Dog Daily News

The best canine news and features, paw-picked by our staff of intrepid news hounds

.

Bathe us, Kendra! We feel so dirty! -- from the boys on the Dog Daily News staff

Heidi Fleiss, the notorious “Hollywood Madam” who ran a high-end prostitution ring catering to the rich and famous in the 1980s, is making headlines once more. But this time it’s for her new enterprise, “The Dirty Dog,” a dog-grooming business and pet salon, near Las Vegas. She’s trying to open it with business partner Kendra Jade Rossi, who happens to be a (former?) porn star and centerfold.

Heidi Fleiss: She knows clean from dirty.

Here at the office the boy dogs are suddenly feeling mighty flea-bitten and grimy. We’re thinking, “Boy do we need warm baths.” I’m personally getting sick and tired of the humiliating routine of getting hosed with cold water  on the sidewalk in front of all the neighbors whenever I roll in some succulent dead creature in the park or even when I just start smelling gloriously “doggy.” The green vet soap comes out and I’m all naked in front of the ‘hood, and then I look like a drowned rat terrier when it’s all over. The suffering I endure…

I would much rather bathe in the privacy of The Dirty Dog, under the warm and able hands of Kendra. Ida, the only girl dog at the office, quipped that Kendra probably couldn’t even see me under her “accouterments” — a comment I found rather distasteful with all its implications about size.

Alas, it seems there’s a bit of a legal snag for Heidi’s and Kendra’s promising business. You can read all about it in this article in the Las Vegas Review-Sun. We at Dog Daily News (if you don’t include Ida) are rooting for the entrepreneurs. We’ll be on the first plane from San Francisco when they’re ready with the suds.

______________________________________

Attention all dogs: Hide this next item from your people. And if you see it on a news site they’re looking at, casually reach up and click the keyboard with your chin or your paw so the article “disappears.” Some data are now available showing just how much we dogs actually cost over our lifetime. And we’re not cheap.

The low end is $4,242. The high end: $38,905. My humans have a friend in Monterey who spent $50,000 recently on chemotherapy and other cancer treatments for his dog. And that dog had a good life. He probably cost his people more than $100k over his too-short life.

It’s heartwarming that humans care so much about us. But in these trying economic times, they may look at the data and say, “Oh my. That dog is too expensive. I think I’ll get me a cat instead.” Yes, cats are way less expensive, with their priciest lifetime care running about $18,000. And keep in mind they usually live a lot longer than us dogs, so on a per annum basis, they’re a better deal by far.

So just scroll down and forget you ever saw this item.

_____________________________________

Here’s a story that could become a Lifetime movie. If Aesop were around today, it would surely have been the basis of a fable.

A young family stops to camp in the Yukon Wilderness. A scruffy mutt pokes his head from the bush. On his face are numerous porcupine quills. The family reaches out to help him with those dastardly quills.

Cut to the next scene. The family’s two-year-old son, Kale, disappears into the bush on a cool rainy night. He’s wearing only a T-shirt. It’s a horrible 25 hours before his frightened family gets word that he was found alive. And with him was Koda, the quill-faced dog they had helped. It seems Koda had stuck with the boy during his life-threatening ordeal, even keeping him warm and protected overnight. A chopper pilot spotted them with infrared technology.

“A bear could have got him. Anything could have happened,” Mike Bondarchuk, a local hotel owner who volunteered in the search for Kale, told The Globe and Mail. “What we do know is the dog stuck with him, all night and all the next day.”

And now Koda has a new home. His people knew what a hero Koda was to the little boy’s family, so with tears, they gave him to the family. (It turns out Koda had been missing for a week before he helped Kale.) His person had apparently met Kale’s mother while he was still lost, learned that the family had helped a dog with porcupine quills, and realized it was her dog. According to The Globe and Mail, she comforted the boy’s mother, saying, “That’s my dog out there. He won’t leave your son.”

And it looks like he really won’t. He is now part of a very loving, very grateful family who will treasure him forever. Pass the hankie!

__________________________________________

Better than doggy Prozac

Our friend Skip, and his human, Jane Rohman, heard about how tense Zulu can be at times, and sent us an amazing collection of CDs, entitled Through a Dog’s Ear. The CDs are clinically shown to relax even the most tightly wound dogs. And who better to use as our guinea pig but Zulu the Worrywart?

So one day last week, we were on deadline and Zulu hadn’t saved the article he was writing, and suddenly it was gone from his computer. Poof! Well normally you couldn’t bear to watch as Zulu falls apart during stressful situations. He pants profusely, he trembles, he curses, he paces, the veins stand out like snakes on his forehead. It’s not a pretty sight. He’d pop Prozac like candy if he could get hold of some.

But instead, Jasper just calmly popped one of the CDs into his computer, and as the slow, gentle, dog’s-ear version of classical piano music wafted through the office, Zulu became so serene that we thought perhaps he had died. He went from a Hanna-Barbera-cartoonlike frenzy to a relaxed, calm, almost catatonic canine within two minutes. When we asked him how his article was coming along, he said, “What article?” This was astounding, but we were on deadline, after all, so Jasper stopped the music and Zulu sauntered over to his computer to start again. No nerves, no cussing.

The CDs are purported to be good for all kinds of dog anxieties, from separation anxiety to thunderphobia. It has to do with something called psychoacoustics and bioacoustics. The words are too long for us, but the link in the previous sentence explains more, should you really care. Check out this interesting CBS Early Show story about the CDs’ effectiveness. Be sure to watch it all the way through, because the difference in the “test dogs” between when the reporter played rap music and when she played a Through a Dog’s Ear CD has to be seen to be believed.