From A Recent Newspaper Article:
Prosecutors have charged this pet owner’s landlord, a 65-year-old woman, with two felony counts of animal cruelty, saying she nearly beat this tiny dog to death with a tree branch in the backyard of her four-plex, then left him in a cinched garbage bag inside her car's trunk overnight, before attempting to dump him in a park.
"She just didn't like him," said a Police Detective, normally tasked with murder and robbery investigations. "She didn't really express why."
The landlord lives on one end of a tidy row of four attached apartments. The dog loving family lives on the opposite end, sharing a fenced backyard with her and the other tenants.
About 6 a.m. one recent morning, the family bundled up the kids and hustled out the door. The father let their two dogs out in the yard, as he does every morning.
Only when they returned home that evening about 8 p.m., did the family discover that they hadn’t let their two dogs back in.
They quickly found their Chihuahua in the yard, but no Miniature Pinscher. They asked the neighbors, who claim they saw nothing.
The dog owner suddenly remembered seeing his landlord unloading groceries. He thought it odd that she darted back inside as they pulled up, leaving some of her bags on the stoop.
After circuitous conversation, the landlord told him that she had "disposed of the dog." Incredulous, he asked what had happened. She simply asked how much the dog was worth to him, and walked away a few minutes later.
He called the police, but the landlord would not answer the officer's knock. The officer took a theft report and left, advising the family to check with local animal shelters.
The family glumly packed up for another day of work the next morning, but the man lasted less than an hour at work before realizing he was too preoccupied to last the day.
So he drove home, checking with animal shelters and canvassing the neighborhood in search of his missing dog.
He stopped at a gas station about 2 p.m. Before filling up, he saw his landlord’s car drive past, heading east. He jumped in his car and followed her up the hill to a trailhead for a regional park.
He now horrifically watched her don rubber gloves. "She opened the trunk. I saw a green recycling bin with a plastic bag in it."
He called out to her, and she immediately closed her trunk, got back in her car, and drove away.
He followed her, on a looping, half-hour chase through the region, on the phone with police dispatchers most of the way.
Eventually, she parked in a rear lot at a medical center, and walked inside.
Police arrived, and received permission from their supervisors to open her trunk. Inside the twist-tied plastic bag, they found this man’s nearly lifeless little dog.
The man rushed his dog to an emergency veterinarian, whose preliminary report indicated "malicious head trauma and attempted suffocation" as the source of the dog's trauma.
The family spent thousands of dollars to keep the dog alive, but took him home against the vet's advice because they've sadly run out of money.
The family still doesn't know the extent of their beloved little dog’s neurological damage. He is at least partially blind, and he no longer barks. His tail wagged feebly, for the very first time, last Wednesday.
You Can’t Even Trust Your Own Landlord, These Very Sad Days. Animal Cruelty is Definitely, On The Rise.
Please Safeguard Your Own Pets; You Never Know Who Wants To Do Them Harm.
AM
Georg
Anna
Blessings! Jasmin Horst