ohmidog!

When Yogi Carroll of Kensington, Maryland, started having doubts about whether her dog walker was walking her dog, she set up her own amateur sting operation, using a video camera, a baby monitor and some tape.

Carroll says that, under her agreement with the dog walking company, the walker was to take Wilson, her two-year-old terrier, outside every day and make sure he did his business. She was paying $10 a day for the service.

Carroll says she set up the camera, hid a baby monitor in the room, and  attached a piece of tape to the door of Wilson’s crate to determine if the dog walker opened it.

Then she apparently hid outside, watching as the dog walker arrived and left just a couple of minutes later.

As the dog walker left, Carroll confronted her, Mike Wallace-style, with camera rolling.

On the video, you can hear Carroll asking the dog walker for her key back. “I’m Yogi. I live here. I’m here to grab the key because I’m actually going to discontinue the dog walking service from now on.”

The dog walker asks, “Why is that?”

Carroll responds, “I’m guessing if I walk in there, you wrote ‘peed only,’ you didn’t walk Wilson. That going to be true?”

The dog walker replies, “Yes.”

Carroll then walked into her home and found Wilson in his crate, the tape across the door unbudged.

Carroll says she made the recording to confirm her suspicions and warn others who may be concerned about their pets.

“So many people use dog walking services in this area,” said Carroll. “My friends are dog walkers, so not all dog walkers are bad. I know this is a hard industry to be a part of, but people need to be aware of what’s going in and out of their house.”

Carroll, showing she’s as classy as she is sly, didn’t reveal the name of the company when she talked to Fox News, but she said the owner of the company took swift action.

A 22-year-old man and a 13-year-old boy were arrested in Chicago after torturing five puppies and posting videos of it on YouTube, police said.

Joshua Moore, the adult, told police he did it because he was bored, and that he thought “it was not a big deal.”

The videos showed dogs — both the pups and their parents — having duct tape put on their testicles and ripped off, being suspended and spun in a harness, being forced to drink lemon juice and eat their own feces, and being thrown into air, choked and shaken.

The grown dogs were a Chihuahua and a terrier; the pups were mixes of the two, police said.

Moore and the boy were arrested Thursday and charged with animal torture and animal cruelty — all felonies. Moore was ordered held on $150,000 bail today.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the torture came to light when a tipster contacted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA reported the cruelty to the Fort Wayne, Ind., Animal Care and Control officials on Sunday, after learning that Moore was from Chicago but living in Fort Wayne.

On Tuesday, officers in Fort Wayne questioned Moore, who they said admitted he was in the videos. When Moore returned to Chicago Thursday, city police arrested him.

The dogs were seized Thursday from a home in the Austin neighborhood and placed in the care of Chicago’s animal care and cruelty department.

The videos were removed from YouTube before the arrest, but PETA had made copies of them by then.

(Top photo: By John J. Kim / Chicago Sun-Times
Middle photo: Screen grab from videos, courtesy of PETA
Bottom photo: Chicago Police Department)

A pet owner in Honolulu says groomers at a local Petco cut portions of her dog’s ears off, then apparently used glue and tape to reattach them.

Gladys Kapuwai said she dropped off her Pomeranian-Maltese mix at the Petco store in Kaneohe for some simple grooming, and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary when she picked up the dog.

Within a matter of weeks, though, pieces of Dodo’s ears fell off, and upon examination by a veterinarian, it was discovered that the bottom portions of the dog’s ears had been cut off and reattached with tape, according to a lawsuit.

Kapuwai’s attorney, Michael Green, filed the lawsuit on her behalf and also on behalf of his wife, who claims her dog was injured during a grooming session at the store. Estelle Green says her dog Hope had the tip of her tail cut off, and suffered other injuries.

Fox News reported that San Diego-based Petco issued a statement saying it takes “any animal care concerns very seriously and we’re actively investigating these cases.”

“We can’t comment on the specifics at this time, but we can tell you that we have very strong standards and policies in place for the care and treatment of animals in our grooming salon and we provide training on those standards and policies for our grooming associates,” the statement said.

A New York man who promised to take a friend’s dog to a farm in the country instead duct taped the dog’s mouth and legs and tossed him in a ditch, state police say.

Shane Morehouse, 52, of Fort Edward, was charged Saturday with animal cruelty and abandoning an animal — both misdemeanors, the Saratogian reported.

Police say the dog belonged to an acquaintance of Morehouse who could no longer care for the dog.

“The dog’s owner said he was going to be released on the farm,” state police Sgt. Chuck Salaway said. “Morehouse apparently changed his mind and left it along the side of the road without any concern over what was going to happen to it.”

If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of one year in jail.

The dog, a 12-year-old malamute mix named Chubby, was taken to a local SPCA, where he was euthanized after he was found to be suffering from an unrelated illness.

We love a good dog movie. We even love a bad dog movie. “Red Dog” — the tale of a stray who wandered Australia’s outback in the 1970s — looks like it might be the former.

The movie, starring a dog named Koko as Red Dog — he’s a kelpie — made its premiere in Australia this week, to mostly good reviews.

Based on those, the book that inspired it, and on the movie trailer, we — not having the vaguest idea of how movie distribution works — say send it on over our way, mates, preferably with, rather than subtitles, a glossary of Australian slang for when we get stumped by the strange words you sometimes utter.

In all seriousness — at a time when not just some Chinese cities, but some U.S. towns, are rounding up and euthanizing strays — we detect in the movie a message worth sharing: That dogs who, through human sloth and neglect, end up as strays, aren’t disposable. That dogs who belong to no one belong to everyone. That, whether they are hitchhiking in Australia or turning over garbage cans in Fayetteville, N.C., homeless dogs, rather than being slapped with the label “feral” and put down, deserve a second chance.

