Category: News

Dogs Found Safe after Carjacking of Doggie Day Care Minivan

Several pet parents who’d left their dogs at a Chicago doggie day care facility yesterday could breathe huge sighs of relief this morning. The minivan transporting their dogs home late yesterday afternoon was carjacked at gunpoint, with seven dogs inside it. This morning the van was finally found, with the dogs still inside it, apparently safe and sound.

Around 4 p.m. yesterday, two armed men stole the unmarked Urban Out Sitters’ minivan as the driver was loading up the dogs, according to the Chicago Sun Times. One of the men pointed a gun at a witness who tried to stop them.

“Fifteen years in business and this is probably the most devastating thing I’ve had to deal with,” Joseph Giannini, owner of the doggie day care, told the Sun Times.

Giannini said that because his facility’s name is not on the minivan, he did not think the carjackers intended to steal the dogs.

As temperatures dropped to below zero overnight, Giannini and worried pet parents drove around Chicago, searching for the minivan.

This morning a woman in the River West neighborhood noticed a dog sitting inside a minivan outside her house for more than an hour. Worried about the dog’s safety, she called the police. Officers arrived and found that the license plates matched those of the stolen minivan.

The case is under investigation by the Chicago Police Department. In the meantime, the dogs have been reunited with their happy pet parents.

Tad Tomita, dog dad of Mochi, a 3-year-old Miniature Schnauzer who was in the minivan, told ABC News that when his wife told him yesterday their dog had been stolen, “I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. It’s so surreal.”

Tomita and his wife picked up Mochi this morning from where the minivan was found.

“She was cold but extremely happy to see us,” he told ABC News.

Photos via Facebook, Facebook

Meet the Beagle: ‘Miss P’ Wins Westminster Best in Show Title

If you ask me, this year’s recipient of the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show’s Best in Show title is the cutest winner since Uno, who in 2008 was the first Beagle to ever take the title.

Maybe that’s because 4-year-old Tashtins Lookin for Trouble — aka Peyton — aka Miss P — just happens to be Uno’s grandniece.

Miss P was much more subdued than her vocal great uncle, who had barked and howled at judges seven years ago. Yet Miss P’s handler, Will Alexander, seemed to be exhausted at a news conference after the show, the New York Times reports.

“She’s hungry and I’m overwhelmed,” Alexander told reporters. “She just never let me down. She didn’t make any mistakes,”

Best in Show judge David Merriam appeared to be having a good time with his duties. According to the New York Times, Merriam said he chose Miss P because she “had wonderful type” and a “wonderful head,” and, as she trotted around the show ring at Madison Square Garden, he could imagine “the Beagle in the ring and the Beagle in the field.”

The win was considered a huge upset since Matisse, a Portuguese Water Dog who’s a cousin of the Obama family’s Sunny, was expected by many to take the title. Swagger, an Old English Sheepdog, got the biggest cheers and seemed to be the crowd favorite.

The competitor who got the most media attention was Toy Group winner Rocket, who is co-owned by former headline-maker Patricia Hearst-Shaw.

Miss P was born in Canada and lives in both Milton and Enderby, British Columbia. She has won 19 previous best in dog show titles in the U.S., but this will be her final one. She’s retiring to motherhood.

Uno, who lives in Austin, Texas, and is now almost 10, has never met his grandniece. His dog mom, Caroline Dowell, told the Associated Press that Uno has his own television set, “so I assume he was watching.” Uno is still in great shape, she added. “You can put him in the ring and he’d win tonight.”

To celebrate her victory, Miss P is spending Wednesday appearing on TV shows, having lunch at Manhattan’s famous Sardi’s restaurant and making a cameo appearance tonight in the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots.”

If Miss P has you thinking about getting a Beagle, please consider adopting one — there are plenty of what the American Kennel Club describes as “curious, friendly and merry” dogs available in shelters and through rescue organizations. The Beagle Dog Rescue Shelter Directory lists rescues across the country.

Photos via Facebook

Patty Hearst’s Shih Tzu Rocket Wins Westminster Toy Group

Patty Hearst has “Rocket”-ed back into news headlines, har har har.

Her Shih Tzu, GCH Hallmark Jolei Rocket Power — aka “Rocket” — won the Toy Group at the 139th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show last night. The Best in Show winner will be announced tonight.

Hearst (who now goes by the name Patricia Hearst-Shaw), granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. A photo of her, holding a semiautomatic rifle while robbing a bank, went what would have been considered viral back in the ’70s.

She spent nearly two years in prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She was later given a full pardon by President Bill Clinton.

In the 1990s, Hearst-Shaw became an actress, with co-starring roles in the John Waters films “Cry-Baby” and “Serial Mom.”

