A toy belonging to one of the children; father, who is not allowed to be identified (nor are other family members), is in the background (Photo: James Glossop/The Times)

In our previous post, about fat dogs being taken away from their owners in Britain, we made a facetious comment wondering if fat human children were next.

Of course, that would never happen. It was just a dark joke. Right? Wrong.

A Twitter follower, doggiestylish, sent us a link to an article that shows our faux prediction had already come true. By now, most likely all of the human children of an overweight couple have been taken away from them. Authorities even absconded with the couple’s newborn baby. A main reason: Fatness. Not the baby’s, of course, but the parents’.

Everyone is heartbroken.

“I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I can’t tell you how powerless I feel,” the dad told The Times. “The other children are devastated too. My wife was told she could stay with our baby for another 24 hours but then she would have to go home alone. She got up out of her bed and left the hospital there and then. I had to wait behind to say my goodbyes to the baby.”

We are heartbroken, too. Dogs need their people. Kids need them even more. Fat or not. This has gone too far. What’s next? Dogs and kids being taken away if their people wear unflattering clothes? (Stay tuned. You never can tell with British courts these days…)

Barney, before and after. Even his spots have shrunk. But did he really need to be wrenched from his person to get a svelte profile?

It was with sadness that we learned of yet another British dog being torn out of the loving arms of a person who had inadvertently made him obese.

According to a BBC report, John Green testified that “he treated Barney as more of a friend than a dog and that he did not set out to deliberately harm the dog.”

As a friend, John shared his chips and chocolate and other treats with Barney. Barney ballooned up to 154 pounds — twice the recommended size for a Dalmatian. We don’t think this is a good thing at all, but we wouldn’t do what the courts did: Not only did they take Barney away from John and put him in the care of a kennel that put him on a strict diet and exercise program; they also banned John from having any dogs for the next 10 years. That seems over the top.

Barney is not the only British dog taken away from his person because of obesity. We recently reported on Fat Bob, a Scottish dog who was far too paunchy for his own good. His person doted on him too much, giving him fish & chips, and lots of tins of dog food. He, too, was taken away from his person, sent to a Fido Fat Farm, and given to a new family.

"Where's my mama? Why are you taking me away?" may be among the frightened cries of the next species of animals who are dragged from their parents for being too portly

Dog Magazine whines that Britain is weighed down by a growing number of obese pets: “As a society it’s time to give a name to the fat dog epidemic sweeping the country.”  OK, maybe Paunchy Pooch syndrome? Corpulent Canine disorder? No, the magazine calls it animal cruelty. And lately, British courts do, too. There’s got to be a better way to trim down dogs and not break their hearts or those of their people.

What’s next – taking fat kids away from their parents?

Just because we're infinitely more popular than cats doesn't mean we can't get along.

We knew it all along, but it took a major nationwide vote to prove it: Dogs are ridiculously popular compared to cats!

Organizers of Meet the Breeds, a NY extravaganza touted as the world’s largest showcase of dogs and cats, held a contest for two months before this week’s event. Some 9,000 pet lovers cast their votes, and the winner was announced today. Despite cat households outnumbering dog households by 13 million, dogs were the paws-down winners, with 65 percent of the vote.

We at Dog Daily News would like to think we had something to do with the preponderance of votes in the canine direction. We did our best to swing the vote with this article we wrote. But even without our time at the keyboard, dogs would clearly be the winners. We’re just so much more likable. There are exceptions, of course, and I myself have to report that I have a couple of friends of the feline persuasion. But if you have any doubts as to why dogs fetch far more votes than cats, check out this list of 15 reasons dogs are better than cats. Even if you are a cat, we think after reading this you will have to agree with us.

We've moved! And it was painless!

We’re excited! Our tails are wagging like mad! We have moved our website to our own host. (Ya ya, boring for you, but thrilling for those of us with less exciting lives.) We love WordPress, but there were limitations while they were our host, so with the tremendous help of the staff of ezsitemove, we were able to make a seamless (to readers) move to BlueHost (a host that gets high marks from everyone we know who uses it).

We can’t say enough good things about ezsitemove. Brandon, our patient, hardworking tech in Utah, worked with us through all our requests to make the site look exactly as it did on our other host. There’s no way we could have done what he did, even with all four our our master canine minds put together. The process is a bit tricky, and it takes a lot to bring things like photos and formatting over in one piece. If you’re thinking about moving your blog, and you are not a tech genius, it’s worth the investment. (And the investment was nothing compared to the price of sanity.)

This experienced underscored our need for a tech-savvy canine on our staff. If you are one, let us know. The pay is terrible and the benefits nonexistent, unless you count being part of our amazing team and our fantastic website as a benefit. You should. We do.

Composting pooch poo. THAT must smell really good! (Photo: AP)

A story I found for my job at MyWire today leaves me feeling a strange mix of quivery joy and nausea. It’s about a group of upstate New Yorkers who have launched a dog-doo-composting program.

Being a dog, the idea of bins filled with weeks-old dog excrement is exciting for its olfactory value. But it’s also kind of creepy. I mean, they’re collecting dog poo! And it can’t be used for veggies and flowers, because the story says we dogs have pathogens in our poo. (Well, maybe we do, but humans probably do, too, and we don’t go around mentioning these embarrassing things about them, do we?!) So it will be used for deep fill, whatever that is.

