1993 - Philip Middleton of Chantilly, Va., and his partner Richard Wooton are preparing to market a commode for dogs. The dog walks up stairs at the side of the bathroom toilet, steps onto a platform over the toilet bowl, and squats down to use the Walk-Me-Not. And an inventor in Southern California recently began marketing the Puppy Didy diaper for dogs.

1994 - Customs officials, aided by drug-sniffing dogs, arrested Mary Gray, 43, of Chicago at O'Hare Airport in June as she returned from Jamaica with 27 pounds of marijuana in her suitcase. She said she thought the marijuana would be undetectable because it was sprinkled with a "magic voodoo potion" that she had bought from a witch doctor in Jamaica.

1995 - In August, Carolyn J. Christian and her minister-husband filed a $160,000 lawsuit against a school that trains guide dogs after a blind man, learning to use one of the school's graduates in a Bradenton, Fla., shopping mall, stepped on the woman's toe, possibly breaking it. (A few days later, the Christians withdrew the lawsuit, citing public outrage.)

1996 - The village council of Bruntingthorpe, England, began consideration in February of one member's elaborate plan to reduce the amount of dog poop in the town of 200 people (and 30 dogs): The village would DNA-test the dogs and keep the results on file for the purpose of matching the DNA to that in any unscooped dog poop lying around the village, so as to punish scofflaws.

1996 - In December, the Arizona Republic profiled animal psychologist Krista Cantrell, who says her success is because she can communicate telepathically with dogs and therefore get to the bottom of most master-dog relationship problems. Several satisfied clients sang praises for Cantrell's work, including even the owner of a horse that was on the verge of being put to sleep but was able to tell Cantrell that he was simply overmedicated. (Five weeks later, the horse won a race.)

1996 - Sigma Chemical Co. in St. Louis gained notoriety in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing for making the artificial scents used to train the dogs that helped find dead bodies amidst the rubble. According to the March Discover magazine, the company makes these smells: Pseudo Corpse I (for a body less than 30 days old), Pseudo Corpse II (more than 30 days old), Pseudo Drowned Victim and Pseudo Distressed Body (for a person still alive but in shock), with Pseudo Burned Victim in the works.

1994 - A December Associated Press dispatch from Australia reports that members of Parliament traditionally address each other much more aggressively than members of Congress do in the U.S. Among the names recently overheard on the floor of the Parliament: perfumed gigolos, brain-damaged, harlot, sleazebag, scumbag, mental patient and dog's vomit.

1993 - London's Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in November announced guidelines to discourage vets from routinely shortening dogs' tails, especially poodles' and bulldogs'. About 20 percent of Britain's dogs have been so "docked," and more than 25 precent of registered breeds have their tails shortened by tradition.

1992 - In May, the Maui County (Hawaii) Council tabled an ordinance that would ban the backyard killing of dogs because of opposition by some groups that such a ban would be discriminatory based on their religious tradition of eating dogs.

1994 - The Chicago Tribune reported in June on a local sex therapist, Robert Herd, who works exclusively helping animals to mate. He says a surprising number of dogs and horses exhibit sexual dysfunction.

1995 - According to a New York Times report, one of the hottest selling Christmas gifts last season in Japan was a child's version of the electronic organizer because it contained not only calendars and phone directories, as the adult models contain, but also a "virtual pet" computer program so that Japanese kids can "play with" dogs and cats in the many apartment buildings that ban pets.

1996 - UPDATE When News of the Weird first mentioned Corky Ra's Summum Inc. in 1988, the Salt Lake City company had just begun the business of mummifying dead pets and had only the dream of someday mummifying dead people, which Ra figured he could do for $7,000 ($18,000 for a mummified bronzed statue). According to a June 1996 story in the San Jose Mercury News, Ra has so far serviced three dozen dogs, cats and birds, and has a customer list of 137 humans (the oldest of which is 54) who want someday to be mummified. His chief associate supposedly has practiced on more than 2,000 roadkill animals and on 30 cadavers purchased from a medical school. The price for humans now starts at $30,000, and bronzing could run into six figures.

