ohmidog!

After being thrown a bone, a homeless dog in China followed a team of long distance cyclists more than 1,100 miles over 24 days.

The little white dog followed the cyclists from Kangding in Sichuan province, to Lhasa in Tibet, China Daily reported.

The dog, nicknamed “Xiaosa” or “Little Sa,” began following the bicylists on May 4 after a Chinese college student on the trip gave it food — a chicken leg, according to some press accounts.

“She was lying, tired, on the street around Yajiang, Sichuan province,” said Zhang Heng, 22.

“So we fed her, and then she followed our team.”

A week later, Zhang and his buddies started a blog about the dog.

“We thought the dog was encouraging us, and wanted others to know its story,” he said.

Xiao Sa, a name created by combining xiao, meaning “little,” with the last syllable of Lhasa, followed the team along dirt roads and up and down mountains, even as some human members of the team dropped out.

“Many people stopped cycling in some sections, then took the bus, but the dog made it,” he said.  On long dowhill stretches Zhang put the dog on the back of the bike.

Several of the cyclists said they wanted to take the dog home when the ride was complete.

Name: Tugg

Breed: Lhasa Apso

Age: 16 months

Encountered: At Volunteer Park in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Backstory: “Joyful, dignified, mischievous and aloof.” That’s how the American Kennel Club describes the personality of the Lhasa Apso. The personality of Tugg — while he looks pretty dignified at left – may be completely different, for all I know.

I only spent a couple of minutes with him — most of that taking photographs, which he didn’t seem to mind at all — before his human, Amanda, took off.

The breed originated hundreds of years ago in the remote Himalayan Mountains, and served mainly to guard the homes of Tibetan nobility and Buddhist monasteries. Those were near the sacred city of Lhasa.

That explains the Lhasa, but what about the Apso? According to 5stardog.com, there are two theories.

One is that it comes from rapso, the Tibetan word for goat. Supposedly, the breed’s coat resembled that of the goats kept by Tibetan herders. Another is that because of the breed’s role guarding sacred places, ancient Tibetans referred to it as apso seng kye, which translates into “bark lion sentinel dog.”

I don’t know which, if either, is right.

The message I got from Tugg — whose face, to me, even without the setting sun dappling it, reflected both wisdom and inscrutability – was that he’d prefer the mystery to remain.

The earthquake in northwest China that killed more than 2,000 people and left an estimated 100,000 homeless also took a huge toll on Tibetan mastiffs.

Officials say that 300 Tibetan mastiffs were crushed to death in the small Tibetan town of Yushu when their kennels collapsed in, and those that survived have been running wild and terrified without their owners.

Yushu, the breeding center for Tibetan mastiffs,  is believed to be home to as many as 20,000 members of the breed. 

The dogs — a status symbol in China, where they can sell at upwards of $100,000 — were once housed in elaborate kennels that lined the only road on the edge of the town. Now, the Times of London reports, they, like their human masters, are homeless.

The relief effort has seen about 8 tons of dog food have arrived in Yushu, where all local supply shops were razed in the earthquake.

(Photo: Joe Chan / Reuters)