I hope these green-minded humans have some kind of stink-containment for this pilot program. I’d hate to be a neighbor downwind. I notice that in the photo above, the woman is putting her dog’s doo in the compost bin in a bag. One can only assume this is a compostable bag. But I imagine that this program will want to cut even compostable-bag waste, and will have its share of bins that don’t require bags, where you just shovel the poo in and let it pile up, like so many corpses in medieval mass graves. (Ida tells me I am getting dark and disgusting myself right now. She is making me finish this story and get some breakfast “so you stop ranting like an idiot.” So I sign off.)

– Frank

We’re going to be looking for a good technical dog to join our staff soon, so if you have recommendations for a pooch computer prodigy, send them our way. We are an equal opportunity employer. Except we only hire  dogs. And we don’t pay money. But we have a lot of Bully Sticks hanging around the office for the taking.

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

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A dog's view of the world is far different from a human's (New York Times illustration by Ward Schumaker)

As anyone knows, we dogs see and hear and smell the world very differently from humans. For example, we find olfactory fascination with little spots of urine that humans for some reason don’t even notice even though they’re walking right over it in the park. I’ve never understood their blindness to this sort of amazing find. But until the recent publication of a book about this very topic, the average human had never really come close to knowing just what it was we dogs experience every day.

Enter Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz. This book is a must-have tome that will help people better understand what it’s really like to be one of  us. Every dog should get one for his or her human.

If you don’t have enough dollars saved up in your doggy bank yet (List price: $27),  enjoy this delectably written review in The New York Times.  Here’s our favorite excerpt from the review:

Consider one of Horowitz’s examples: a rose. A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog. How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? “To a dog,” Horowitz points out, “a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, and so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.” Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

I think that’s a marvelous idea. Maybe if our people knew more about how we see, hear, and smell, they wouldn’t be so quick to tug us away from the next rock or leaf or patch of sidewalk we’re utterly, completely, joyously obsessed with.

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A poor stray dog at the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in London (nice sounding-name, anyway)

The number of stray dogs and cats in the United Kingdom rocketed up 11 percent in the last year, according to an article on CNN.com. Many are blaming the economy. When the household budget is in upheaval, it seems many people are just ditching their dogs. (Did they see our story about how much dogs cost to keep over a lifetime? We hope not.)

What’s more tragic is that so many more strays are being euthanized. The number shot up from 7,000 last year to 10,000 this year. The Dog Trust is calling on the British government to make microchipping mandatory. It may make it a little easier to track down a dog’s people, but what good will that do if the people consider the dog just a piece of property to be abandoned when hard times hit?

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This alarming news just in from Reuters: It looks like another major dog cull will happen tomorrow (Sept 10) in a city near Beijing. Get this: Residents with dogs taller than one foot high are being asked to kill their dogs by tomorrow. If they don’t, police are said to be ready to “form dog-beating squads, combing the district and killing all such dogs. Owners will then be fined for the killing,” the story says.

This is unbelievable. It can’t really be happening. The article doesn’t mention anything we can do to help stop the slaughter. This must be a nightmare, right? Wake us up –  please!

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We can’t end our column on such a horrible note. Zulu, Ida, and Jasper are sniffing around right now for something fun and lighthearted so we don’t all go to bed feeling so helpless about our Chinese canine counterparts. (Except for Ida, we’re all shrimps, and would survive the cull. But that doesn’t make it any less painful.) We’ll be back to you shortly…

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Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

OK, as promised, here’s a little something to take you away from the trauma of the post about the dog cull in China. Here is a video of a little French bulldog puppy. He is cute as a button, and stuck on his back like some unfortunate beetle. Won’t someone help him get up? (That would ruin our chuckle, but geez, the poor little guy!)

Folks, my staff seems to have taken the day off. Some nonsense about “We don’t labor on Labor Day weekend.” Ida has not given me the new passwords to post stories, but I will get them by tomorrow and regale you with some great new dog stories I’ve scouted out.

Enjoy your holiday! (My staffers seem to be doing just that…)

– Frank, your humble but lovable editor

We at Dog Daily News are excited to roll out our new daily feature, Today’s Top Dog Stories. My small staff and I (Yes, I now have a staff! I’ll post a page on them soon.) will paw-pick the very best dog-related news and features every day for your reading pleasure.

You’ll no longer have to spend time poring through the internet sniffing for dog news among stories about hot dogs and dog days of summer and Blue Dog Democrats and a politician’s dogged determination. We’ll do the work, and use our collective canine smarts to present you with the best daily reading about your favorite species — complete with our capsule opinion for each story.

And now for our very first Top Dog Stories. Since we are in Beta mode (a term familiar to many of our dog readers and my personal assistant, Jasper), we have picked just three today. If our site doesn’t crash and burn, we’ll higlight more stories tomorrow.

Bo settling into life on Capitol Hill – Go, Bo, go! See Bo run! We’re only slightly jealous of the First Dog. He eats the presidents shoes, and is still adored by millions. And he gets to walk with the president most nights. Some of our staff barely get to use the doggy door most nights. Still, an entertaining story by ABC News.

The victim and a protector

Historic trial for dog rapist – OK, this is pretty gross. But we’re glad to see that India is going after the man who is alleged to have forced himself on a poor, defenseless dog. (We are amused by the way the article calls it “patently non-consensual sex.” If the dog had been found with a cigarette and a cocktail, would things be going differently?)

Deputy: Dog bit off baby’s toes while mom slept - While her baby slept just feet away from her in the same room, the pit bull that Robie Lynn Jenkins, and her boyfriend, Tremayne Spillman, were babysitting munched the toes off her infant. Mom says she didn’t discover that the little piggies had really gone to market until she was diapering her baby the next day. What a class establishment that must be.