publicity. The news media gets somebody else to do its work for free.

Come to think of it, it serves us bloggers pretty well, too.

So keep saving those dogs, and putting out those fires, and don’t forget to send us some B-Roll.

Here’s an unusual perspective on saving a dog from an icy river, brought to you by the Fargo Fire Department.

Jake, an 11-year-old Lab, went into the not yet frozen-solid Red River in North Dakota after straying from his home yesterday, and couldn’t get out.

He clung to a piece of ice until rescuers arrived.

Fargo Firefighter Mike Seaberg went out on the ice to save him, while wearing a camera.

Today, Jake’s back home and doing fine.

Searchers found his boot, and the body of the dog that tried to save him, but they were still searching yesterday for the six-year-old boy who fell into an icy river while playing in Quebec.

The boys were playing on the ice when Maxime Dion fell in the Riviere Noire around 5 p.m. Monday, near his family home in Upton, CTV reported.

The other boys — and according to some news accounts, the dog — tried unsuccessfully to rescue him.

The dog’s body was recovered Wednesday.

Since then, there has been no sign of Maxime, other than his boot. Police were using an amphibious vehicle to break through the ice on the river and continue the search.

According to an article in the Winnipeg Free Press, the two other boys — Maxime’s brother and a friend — tried to pull him off the ice he was clinging to and help him out of the water.

“The dog as well tried to help, tried to grab on to the boy,” said police Sgt. Daniel Thibodeau. “But he fell into the water as well … at a certain point the boy went underneath the ice and the dog a short time later.”

While there’s much to scoff at when it comes to the industry that has blossomed around bidding farewell to our dead pets — especially those that promise life after death — I’m not quite ready to scoff at this idea.

In fact, I may even like the concept of turning your deceased dog into a tree.

But just so you can be sure I’m not shilling for the company behind this product, I would point out that you could probably do the same thing with your dog’s ashes without a special, fertilizer filled, biodegradable, $90 “Geos” urn.

The Geos urn — one of four offered by a company called Limbo Zoo — is designed to hold a pet’s ashes and serve as the medium in which a seedling (you supply it) can grow into a tree.

“The nutrients that conform this handcrafted earth-made urn combine with those of the fertile ashes to form a beautiful tree,” says the website.

The company also offers the “Nu” urn, which is made of sea salt and designed for burials at sea, and the “Samsara” urn, made of fine sand and designed for burials in fresh water, like a lake or river.

The urns are advertised as an environmentally responsible alternative and billed as both “durable,” and “biodegradable.” They’re designed to stay intact for a while, and then disintegrate over time.

The company is headquartered in Spain, and the urns are made there, but they have a U.S. distributor in Texas.

The Geos urns are made from a hardened organic compost and mineral soil bound with natural plant extracts. None of the urns include any animal products.

The search continued yesterday for a 29-year-old man who disappeared Sunday in the Snoqualmie River  while trying to rescue a dog.

According to the King County Sheriff’s Department in Washington, witnesses reported a man and a woman were playing with two dogs when one of the animals got pulled into a whirlpool in the river below Snoqualmie Falls.

The woman, also 29, apparently went into the water to save the dog also, but was rescued, the Seattle Times reports.

Neither the man nor the woman were identified by name.

King County sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. John Urquhart said the waters of the Snoqualmie are “very fast and very cold and not conducive to survival this time of year, even for the strongest of swimmers.”

He said people should think twice about going into water to rescue their animals. In this case, he was right, the dog who went into the river managed to get out and is reported to be fine.

Molly Pfeiffer was walking with her unleashed Wheaten terrier near New York’s Pier 54 Tuesday when the dog, named Boogie, ran after a gull and jumped into the Hudson River.

Molly, 29, followed, snagging her dog, hoisting her up on a plank beneath the pier and calling for help as she hung on to a pylon.

“I saw her go down into the water and I went after her,” Pfeiffer told the New York Daily News. “The current was pretty strong. She was going to drown … I grabbed Boogie and pulled her up on to one of the wooden supports on the pier. It was covered with algae and really slippery.”

A passerby heard Pfeiffer’s cries and dialed 911, and officers on a police department boat plucked Pfeiffer and Boogie from the water.

