oxen / dachshund

[Mai Kuha]

In one of Sprint's most recent TV ads, the Sprint PCS guy comes to the
rescue of a farmer who had ordered 200 oxen using a low quality cell phone
with static, so the order was misunderstood and 200 dachshund were
delivered. It finally hit me that "200 oxen" and "200 dachshund" aren't just
close, but actually identical in the ad, because the actor playing the
farmer pronounces the first vowel of "oxen" as "ae" (the vowel of "bad"), or
something close to it. Am I hearing that correctly? (These American English
vowels still throw me for a loop after all these years.) ...and if "oxen"
does have "ae", is that an example of a regional feature? possibly the
fronting of the nucleus of "ay", which some researchers include in the
Southern Vowel Shift??

-Mai