Posted on 06/27/2012 7:05:01 AM PDT by el_texicano
Emotion overcomes Joy C. McDonald each time she pauses to think about what her future might hold.
She could lose her job, her small rented home and custody of her three children — all because her two little dogs supposedly scared a neighbor’s elderly chicken to death.
According to McDonald, the penned bird apparently suffered a heart attack when her two Chihuahuas barked at it while running loose in their rural Lafayette County neighborhood.
A chicken heart attack?
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
Interesting. My neighbor’s dogs killed two of my chickens. I mean, they had them in their mouths. I just pumped my pelet gun twice and the next time they came up I gave them a shot in the buttox. Didn’t break the skin but scared them. They have not been back. Maybe I should get them to send my neighbor to jail, except I like the guy. Dang...
The woman’s attitude - treating it like a big joke - sure didn’t help. In the country free-roaming dogs killing live stock can be a very big deal. She shouldn’t have hung up on the angry neighbor.
We need to revert to the biblical guidance that the punishment fit the crime. The OT notion, “An eye for eye...” was not savagery, it was an admonishment that the victim could extract no greater toll from the criminal than was done to them. Hence, most matters were handled as civil infractions, with an insult redressed through monetary (or livestock) payment. The problem with our justice system is that ANY conviction, no matter how minor has grave extra-judicial consequences that exceed the infraction. For most people, you lose your livelihood, potentially your home... all the investments you made in life are cancelled because of something as venial as a neighbors frightened chicken. The remedy is to redefine crime as only things that are “criminal”, e.g. acts in which there is an active malicious intent to do harm, and civil infractions as everything else.
Criminal charges seems extreme; but what bothers me is that she apparently had been letting the dogs run loose. Not very neighborly, and not good for her dogs either.
Colonel Sanders would be doing life at a Federal Pen.
FTA....
An irritating bark is part of a Chihuahua’s DNA.
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(paging Captain Obvious)
Good fences make good neighbors.........Robert Frost
Agreed. Grew up on the family farm. It was a never-ending irritant that ppl would dump off their unwanted pets (predominantly dogs) in the country. Packs would develop and sheep were the first to be attacked. Word would get around, and it was open season by the farmers on any “free-range mutts”. I so much hate ppl who do will not take care and control of their pets.
There are few more irritating sounds than the bark of a chi-hooey-hooey.
And they bark all the time, at any movement or lack of movement around them. All the time they bark. And go for your ankles if you are unfortunate enough to be in their presence.
My sympathies are with the chicken owner.
Amen to that.
The ruling class and the enforcement class has lost touch with reality.
Total nonsense.
We’ve become a silly people who live in a silly country and concern ourselves with silly things.
Where I used to live in the outer sticks of GA there was a huge problem with dogs killing livestock. The owners would just let them run loose during the day and they'd form into packs killing chickens, goats and cattle. One friend of a friend came home and found a pack of about 20 dogs in his calf pen along with the heads and a few other parts of two calves. He went into the house get his AR-15 and killed all but two of them. Some of the "neighbors" whose "pets" they were complained to the sheriff (those who were responsible for the most dogs.) I think the one "neighbor" that actually made it to court owned about a dozen of them.
Bottom line was it was treated as a civil matter. the judge ordered him to pay $10 each for the dead dogs, and ordered the dog owners to pay $1000 each for the dead calves. Naturally the trash who owned the multiple dogs couldn't pay, and had nothing against which to place a lien. Funny how they could afford to harbor a pack of dogs.
Yup. And $30 is more than he would have collected if coyotes had gotten there first.
Elderly chicken + yapping chihuahuas = unfortunate consequence
This story reads as if The Far Side came to life.
As she stated in the video, there's no leash law, and being out in the country, she figured the dogs wouldn't get into trouble--especially since together, they weigh less than an average cat.
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