ohmidog!

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A lot of us think our dogs were gifts from above, but here’s one that truly was.

A seven-year-old boy in Salinas, California, got a new puppy after it escaped from the clutches of a hawk and fell out of the sky into his backyard.

KSBW reported that the two-month-old puppy was dropped an estimated 30 feet before it was discovered by a seven-year-old named Taylor.

The dog has been adopted by Taylor’s family and named T.J. Heavenly.

The family believes that T.J. Heavenly somehow worked himself free of the hawk’s talons.

“If you look at him right now, he’s so wiggly,” Elaine Bouchard told the TV station. “And his nose; he’s such a little bulldozer, I can see him wiggling right out of the talons.”

The dog was taken to a veterinarian to get treated for wounds and dehydration before the family took him home for keeps.

“When God drops a puppy from the sky, you keep it,” Bouchard said.

Here’s seven-year-old Ava Hudak singing about her dog, Hank.

The song was written and the video produced with help from her aunt, Jes Hudak.

Not only did a dog act win the finals of “Britain’s Got Talent” Saturday night, the performance of Pudsey the dog and Ashleigh the human helped the show pull in double the audience of its competition,” The Voice.”

An average of 11.4 million saw Ashleigh Butler and Pudsey win in the live final of the ITV1 show, compared to 5.6 million for The Voice on BBC1, UK’s Press Association reported.

ITV1 said the ratings were the highest of any show this year.

Butler, a 17-year-old from Northamptonshire and her six-year-old dancing dog narrowly beat Jonathan Antoine and Charlotte Jaconelli to the title after receiving the most votes from the public.

This video — recounting the journey of a dog as she travels from homelessness, to shelter, to loving home — is part of a new campaign called The Law of the Paw.

Filmed from the dog’s point of view, it was created to raise awareness for the national, grassroots effort that encourages people to do three simple things: adopt, spay/neuter, and ID their pets.

The campaign was launched April 11 by the Animal Humane Society in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and 15 other animal welfare organizations, including Minnesota Partnership for Animal Welfare (MnPAW) and the Washington Humane Society in Washington DC.

Best of all, other shelters and animal welfare organizations are invited to freely join in.

“We really view this as a game changer for animals in this country,” says Janelle Dixon, president and CEO of Animal Humane Society. “… When people take care of their own pets, according to the Law of the Paw, they are helping all animals and we will see the number of animals coming into shelters reduced and decreases in pet homelessness and euthanasia.”

“The issues facing animals are not local problems – we face the same issues here in Washington DC that Animal Humane Society faces in Minnesota,” said Lisa LaFontaine, president and CEO of the Washington Humane Society. ”Overpopulation, stray and lost animals and crowded shelters can be found in every community in every state. It’s time we come together and address these issues as one.”

A Massachusetts pit bull is being credited with pulling her owner off the railroad tracks, saving her from an oncoming freight train.

And that, lest you find it hard to believe, is according to both the driver of the train and the woman’s son, a Boston police officer.

The woman survived, uninjured, but the dog — named Lilly — was severely hurt and lost a front leg.

Boston police officer David Lanteigne said he rescued Lilly from a shelter to serve as a companion for his mother, who suffers from alcoholism.

“We saved her life and she saved my mom’s life,” he told WCVB in Boston.

Lanteigne’s mother, Christine Spain, apparently fell unconscious onto train tracks in Shirley last Wednesday.

When help arrived, Lilly was covered in blood but still standing guard over her owner.

Lilly was taken to an emergency animal hospital in Acton, and later to Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston.

“Lilly was either pushing or pulling my mother off the tracks,” said Lanteigne. “There wasn’t enough time and … just prior to the train making impact Lilly had intentionally gotten between the train and my mother, and had taken the hit.”

“I’m supposed to be the strong one. I’m supposed to be here for her, but she’s been so great, so tough through all this,” Lanteigne said of his dog. “It almost seems like she’s the one comforting me and being there for me and making me feel better.”

(Photo: Courtesy of Angell Animal Medical Center)

No animals, or babies, were harmed in the making of these videos.

The top one shows a one-year-old Siberian husky-Australian shepherd mix named Haiku going through his first car wash.

The second one shows an unidentified baby also experiencing a car wash for the first time.