1994 - In January of this, the Year of the Dog, the city of Beijing prohibited its citizens from owning dogs, even though many people still try to hide dogs in their homes. Recently, a park opened north of the city to rent dogs for patrons to walk at a price of about 23 cents for 10 minutes. In April, Feng Quantang filed a lawsuit in Shenyang, China, asking for damages from the government because inspectors allegedly beat his illegal dog to death in front of him.

1997 - In July, Alex Alzaldua filed a $25,000 lawsuit against Dennis Hickey in Raymondville, Texas, alleging injuries caused by his "suddenly without warning" having tripped over Hickey's dog in the kitchen of Hickey's home. According to the lawsuit, Hickey should have warned Alzaldua that he was walking around in the kitchen "at his own risk" and that Hickey had failed to warn Alzaldua of "the dog's propensity of lying in certain areas."

1996 - This summer in Putney, Vt., Honey Loring expects 400 people will enroll in her two-week, $1,300 camp for dogs and their owners. At Camp Gone to the Dogs (now in its sixth year), there is doggie square-dancing, doggie swimming lessons, and a doggie bathing suit pageant and costume parade, as well as traditional classes in Frisbee-catching.

1996 - In December, Independence, Mo., veterinarian R.D. Holder performed the first testicle implant on a dog when he inserted FDA-approved Neuticles into a 110-pound rottweiler. Holder and Gregg Miller had invented the implants so that male dogs that have been neutered could still walk around with testicles after the surgery. (Miller said he got the idea when he saw how "frightened" his own dog looked when he returned from being neutered.)

1993 - In December, a St. Louis domestic relations judge decreed that a divorcing couple, Tony and Carla Julius, were each entitled to custody of one of their two dogs, but that each Sunday the dogs must play together for four hours with Tony and four with Carla.

1991 - A treadmill for dogs, "Jog-A-Dog," is on the market, with models starting at $1,395, to allow dogs to run in place in the privacy of their own homes.

1995 - According to a September Los Angeles Times article, the Park Bench Cafe in Huntington Beach, Calif., recently became perhaps the first restaurant in America to offer its diners a menu for their dogs. Items for the couple dozen dogs that might accompany their owners to dine on a good day range from a plate of five dog biscuits (50 cents) to a ground turkey patty (called a Wrangler Roundup, priced at $2.25). Dogs are leashed, sit on the floor, and eat from disposable plates.

1994 - In a report in a recent issue of Audubon magazine, Ursula Garza de Garza of the border town of Matamoros, Mexico, mentioned that her dogs no longer have a flea problem. "We grab the dogs and stick them in the canal (that connects several Matamoros chemical companies), and the fleas are gone. All the hair falls off, too, but gradually it comes back."

1997 - In October, Annie Wald and a partner opened Total Dog, Los Angeles' first canine fitness center. For a fee of up to $800 a year from owners too busy to walk their dogs, the pooches work out on treadmills, in swimming pools and on an obstacle course, and massages are available.

1996 - Thieves broke into a commercial meat freezer in Spring Valley, Calif., in March and are still at large but are not being pursued as a high priority. The freezer is located equidistant behind two buildings. The thieves undoubtedly thought the freezer belonged to a restaurant and that they were stealing frozen steaks for resale; in reality, it belongs to the restaurant's next-door neighbor, the Paradise Valley Road Pet Hospital, which reported nine euthanized dogs missing.

1997 - In the British elections in April, the usual fringe parties were in evidence, such as the Blackhaired, Medium-Build Caucasian Party, but the longest-standing alternative, the Monster Raving Loony Party, ran the most candidates. Its main platform plank this year was to tow Britain 500 miles into the Mediterranean Sea in order to improve the country's climate, and 50 other MRLP candidates for various offices made proposals such as requiring dogs to eat phosphorescent food so that pedestrians could more easily avoid stepping in their poops.

1995 - In July, according to U.S. News & World Report, a federal agency that helps administer the Americans With Disabilities Act told a disabled employee who uses a Labrador guide dog that he could not bring the dog with him to work because a co-worker suffers from a fear of dogs.

