Wagger.co.uk

Carolin Fabian jokes that the only thing her American Staffordshire terrier Tobias fights for is a place on the couch.

"He’s very calm — he’s happy when he can sleep, eat … go for a bit of a walk when it’s not too hot or raining," said the 35-year-old Fabian.

Sounds harmless. But starting Thursday, Fabian and owners of 11 other breeds known as aggressive "fight dogs" will be under stricter scrutiny: a hotly debated new law requires Viennese and longterm visitors who own such dogs to carry a license proving they can keep their pets in check.

Some say the measure will make public spaces safer, critics call it canine profiling.

The dog magazine "Wuff" tried to make that point in a highly controversial manner — by publishing a flyer that showed a young pit bull wearing a yellow star with the word "bad" inscribed in it, seated next to a labrador puppy. A headline above the two asked: "What differentiates us?" The magazine dropped the yellow star from its campaign after protests from the Jewish community.

Months later, emotions are still running high.

Alexander Willer, a spokesman for Vienna’s main animal shelter, said the list of affected dogs — which includes Rottweilers, pit bull terriers, Mastiffs, and others — was compiled "at random" and has made it harder for abandoned breeds of this kind to find new homes.

"The image of these dogs has hit rock bottom," Willer said, adding that since Christmas, the number of "fight dogs" seeking refuge in the shelter increased from 123 to 170.

"The majority of people who own these kinds of dogs are normal — they aren’t psychopaths," Willer said.

Maybe not — but dangerous incidents still happen, said Valentina Simic, 21, whose young son narrowly escaped an attack by a Rottweiler.

"Dogs are cute and all but if people can’t handle them properly then they shouldn’t be allowed to own them," she said as she sat on a park bench on a recent balmy evening.

Officials estimate that about 2,500 dogs will be affected by the new law in a city where man’s best friend is often spotted snoozing in cafes, riding the subway and sitting outside shops.

If owners don’t comply by this time next year and are caught without a permit, they face fines and could even see their pet confiscated by police.

Is this an indication that breed laws will be tightened up even more across Europe??

German researchers used high-tech infrared cameras to record the movements of dogs missing a fore limb or hind limb as they walked and ran on a treadmill. The tests revealed that the dogs used different coping methods, depending on which limb was missing.

Adjusting to a missing fore limb is more difficult for a dog than dealing with a missing hind limb, for example. Fore limb amputation requires the remaining limbs to undergo careful adaptation to coordinate with each other, a process called "gait compensation." In the case of a hind-limb amputation, the fore limbs continue to act as they normally would in a four-legged dog, so there is little or no compensation strategy.

The difference in compensation strategies may be due to the fact that a dog’s fore limbs carry more body weight than the hind limbs.

The research is slated to be presented Thursday at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Prague.

Update on World’s Ugliest Dog contest:

LOS ANGELES — Princess Abby is missing one eye and a lot of fur. She’s got rabbit ears, a camel’s back and a kangaroo hop. She has mismatched legs, an inverted floppy front foot and a twisted tail.

Add a pile of personality and some unusual dance moves and the 6-pound Chihuahua easily won the title of World’s Ugliest Dog at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma over the weekend. For those very same reasons, she also claimed the heart of owner Kathleen Francis.

"To other people she is ugly, and kids in the neighborhood in the beginning were kind of scared of her," said Francis, 67, who lives in Clearlake, about 110 miles north of San Francisco. "But I think she is beautiful through and through."

Well ,beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.