Dog legislation off and running for greyhound welfare FL 'For the third year in a row, Sen. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Pembroke Pines, is asking her colleagues to pass legislation (SB 228) that requires greyhound adoption booths at racetracks...'  Animal rights activists have opposed previous legislation because they say expanded hours mean more dog racing and more dog deaths. Currently, puppies who do not meet racing requirements are destroyed and retiring dogs are retired [sic] by euthanasia. [Miami Herald] Related: Canine killing grounds: greyhounds massacred, Greyhound left for dead, later rescued

Chloe shares some photos she took of dogs in cars and submitted to dogs in cars [Watermelon Punch via RSS Search] Related: Dog's place is not in the driver's seat, even if Rover is sitting ... on your lap 

Dog attacks AIBO Some dogs react to the robotic dog with dog-on-robot aggression. [Boing Boing]

How to be a good dog [Lexi the dog] (okay, it's really 'how to be a bad dog and get away with it.')

Old dog, new tricks CrookDimwit who lives on Capitol Hill with his clever dog, Abbie, learns that Abbie knows 'how to be a bad dog and get away with it.' (well, not really... Abbie, a smarty pants Dalmation, still had to go for her walk) [CrookDimwit]

Dachshund makes fashion statement at gala show in Moscow [BenBailey.net] (must see photo)

Adamholz conjures up a must-have phrase for the Bowlingual translator [Adam Holz]

Add your dog to the Minipups [Anil's Daily Links] (if I ever figure out what 2 inches to the pixel means... )

Scott Johnson of FuzzyGroup says that 'three letter' queries (ie, dog)  don't work properly on Feedster, that cool rss search tool his company has cooked up (along with InBox Buddy, an Outlook Express spam tamer). No problem... Of course, that's easy to fix. If you can't re-engineer the tool, just re-engineer the world:

Attention, all bloggers and news organizations. From now on, you must substitute the word 'pooch' for 'dog'  in all your posts. Got it? okay, now, Dog News can search for you...

Wanted: fence mender to keep starving wild dogs at bay AU  A drought has forced The Wild Dog Destruction Board (pdf format; html format) to add additional fence boundary riders to its defense of the 'dog fence', one of the longest fences in the world. Starving wild dogs, desperate to reach feed and water, have been chewing through the fence to get to the other side. The pay isn't great (and neither is the job, for that matter), but the extreme isolation may be welcome, considering the constant news of war and politics:

'One of the world's longest man-made structures, an unbroken fence stretches more than 5000 kilometres from south-east Queensland to the Great Australian Bight in South Australia. The NSW border fence, built in 1921, starts near Hungerford, on the Queensland border, and ends near Broken Hill...' [ Sydney Morning Herald] (What kind of government funds an agency called 'The Wild Dog Destruction Board' and what kind of government plans for dogs to needlessly starve in the desert... )

Hero dogs...

• Dog rescues Alzenheimer patient from muddy pit  NC [WRAL]
• When hospital patient stopped breathing, dog alerted nurses UK [BBC]

Jazz performer for 'animal liberation' benefit wacks neighbor's dog AU Jazz great Vince Jones says he killed Oscar, a neighbor's miniture staffordshire terrier, when he found 13 of his birds shredded:

He said he had been very upset when he got home to find that 13 of his birds had been killed, and when the dog came back for one of his few surviving drakes, he got angry and hit it with a spade. "It was my long-handled spade, the dog wasn't looking and I'm fairly sure I got it on the back of the neck. It was yelping quite severely ... I figured it would go home..." (In the meantime Jones put the dog's collar on his garbage bin;. Next month he performs at an Animal Rights Benefit in Sydney, Australia.) [Sydney Morning Herald] (Maybe they should exile him to Dog Island [Madville.com]

Bad owner...  bad dog: Results of a New Zealand government survey concludes irresponsible dog owners are biggest problem. NZ A survey of 71 of 75 councils says owners, not dogs, are the biggest obstacle in preventing dog attacks. Other findings: 

• 39 per cent of those needing hospital treatment after attacks were children under 10 years;
• breeds most commonly identified in attacks were staffordshire bull terriers, german shepherds, labradors, bull terriers, rottweilers and pit bull terriers;
• a need for a standardised system of recording dog attacks.
• dog attacks have actually decreased in the last three years. [Stuff, New Zealand]

The most recent in a spate of dog attacks: Golden Retriever shreds child's face at wedding; charges pending