1994 - Latest Men Bite Dogs stories: In August, an assault suspect in Simi Valley, Calif., was charged with biting a police dog. A month earlier, in Auckland, New Zealand, another suspect was charged with biting off part of the ear of a police dog. In August, in Kelowna, British Columbia, a man was convicted of biting his pet pit bull and sentenced to 40 hours of community service. But in Bytow, Poland, in July, a dog stepped on his master's shotgun, engaging the trigger, and sent about 60 pellets into the man's body.

1995 - In a four-student, Davidson College class project reported in November in The (Charlotte, N.C.) Observer, an Australian terrier named Willie starred in an experiment in which the students sprayed a synthetic dog-scent chemical on stakes, hoping to see how often dogs would urinate on the scent. Willie, who is legendary because he has been known to urinate dozens of times on a single stroll through the neighborhood, correctly hit three of the five marked stakes but also hit two of the unscented ones.

1994 - A Wall Street Journal feature in June reported on British executive Jim Rose, the manager of a new line of pet food for Britain's Safeway Stores PLC. Although Safeway Stores use a "test panel" of 2,000 dogs and cats, Rose nonetheless carefully tastes every single product under development, as well as competitors' products, leading his wife to refer to him affectionately as "dog breath." A spokesman for rival Ralston-Purina said, "We don't use humans to test pet foods."

1996 - Newsweek reported in January that Dr. Soraya Juarbe-Diaz of Cornell University is developing a kitten personality test to help prospective owners, eliciting cat responses to 13 stimuli, including prolonged petting, various toys and the sight of dogs.

1991 - Wayne Lewis, 24, a 475-pound man from Miami, was arrested at the Tallahassee, Fla., airport for possession of cocaine when he was identified by drug-sniffing dogs. During a search, police found nothing and began to suspect the dogs had defective noses, but on closer inspection, they found nearly 11 pounds of crack cocaine hidden in the folds of Lewis' stomach.

1992 - British scientist Andrew Tomkins, in a letter published in an August medical journal, wrote that his studies showed that the food dogs and cats receive in the more developed parts of the world is more nutritious than the food supplied to human refugees in the world's trouble spots. He called for, at least, parity.

1994 - According to the annual Firearms Discharge Assault Report of the New York Police Department, disclosed by New York Newsday in June, city officers fired 155 shots at dogs in 1993 (mostly pit bulls), scoring hits 72 percent of the time. However, of the 1,195 shots at human perpetrators, the success rate was only 19 percent, and in gunfights in which the target was less than three feet away, the officers' success rate was still only 29 percent.

1991 - In the spring, California veterinarians waged a vigorous campaign (which critics say included bribery) to persuade the state Assembly not to change a law that makes it illegal for anyone other than vets to brush a dog's teeth. The bill would allow owners and dog groomers to perform the brushings. The Assembly postponed consideration of the bill while it investigated the bribery allegations.

1992 - Nippon Crown Co. recently introduced a $17 compact disc of specially composed "cheerful but serene (New Age) music" for dogs and cats stressed out by their hard-working Japanese owners. The selections, tested for effectiveness on more than 100 pets, are slow and calm for dogs, bouncier and more rhythmic for cats (containing such sounds as buzzing flies).

1992 - Among the award-winning stories at the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association awards in May was one from the Austin American-Statesman, reporting a plan by city officials of Rollingwood, Texas. The officials planned to spray-paint all dogs that had gotten loose in the city so that owners would call up to complain and could then easily be cited for violating a local law prohibiting their dogs from roaming free.

1991 - Optik Paradies, an upscale eye wear shop in Munich, offers eyeglasses for dogs. A typical pair has three supports and sits on the dog's nose with a band tied round the head. The store claims that some veterinarians have praised the idea of improving dogs' eyesight with glasses and protecting them from the sun. Another use, of course, is to protect the eyes of dogs that stick their heads out of car windows. The store sells about 300 pairs a year for about $150 a pair.

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