ohmidog!

That Florida veterinary technician videotaped holding a dog by its neck and slamming it against the wall has been fired.

And the footage apparently is finally being reviewed by the state attorney’s office.

The video was recorded on a cellphone, and it was posted on YouTube just over a month ago.

Mohammad Hassan, the veterinarian who heads Emergency Pet Hospital in Orlando, originally defended the employee, but he recently apologized for her actions on on the hospital’s Facebook page.

“I want to apologize to all of the pet owners and animal lovers who were rightly shocked by the cruelty on the video,” he wrote in the post.

Hassan also says the vet tech, Stefanie Stasse, has been fired.

Meanwhile, WFTV in Orlando reports that the state attorney’s office has received a copy of the video from the Orange County sheriff’s office for review.

Eight months after she was stabbed seven times with a steak knife, Chloe the Shih Tzu lives in a new and happy home with a veterinarian who works at the animal hospital where she was treated for her injuries.

“…She certainly hasn’t let it get her down,” said Abby Dunlap, of Vienna, Va., who took the patient home after it was decided her previous owner shouldn’t get her back.

The three-year-old dog, formerly known as Coco, was living with her owner in  Southeast D.C. when the owner’s brother, claiming the dog was Satan, stabbed her seven times, according to the Washington Times

Miraculously, no vital organs were hit, and Chloe, after being stitched and bandaged, recovered.

Police took her to  the animal hospital, where it was discovered that, miraculously, the knife had not hit any vital  organs.

“She was very lucky,” said Scott  Giacoppo, a spokesman for the Washington Humane Society.  ”…I’ve seen animals stabbed, beaten, set on fire and discarded like trash.  It’s horrible. But we  get stories like Chloe’s and it brings a smile to our faces that we can make a  difference.”

Dunlap said she and her husband had just lost their own dog when they volunteered to foster Chloe.

“It took a little bit of time for me to trust her and figure out if we wanted to keep her.”

But now Chloe has bonded — with Dunlap, her husband, their children and other dogs in the neighborhood, she says.

(Photo: Washington Times)

A majority of pet owners would pay $500 for life-saving veterinary care, but less than half would fork over $1,000, only a third would spend $2,000, and only about 20 percent would be willing to pay $5,000.

So says an Associated Press-Petside.com poll about the cost of health care for animals, conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media.

Only at the $500 level were dog owners (74 percent) more likely than cat owners (46 percent) to say they would likely seek treatment. In the higher price ranges, the two are about equally likely to seek vet care.

“Euthanasia is always sad but when finances have to be considered, when you feel there is a possibility you didn’t or couldn’t do the right thing, you feel guilty,” said veterinarian Jane Shaw, director of the Argus Institute in the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University. “We are at a point where we are talking about basic life needs or survival needs.”

One in five pet owners said they fret a lot about being unable to afford seeing a vet. Dog owners are more likely to worry than cat owners, and low-income people are among the biggest worriers, which is probably because they have the biggest worries.

About one in four people, or 27 percent, said pet insurance is a good way to save money on vet bills, though only about 5 percent of pet owners actually have it.

The AP-Petside.com Poll was conducted April 7-12, 2010, and involved phone interviews with 1,112 pet owners nationwide. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

A dog has gone missing from the Compassion Veterinary Clinic in Marlborough, Mass. He’s described as small, black and plywood.

Debbie Cassinelli, the clinic manager, made the wooden dog silhouette — and several cats, as well — and attached them a couple of months ago to the clinic’s sign.

She suspects kids took the dog, which disappeared just after Thanksgiving. The cats were spared. 

Cassinelli told Metro West Daily News that she worked on the animals off and on for about three months. The dog was based on her own pet, a border collie-terrier mix. Cats looked down at the dog, which rested its paws on the edge of the sign.

She attached the dog to the sign with steel rods.

Cassinelli said she added the animals to the sign to draw attention to it. People tended to “fly down the road” and not notice the sign before the animals went up, she said.

Cassinelli  does not think she will get the dog back, but she plans to make a new one.

As yet more proof that dogs eat the strangest things, a terrier required veterinary treatment after wolfing down one of his owner’s silicone falsies.

The incident — despite its vast pun potential — was straightforwardly reported on Dogster back in August, in a dispatch written by the veterinarian, Dr. Eric Barchas.

“Last night at the emergency hospital a nurse carried a five-year-old Terrier cross into the treatment room. She advised me matter-of-factly that the dog had consumed a fake breast three hours earlier.”

Barchas determined that the fake breast, while not toxic, would ultimately lodge in the dog’s intestines — the dog being only 15 pounds and the breast being a size B.

With only three hours having passed since ingestion, the vet decided to try to make the dog vomit. The clients authorized the procedure — and the vet forced the dog to vomit with an intravenous injection of a drug called apomorphine.

“The dog vomited copious dog food, a moderate amount of grass, several small twigs, an ear plug, some yarn, and a fake breast, size B,” Barchas wrote. Forty-five minutes later the dog was ready to go home. Barchas didn’t mention how much he billed the family, apparently heeding the Biblical advice:

“Beware of falsie profits.”