About 10 years later, she became involved in showing dogs.

“People move on,” she told reporters after Rocket’s win yesterday, according to the New York Post. “I guess people somehow imagine you don’t evolve in your life. I have grown daughters and granddaughters and other things that normal people have.”

Among those “other things” Hearst-Shaw has are show dogs. She primarily shows French Bulldogs, one of whom won a ribbon yesterday. She co-owns Rocket the Shih Tzu with two others.

While Hearst-Shaw said she is a dog lover, her two daughters have cats.

“I don’t know what I did wrong,” she told reporters.

The 139th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Shows airs live tonight at 8 p.m. ET on the USA Network.

And just a reminder to adopt, not shop — many shelters and rescue groups have purebred dogs waiting for forever homes.

Photos via Facebook, famouspictures.org

New Study Finds Dogs Recognize Our Happy and Angry Facial Expressions

Apparently we don’t have to be raising our voices for our dogs to understand that we’re angry, according to a new study by cognitive scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.

Just by looking at our faces, dogs can tell if we’re angry, or happy. It was previously believed that dogs could only figure this out by using other senses, like hearing and smell, and by observing how we were acting.

A 2013 study found that dogs can discriminate human faces in pictures. But could they also discriminate emotions?

The latest study, published today in the scientific journal Current Biology, was conducted at the Clever Dog Lab at the Vetmeduni Vienna by Corsin Müller, Ludwig Huber and colleagues from the Messerli Research Institute.

During a training phase, two groups of 10 dogs were shown side-by-side photos of women smiling and scowling. One group of dogs was rewarded when they nose-bonked the images of happy faces; the other group was rewarded when they touched angry faces.

To ensure the dogs weren’t making their decisions based on differences between the photos, such as teeth or frown lines, the photos were split in half so dogs only saw the eye or mouth area. Even then, most of the dogs could discriminate between happy and angry face halves. They were also able to determine the emotion in photos they had not seen before.

“We believe that dogs draw on their memory during this exercise. They recognize a facial expression which they have already stored,” Müller said in a press release. He noted that all the dogs in the study were pets. “We suspect that dogs that have no experience with people would perform worse or could not solve the task at all.”

Interestingly, the dogs were able to identify happy faces much more quickly than angry faces.

“It seems that dogs dislike approaching angry faces,” Huber said.

The study results are surprising, since the spatial resolution of dogs’ vision is about seven times lower than that of humans.

“It had been unknown that dogs could recognize human emotions in this way,” Huber said.

To better understand how these visual skills are developed, the team plans to conduct similar research using wolves.

Photos: Clever Dog Lab / Vetmeduni Vienna

Small Dog Safe After Owner Shoots Himself at End of L.A. Car Chase

A man wanted for assault with a deadly weapon led police on a car chase through the San Fernando Valley early this afternoon. When it ended in a hour-long standoff on an Arleta, Calif., street, a passenger could be seen through a tinted window of the suspect’s utility truck — a small, white dog.

The window was rolled all the way up on an 85-degree day, and the dog appeared to running back and forth inside the cab.

When video taken from a helicopter showed the suspect to apparently be bleeding and unconscious, SWAT team members approached the truck and opened the passenger-side door. The dog watched them from the driver’s seat. An officer attempted to open the driver’s-side door, but it was locked.

After a couple of minutes, the dog jumped out of the passenger side of the cab and bolted down the street.

“Here’s the moment poor pup ran out of the truck,” tweeted FOX 11 reporter Gigi Graciette.

Another reporter following the chase, Kristine Lazar of KCBS, tweeted, “Pursuit update: The dog is safe! But he ran off and wouldn’t come to me!”

After a few minutes, KTLA tweeted that the dog returned to the truck and jumped inside the cab, where the driver remained.

The dog then jumped out of the cab again. “Officers still trying to capture dog running near truck following standoff,” KTLA tweeted four minutes later.

The suspect reportedly shot himself in the head and has died. Animal control officers were able to capture his dog, who appeared to be terrified.

“#LAPD thanks our animal regulations partners for safely getting dog from pursuit,” the LAPD tweeted. The dog has been reunited with family members, according to news reports.

If you lead police on a car chase, you’re an idiot. If you bring your dog along, you’re an even bigger idiot.

“Some think sympathy should be for suspect, not dog. Not me,” Graciette tweeted. “Sad for his family, YES but he made those choices, including the one where he endangered so many lives by speeding thru our city streets. Dog had no choice. The end.”

Hear, hear. I hope the dog ends up in a home with a responsible pet parent.

Photos via @tarawallis, @GigiGraciette, @CBSLAKristine, @KTLA, @KTLA, @LAPD HQ

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