Yes

by Rachael Joseph

Created on: August 22, 2009   Last Updated: August 23, 2009

Penalties for animal cruelty should absolutely be more severe. I worked as a veterinary technician for fifteen years and this is one of the reasons I am no longer in the field. More than half of my career as a technician was spent in emergency rooms and some of the things I am going to share may be shocking.

One evening working the overnight shift at an emergency hospital, a Labrador came in with a ruptured spleen. The dog was bleeding out internally and required numerous transfusions and an immediate splenectomy to save its life. What could have ruptured this dog's spleen? As it turned out, this black lab was a little too happy to see his owner when he arrived home from work and without the proper training, was jumping up and down with excitement at seeing his favorite person enter the front door. Rather than pet Fido after a long and frustrating day or simply walk away from the dog who adored him but was being a tad boisterous, the dog's owner delivered a sharp kick to the abdomen that ruptured his spleen. Can you imagine the force of the kick that could rupture a young, healthy animal's internal organs? What's worse is that after the corrective surgery, we had to let the dog go home with the same owner who put him there. Had it been up to me, our state laws would have allowed us to call the police and toss this guy in jail for what he'd done, require him to take anger management courses and re-home the dog with an owner who would never lay a finger on him.

Another shift in a different emergency room, a husky covered with blood from snout to tail arrived. He was non-responsive. His owner had decided the dog needed to lose some weight and tied him to the rear bumper of his car for a little exercise. When the dog could run no more, the owner either didn't notice or didn't care that he was dragging his husky from the rear of his car. When the dog's skin had nearly slipped his body, he brought him to us. There was no surgery or procedure that could fix this poor, tortured animal who had just been through hours of hellish suffering and at least we were able to humanely euthanize him. The owner walked out the door without paying the bill. He probably wanted to save his money for a new dog, this is a regular pattern.

The worst cruelty and neglect case I'd ever seen came only weeks later when a neighbor brought in a dog she thought was dead. When she went into the neighbor's yard to check on the matted, emaciated cocker spaniel, it took a breath. She brought it in to us as a good Samaritan and tried to help us contact the owners-a couple of Realtors who were out of town for a convention. They had left the pet they'd adopted and were supposed to be responsible for tethered in the backyard, without food or water in the summer heat. The dog's blood sugar was so low it wasn't compatible with life and as I began to shave the dog's leg to place an IV catheter, I noticed maggots crawling out of every orifice. They were coming out of the eyes, nose and anus of the dog. This poor cocker spaniel was literally being eaten inside out. I called the police and they arrived shortly to take photos. We infused dextrose to raise the dog's blood sugar but he wouldn't eat and again, there was no saving this poor, neglected animal. All we needed was a verbal phone authorization from the owner to two separate hospital employees to put this dog to sleep. The owner learned the police were present and continued to play games with us, prolonging the suffering of the animal. We couldn't move the dog without causing intense pain so all we could do was give him large doses of pain medication and pray the owner would give us the authorization we needed for legal reasons as soon as possible. This owner let us all watch the dog live, being ingested alive for hours before we finally got our verbal consent to euthanize the cocker spaniel. Veterinary professionals rarely cry but in this situation, we did and so did the police. The couple was summoned to court and ordered to pay a small fine for what had happened that day. He had a new cocker spaniel by then.

Ideally, there would be a system that not only punishes these neglectful, abusive owners with jail time but also prevents them from getting new pets. They need to be ordered to take some sort of animal husbandry course through their local humane society as well. A database needs to be established through breeders, humane societies and pounds that prevents these neglectful people from owning another pet again.

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