Me & Stanley are turning the blog over to mom for a serious thing.
For those of you on Facebook, you heard about this last night . . . I was so angry I was still trembling when the police came.
I was standing in front of our picture window and happened to notice one of the neighbors as she was walking towards her dog pen. She has 2 dogs, a dark brown one and a golden lab named Sadie. The reason we know the lab's name is because her voice carries as she yells "Sadie Sit!" which is immediately followed by a tirade of "bad dog". They got Sadie as a pup maybe just less than 2 years ago. The dark brown dog, I will call Brownie, was already an adult.
The dogs were jumping around as she approached the dog pen. She walked to one side and then another, then repeated. Her posture told me she was not happy about something though I could not tell what the problem was. She backed away and retrieved a watering wand from the yard (attached to a hose already). She immediately starts spraying Sadie, drenching her and then focusing on her face. Sadie retreated into the dog house to get away from the water so then the woman just sprays directly into the dog house. After several minutes, she stopped spraying the water and as soon as Sadie would poke her head out of the dog house she would turn the water on, right in Sadie's face.
This went on long enough that my gut was churning. Then she goes in the pen, grabs a chain, clips it on Sadie's collar and starts wailing on Sadie. I had a good view of this since I had grabbed the binoculars. It was sickening. I immediately rushed out our deck door and screamed at her "Stop hitting that dog!" She stopped and marched straight into the house. About 10 minutes later she came out of the house, walking through the yard closest to me, and took Sadie to the front and into the garage. Minutes later the woman walked out her front door. I don't know what the purpose of putting Sadie in the garage was but the woman didn't stay there with her very long.
As this unfolded, I called police dispatch. It was in the evening so the dispatcher said she would have a police officer call me and it would be referred to Animal Control in the morning. She asked me a few more questions then changed her mind and said she was sending out an officer. About a minute before the officer came to our house, a vehicle backed out of the woman's garage. I couldn't tell who was in the vehicle.
The officer who responded ironically used to be our Animal Control officer. I knew him from working on the Dog Park. He came in the house and looked out our window as I explained what happened. He said he would make contact with the woman and then have Animal Control follow up. He said if no one was at the house he would come back again because he was on duty until 2am. We talked for some time.
After he left I watched him pull up to the woman's house and knock on the door. No one answered so he parked a few houses away and waited awhile before leaving. Soon after it got dark. The car came back. I don't know if the officer made contact with her or not but I believe he would do as he said.
So today (Tuesday) Brownie is the only dog in the dog pen. I don't know if Sadie is in the garage, gone, or what. I will update if I find out anything more.
