Katherine_Edgar
New Member
Our dog got out in September, but we retrieved him and he was not out longer than one to two minutes. My son saw him go into a neighbor's yard and said he jumped on the neighbor (face to face). We got the dog home and did not think there were any problems. Later that day the animal control was on our door step asking if we own a medium sized black dog. Knowing our dog had been out we brought him out and the neighbor did a positive id of our dog. We were informed our dog was being accused of bighting him in the wallet. They told us about the torn pants, but we were never shown these torn pants. He showed us his wallet, but there were no dog teeth marks and the slit looked more like and exact-o knife cut than a dog tooth cut. Also our dog's rabies and license was expired for 4 months (we had lost track of when they expired). We were cited for failure to display rabies, failure to display license, dog at large and vicious animal. We went to court and pled not guilty. Today we had our pre trial and the DA was a complete jerk toward us pretty much short of telling us we were guilty and we should accept blame. He did drop the rabies and license as we did get that corrected immediately. We also took the dog to obedience class which he graduated. The instructor and the store manager both wrote letters commenting on their observations of no aggression in our dog. What we are looking at is dog at large (which we are willing to admit guilt to) and vicious animal (which we are not willing to admit guilt to). When the animal control came, she asked what his breed was, and I stared to tell her his mixes (which are 1/2 black lab, 1/4 Border collie and 1/4 Australian shepherd) but when I said black lab mix, she wrote on the summons German shepherd. She also did not maintain chain of custody of the evidence, so there was no way for us to be able to see for ourselves the "torn pants" and I am expected to just blindly accept what the animal control stated. My feeling is they should be responsible to test the evidence for dog saliva, and then verify the DNA in that saliva match to my dog's saliva to prove my dog indeed bit this persons' wallet. Is there something we can do to protect our dog from being labeled as a vicious dog as well as our family from the chance of losing him to this process?
