The story you are looking for is a Hugo-Award-winner called "Allamagoosa"
by Eric Frank Russell. The device is called the "Offdog," you left out the
"d". Also, I was mistaken about Star Prince Charlie being a Hoka novel,
something which I discovered when I came across it recently.
>Here's a poser. I'm trying to think of the author of a short story I
>read in the long ago. It was called, I think, "The Offog". A starship
>captain and his crew, resting on a far-flung planet, are suddenly
>ordered by earth-bound bureaucrats to furnish a complete inventory of
>ship's supplies, hardware, and so forth. All goes well until they
>arrive at the manifest item: "Offog, 1". No one has seen an offog.
>They don't know what it looks like and, worse, can't tell what it's
>value is. In despair, the captain sends a message that the offog came
>apart as a result of stresses incurred during hyperspace travel.
>This, he thinks, will get them off the hook. It turns out that the
>starship has one officially sanctioned four-legged mascot. The
>captain receives an immediate order to suspend all further operations
>until such time as a complete account is given of how the "official
>dog" came apart in hyperspace.
>
>You'd think that with such a detailed memory of the plot I could fish
>up the name of the author, but no dice. Can anyone help?
>
>Vexed and perplexed,
>
>Wayne Daniels
>
>Metro Toronto Reference Library
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