Pfeiffer thanked the stranger who called for help: “He saved my life and Boogie’s.” She said she’d do the same thing again: “I love [Boogie] very much or I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

Most Daily News readers feel the same way. In an online poll, the newspaper asked readers if they would jump into a river to save their pet.

Eighty percent answered “in a heartbeat.”

(Photos: From the New York Daily News)

Ace — though he seems to appreciate the slightly wobbly stability our temporary trailer home in Cave Creek, Arizona, is providing — woke up Saturday morning raring to go.

Where, I do not know.

Maybe, with all the driving of the last six months, he now feels the need to ride. Maybe it was the crisp morning temperatures; or perhaps he’d gotten worked up by all the coyote howling the night before. They sounded as if they were having a feast, or a fight, or possibly an orgy.

Ace galloped out of the trailer, ran up to the car and took a seat in the dirt, his wagging tail kicking up dust and a look on his face that said, to me, “What are we waiting for?”

So, on the spur of the moment, I decided we’d revisit Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area — 2,154 acres of desert that over the years has been home to cowboys, Indians and mining operations. Now it’s part of the Maricopa County park system — and it’s just a few miles of paved and dirt roads from where we’re staying.

I’d driven out there last weekend, hearing it was a good place to romp with dogs, but didn’t really explore. On Saturday, I tossed Ace’s leash, water bowl and jug in the car, and off we went — planning not a long hike, just a 30 minute tour to better check things out.

The first thing we encountered was not a gila monster or a rattlesnake, but an extremely nice sheriff’s deputy. He was explaining the lay of the land to me and suggesting some trails when three guys on horses rode up. Ace, who had been around horses only a little — like back when we were passing through Maine — was a perfect gentlemen, and sat at my side. His eyes got big, as they seem to do when he’s amazed, but his hackles stayed down.

The weekend cowboys rode off, and the deputy and I talked some more. I asked if there were any areas where dogs weren’t allowed. He said they were fine everywhere — that rules call for them to stay leashed, but that the rules were pretty flexible. Well behaved dogs, he implied, could romp a bit off leash.

So, 50 yards down the path we chose, off it came.

Ace walked tentatively, avoiding the rocks as he veered from one side of the dusty path to the other, carefully sniffing the various types of cacti as I tried to remember their names, all of which I’d made a point of learning when I moved to Tucson 35 years ago — saguaro, cholla, prickly pear, barrel, agave … my memory of the rest had gone dry.

So had Ace. Not planning a long hike, I hadn’t brought any water — for me or him.

I wasn’t particularly thirsty. We’d only been walking 30 minutes or so, and at a very slow pace, with lots of pauses for sniffing. But Ace, who seems to have a better understanding of the need to hydrate than I, was clearly wishing for water.

He got his wish.

I didn’t know there even was a Cave Creek — as in an actual creek — much less that we were headed towards it, or that it, unlike most alleged bodies of water in these parts, would actually, at this particular time anyway, have water running through it.

Ace, after approaching cautiously, made the most of it. First he pawed it, then he took a tiny taste, then he plunged his head in, taking a long drink, running in circles, then drinking some more.

It wasn’t exactly a raging river, but here in the desert, you take what you can get. We hiked a little deeper down the trail, then turned around. By the time we reached the creek, he was ready to celebrate it once again.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Dogs have a way of living fully in the moment – no matter how piddly a moment it is — and we could learn from that.

Our 30-minute hike took two hours. We encountered five other dogs along the way, people on horses and people on mountain bikes, one of whom, as he rode, was singing at the top of his lungs. Possibly that guy was living in the moment, or just a nut.

We had one sour moment, when a lone female hiker snuck up behind me and decided I needed a scolding for not having Ace on a leash.

I hooked him up and let her pass, holding him to my side and assuring her that he was friendly. “That’s what everybody whose dog has ever bitten anybody says,” she said. She kept mumbling as she went by and, once at the trailhead, reported me to the sheriff’s deputy, who — though he didn’t consider it a hanging offense — reminded me of the official rules.

Spur Cross is the newest addition to Maricopa County’s Regional Parks System. Citizens of Cave Creek voted to pay more taxes to help the county and the state to buy the land. The conservation area’s trails pass through through archeological sites of the ancient Hohokam, who once lived along the creek, and one can see relics as well of its mining heritage and its days as a dude ranch.

None of that mattered to Ace. But he sure liked the water.