ohmidog!

Talk about a dog with a one track mind.

Few details accompanied this video, posted on YouTube last week, of a dog who’d made himself comfortable in the middle of a Ukranian street and refused to get out of the way of traffic, including an oncoming streetcar.

A bystander tries to coax him out of the way. Then the tram driver, after giving him a pat on the head, gives him a slight nudge in the butt with his foot, at which point the dog begrudgingly takes a few steps.

Eventually, the dog gets out of the way, but just barely.

No, that’s not the ice cream man rolling down the streets of Lisichansk, a city of 100,000 in Ukraine.

It’s a crematorium on wheels, purchased by the city to more handily dispose of stray dogs — sometimes while they are still alive — as part of the country’s efforts to clean up its streets before next year’s Euro 2012 soccer championship.

(About two and a half minutes into the video above you can see city officials showing off their mobile crematorium.)

The vehicle is staffed by three employees — a driver, an oven operator and another who shoots strays with a syringe gun, paralyzing them.

The crematorium is capable of burning 40 kilos worth of dogs and cats at a time.

Lisichansk is not alone in trying to clear the streets of strays before the soccer championship,  being co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland.

The cities of  Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv and Donetsk — all of which are hosting matches — have stray removal programs underway. In Kharkiv and Kiev, plans have been made to open shelters for strays found in the vicinity of Euro 2012 stadiums, but some other cities opt for extermination instead.

Sometimes, Lisichansk lends its mobile crematorium to neighboring  jurisdictions. How thoughtful.

Despite protests, from inside and outside the country, the stray removal program continues, and the mobile crematorium — which features temperatures of 900 degrees — keeps rolling.

A petition appealing to Ukrainian authorities to stop cremating live animals can be found on the website Care2.

According to the petition, Ukraine — rather than focusing on spaying and neutering and finding homes for strays — has long opted for less humane practices.

Stray dogs and cats were previously killed using an illegal poison called ditiline that paralyzed their respiratory muscles are paralyzed.

Officials consider the crematorium ” more modern” and “environmentally safe,” the petition says.

Vasily Fedorouk, an internationally acclaimed sculptor, drowned Sunday after saving his dog, Era, from Horsetail Lake, outside Chicago.

The 2 1/2 -year-old German hunting terrier went into the lake to fetch a ball but got caught in some vegetation. Fedorouk, 59, jumped into the lake and freed the dog, but wound up getting entangled himself, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“He was waving his hands in the water,” his wife, Dilbara Arapova said. “At first I thought he was joking. Then he went underwater and I started to scream. I couldn’t help him. I can’t swim.”

Another man at the scene, who also couldn’t swim, called police on a cell phone. By the time police and paramedics arrived, eight minutes later, Arapova said, it was too late.

Fedorouk was found submerged in 6 to 8 feet of water. An official with the Cook County medical examiner’s office said Fedorouk died of accidental drowning. Arapova said police told her that Fedorouk apparently got caught in fishing line.

On Monday, Arapova and her son, Anton Fedorouk, 24, described the sculptor as a hardworking, passionate artist. “He would work from sunup to sundown on his sculptures,” Arapova said. “That was his passion. He would want to be remembered for his art. He told me that after he dies, his art will still live on forever.”

Fedorouk, who immigrated to the United States with his wife from Ukraine in 1992, attended the Lviv Academy of the Arts, in Lviv Ukraine, in the mid-1970s.

Anton Fedorouk was not surprised that his father risked his life for Era. “He loved our dog. He would do anything to save it.”

(Photo from vasilyfedorouk.com)