Thanks to the San Bernadino Sun for this article.

Eatery dishes out help for police dogs

Michel Nolan, Staff Writer

Sharon Gaitan Blechinger hopes community support goes to the dogs.

“Dollars for Dogs,” that is.

Now in its third year, “Dollars for Dogs” is a fundraiser adopted by Blechinger’s restaurant, The Mexico Cafe, to raise money to expand the San Bernardino Police Department’s canine unit.

“The dogs are such a good tool for the Police Department in reducing crime in the city. When they are pursuing a suspect, that puts one less human in jeopardy,” says Blechinger, who along with police Lt. Gwendolyn Waters, doggedly leads a pack of local supporters in beefing up the department’s understaffed unit.

Waters, a former dog handler for the Police Department, says the dogs make the department more effective when serving

Podcast: One Voice Q&A with Sharon Gaitan Blechinger and Lt. Gwendolyn Waters.
the community.
“They can conduct searches more thoroughly and can catch suspects more easily,” she says. “Dangerous suspects who would fight an officer will surrender to a dog.”

Throughout the day on March 26, volunteers and police officers will take over The Mexico Cafe, serving the public by hosting, tending bar, taking orders, and busing tables.

All the money raised goes to add a new dog to the department’s existing three-dog team.

Eventually, Blechinger hopes to add a fifth dog to get the department back to an adequate number of dogs and handlers for a police department the size of San Bernardino’s.
“Anything we get goes directly to the canine unit,” Blechinger says. “Realistically, we’d like to at least match the $10,000 we got last year. We’re going to have the dogs - Elroy, Zeke and Primo - and their handlers as ambassadors of the place, meeting and greeting people.”

Blechinger and The Mexico Cafe patrons helped purchase Elroy and Primo.

“We were taken aback by how generous the people of San Bernardino are,” Blechinger says.

Follow this link to read the rest of the article and listen to the podcast.

Categories: Dog News, Working Dogs
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Thanks Belgian for barking in about this web site.

This was a website i came across. it is a website dedicated to stop puppy mills. The photos can be really gory. its shameful what cruel people do to dogs. i believe your fellow bloggers might be in some interest to follow into this website. it includes videos, photos, interviews and much more.

This is just a reminder to people to fix their pets.

The web site is called Puppy Mills Breed Misery and, as Belgian said, it is indeed very graphic. Therefore, I’m not posting any pictures from the site. There are also some videos inside puppy mills, as well as an interview with a puppy miller.

Thanks again to Belgian for letting me know so I can let others know. If you have a site you think others should know about, bark it in!

Categories: Dog News
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Thanks to Karen, Dogster Roxie’s furmom, for barking in this great MSNBC video about an unlikely pair — a dog and a monkey.

As Karen said:

It’s truly amazing what some animals can do to survive and what unlikely friends they can become.

Categories: Dog News, Fun Stuff
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Thanks to Chiris Krewson for letting us know about this strong article from The Morning Call about puppy mills in Pennsylvania! Big barks and howls for the investigative journalists at The Morning Call!

More happy barks for The Morning Call’s new database on Pensylvania puppy mills! As Chris mentions, you can help others learn more about the evils of puppy mills by actually including a link on your blog or site to the extensive database.

Chris Krewson wrote:
Hello. On Sunday my newspaper (The Morning Call, Allentown) is running a major investigative story on Pennsylvania’s reputation as the puppy mill capitol of the East Coast. To do that, we used the state’s Right to Know Law and obtained 20,000 inspection reports, and assembled them into a database.

Today we launched that database on our Web site for users to search, days before the story’s running. We’re also encouraging Web site owners and bloggers to embed our search widget on your pages in the same way YouTube lets people
embed videos on their pages or blogs.

Please drop us a line if you wind up using our code. Thanks!

Who’s watching out for me?

Puppies put in peril by dog wardens with limited power, a flawed state reporting system and lax enforcement.
By Tim Darragh and Christopher Schnaars Of The Morning Call

Puppy breeding and boarding kennels throughout Pennsylvania have been virtually assured of passing grades from state regulators even with feces-filled living areas, cramped cages, dirty water bowls and diseased or dead dogs, according to an investigation by The Morning Call based on a first-ever analysis of 20,000 state inspection records.

Dog wardens are charged with protecting puppies. But the analysis of kennel inspection records from 2003-2006 shows the wardens have been the kennel owners’ best friend.

Kennels received perfect ratings — no violations in the 26 categories inspected by wardens on each visit — more than nine times out of 10 during that time, the newspaper’s analysis of the state’s computerized records showed.

This record of perfection flabbergasts animal welfare organizations, including the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which have long criticized Pennsylvania for allowing substandard kennels and puppy mills to operate.

The newspaper’s finding “sort of verifies in a very strong way what we’ve been complaining about for years,” said Bob Baker, a national ASPCA investigator. “I don’t think even the harshest critics would have thought” nine out of 10 inspections would be perfect. “It shows [the lack of enforcement] is even worse than what we thought.”

To fix the problem, the state Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement would have to know it existed. Until The Morning Call demanded kennel inspection records, the bureau had no idea how to analyze its own data. It took the newspaper three months to get the state database of inspections using the state public records law.

Even then, bureau officials mistakenly believed their computer system could only provide inspection records one at a ti