That may not be the movie’s intended message — I haven’t seen it — but it is mine.

The movie is based on the 2002 book by English author Louis de Bernieres.

In 1998, de Bernieres was invited to Karratha, in northwest Australia, for the town’s first literary event. The manager of his hotel loaned him a vehicle so he could tour around in a land that, known mostly for mining, seldoms draws tourists.

Around Dampier he spotted a statue of a dog on the side of the road.

“It said something like ‘Red Dog 1979, erected by his friends’ – something like that. So I thought, ‘That’s really interesting, who is this Red Dog and why has he got a statue?’ I started asking questions.”

The author hung around town for a while, gathering Red Dog lore and making a map of all the various spots Red Dog spent time in. He returned two years later to do further research.

Red Dog had accrued quite a history, as it turned out, and was said to have hitched rides with locals and truck drivers from Karratha as far south as Perth and as far east as Darwin, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

While he was viewed as “everybody’s dog,” Red Dog, in the movie, finally ends up with a permanent human companion.

As the movie trailer concludes, “Sometimes we pick our dogs, sometimes our dogs pick us.”

Before the movie was released, its makers posted on the Internet what they say is Koko’s audition tape. Here’s a look at it:

The sight of a puppy stuck to the side of a refrigerator with packing type left a Boulder police officer so “caught off-guard” that he momentarily lost control of the scene he was there to investigate.

“I see this thing and it doesn’t register as a dog to me. “I’m looking at it and I see it starts to move,” Officer Rick French testified during the first day of Abby Toll’s felony animal cruelty trial in Colorado.

French described the early-morning hours of April 14, 2009 — a year ago today — when he responded to a report of a couple fighting at a Boulder apartment.

He testified that he was in the middle of interviewing Toll’s boyfriend, Bryan Beck, when Toll began to pull the animal — then named Rex — off the fridge in a “brusque and abrupt” manner.

“I’m not going to have this dog torn down and hurt any more than it appeared it already was,” the officer said. He stopped her and took the dog down himself.

French was one of only two witnesses called by the prosecution Monday in what is expected to be a three-day trial, according to the Boulder Daily Camera. Prosecutors rested their case at the end of the day.

Toll, 21, a former University of Colorado student, is being tried on a felony charge of aggravated cruelty to animals. Her attorney told the jury of seven men and six women that his client was a victim of domestic violence.

“This bizarre behavior by Abby was taking place at the same time Mr. Beck was not allowing her to leave the apartment,” he  said.

Prosecutor David Cheval told the jury the case was one of deliberate animal abuse fueled by Toll’s jealous perception that her boyfriend cared more about his dog than he did about her.

Cheval said the defendant took her time gathering up hair ties, scissors and tape at Beck’s apartment in preparation for binding up the 8-month-old puppy.

“She collected her tools, her tools of torture,” Cheval said.

Toll systematically bound the dog’s feet, tail and snout with the hair ties and then wrapped the animal in packaging tape before taping him to the fridge upside-down, Cheval said.

“Think about the time, the effort, and the deliberate effort it would take to do that act,” he said to the jury. “Is that torture?”

Rex showed obvious signs of pain as he was set free from his “tomb of tape,” French testified.

The dog has since been adopted.

(Photo: Boulder Daily Camera / Paul Aiken)

Sticky has a new home.

The cat that was duct-taped and dumped in a North Philly yard was adopted by a family Tuesday afternoon, according to Pennsylvania SPCA officials.

The family, which asked to remain anonymous, was selected out of nearly 100 animal lovers who had expressed interest in giving the gray cat a home.

PSPCA officers arrested James Davis Sunday for allegedly duct-taping the cat from its neck to its tail and dumping her in a North Philadelphia yard last week. He faces up to two years in prison on an animal cruelty charge.

The PSPCA received a tip identifying Davis as the culprit, then a few hours later got a call from Davis himself, admitting to the crime, NBC News in Philadelphia reported.

Davis reportedly lost both his father and a brother to murders in recent years.

Last week, the SPCA had offered a reward of $2,000 after the female cat was found wrapped in duct tape.

A cat bound in duct tape was found abandoned in North Philadelphia, and a $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the conviction of her abuser.

“Whoever did this is very sick,” said George Bengal, director investigations for the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is headquartered in North Philadelphia.

A resident of the 2200 block of Edgley Street found the cat yesterday afternoon, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Nicknamed “Sticky” by workers at the PSPCA, the cat was sedated so the tape could be cut away and saved as evidence. She is reported in good health.

“She was purring while we were preparing to take the tape off, while we were getting her sedated,” said Gail Luciani, PSCPA spokeswoman. 

The PSPCA asks that anyone with information about the case call its cruelty hotline at 866-601-7722.

The college student accused of taping her boyfriend’s dog to a refrigerator will be allowed to spend the summer at her mother’s home in Chicago — even though her mother has a dog, a judge has ruled.

Abby Toll, 20, an environmental design major at the University of Colorado, will be required to participate in a monitored sobriety program in Chicago as a condition of her release on bond. “I think the defendant’s mother can look out for the family pet,” a judge in Boulder said.

Toll was arrested in April on suspicion of felony animal cruelty. She is accused of binding her boyfriend’s 2-year-old shiba inu, Rex, in packing tape and sticking him upside down to the refrigerator during an argument. She also faces a felony charge of drug possession after police said was found with a trace amount of heroin while being booked into jail.

Her boyfriend, Bryan Beck, also faces a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty. He is scheduled to appear in court for a pre-trial conference Thursday, according to Coloradodaily.com.

Rex is living with a Denver-area foster family awaiting adoption. Another dog living with Toll and Beck, a Chihuahua named Peanut, remains in the care of the Humane Society of Boulder.