I recommend starting them up at the same time.

Notice the similarities in reactions — namely, the bug-eyed look they both get, a seeming mix of horror, uncertainty and curiosity.

All of which proves nothing major — only that, for dogs and humans, a new environment is scary the first time you roll through it, especially one with noisy blasts of water, flailing sponge strips, whipping brushes and mounds of cascading suds that seem intent on burying you.

By the time we — dog or human — take our second trip through the car wash, though, it’s usually a different story. It’s not as scary. The baby, in fact, appears to be getting used to it by the end of the video, relaxing enough to enjoy a sip of his beverage.

True, it’s not often you’ll see ohmidog! singing the praises of a large commercial dog breeding operation — but Bluespring Valley is different.

To be able to order a purebred golden retriever with just a few clicks of the mouse? How great is that? They ship them nationwide!

And judging from the pastoral setting, Bluespring has got to be one of those “respectable” breeding operations.

You can find this outfit advertised on such fine websites as familypetclassifieds.com and puppytrader.com.

Click on the image above, and watch the video. As you can see, they have nothing to hide.

At the end of the video, you’ll find out who’s behind it.

Li Li, a golden retriever in China, has become a local celebrity — partly for how he stands guard over his owners bike, partly for how he hops up and rides on it when he comes back.

Locals in Nanning, capital of Guangxi Province, call Li Li the “Bike Hugging Dog.”

Sydney, a beagle-terrier mix in Michigan, has taken on the job of nursing five kittens.

The dog’s owner, Heather Rector, of Portage, brought the kittens home last week after they were rescued from a construction site.

Sydney’s maternal instincts — she has had three litters of her own — kicked right in.

And, stranger yet, she started lactating, her owner says.

“Two days of them being here, she was fully lactating, and … she hasn’t stopped lactating yet,” Rector said.

Sydney is feeding and bathing the kittens and won’t let them wander far without bringing them back to her bed.

Rector, a new mother herself, says she’s proud of Sydney’s compassion.  ”You don’t see a lot of people or animals do that anymore, and I think she did the exact thing I would have done.”

When a Hollywood movie goes over budget, it’s no big deal.

When one being paid for by taxpayers — or even toll violators —  does, it is.

So, as snarky as this investigative report by the 13 Undercover team at Houston’s KTRK is at times, it makes some valid points.

The Harris County attorney’s office hired director Fleming Fuller to produce a public service documentary about the dangers of dogfighting, offering $10,000 for the finished product.

The movie was intended to show the horrors of dogfighting, and get across Ryan’s message that he was going to be tough on people who take part in it.

Normally, we’d applaud something like that, but the movie went 10 times over budget, the county attorney seems to be taking credit for a previous county attorney’s dogfighting bust, and the movie’s director was a good friend of the Harris County attorney’s top assistant.

As the report points out, County Attorney Vince Ryan campaigned as an ethics watchdog:  “So you’d figure his office would the first to make sure your money wasn’t wasted, reporter Wayne Dolcefino says. “Instead, they spent money like they were in Hollywood.”

On top of that, the report says there hasn’t been a big dogfighting bust since Ryan took office.

And, in yet another criticism offered by the news report, the documentary includes scenes of Ryan frolicking with his dog at the beach, which gives the film the appearance, at times, of a campaign ad.

The director charged $500 for his time on an overnight trip to Galveston — apparently just to obtain that beach footage — and expenses there included multiple hotel bills and a pricey dinner.

Fuller is a North Carolina-based director who has made a few horror movies, including Prey of the Chameleon and Stranded.

While the county’s contract specified $10,000 would be spent on the film, and that it would be completed in one month, the final pricetag came out to more than $100,000 and the film took nearly a year to make.

The movie was paid for from a special fund consisting of fines imposed on  drivers who fail to pay tolls.

Ryan said the video has been used to train law enforcement officers and to show high school students and others that dogfighting is inhumane and illegal.

KTRK says the documentary ended up costing cost $13,000 a minute, and that only 171 people have watched it in on YouTube.

The original documentary, as it appears on YouTube, is in three parts, which, combined, add up to nearly 30 minutes, not seven minutes, as the news report says. (The version being distributed for education purposes has been shortened.)

Here’s part one:

To see all three parts, click here.