The Ugly

Last Thursday my next door neighbor came home for lunch and on her way into her house stopped to talk to me as I was working in my yard . We talked a bit and then she asked me if I had heard about Scooby. Scooby is the chocolate lab who lives at the other end of the block. I said no and she said Scooby had died earlier in the week. I could not believe what I was hearing. Scooby was five-years-old and the idea that she had died stunned me. I asked my neighbor what had happened and she said Scooby and her son Tank and been shot and Tank was now up at the Vet clinic badly hurt.

Scooby and Tank, so named because he is a big lug of a dog, had got out of their yard and traveled across town to the yard of a man who lived behind the bus barn just east of the high school. This man had a chicken coop and Scooby and Tank dug their way into it and killed six seven-week-old chickens. The man found them and stepped into the coop with a .22 pistol. He shot Scooby three times and Tank once. When he was done he called the Sheriff. When asked why he had done it he said it was because the chickens were his daughters pets. The Sheriff called Scooby and Tank's owner. When "Dave" got there Scooby was dead and Tank bleeding heavily. The Sheriff took Scooby's body and buried her while Dave rushed Tank up to the Vet Clinic.

First of all, as two women who I talked to about this said, no one around here raises chickens as pets. Second, he did not have to shoot the dogs. He could have blocked the hole the dogs had dug trapping them and then called the Sheriff. Third, this man is an heartless SOB. He is know for shooting any cat that is unlucky enough to be on his property. Lastly, he shot the dogs because he knew he could get away with it. There is no law against shooting any animal that is trespassing on your property if your property is outside the town limits. His house is at the edge of town.

Later, the same day I heard of Scooby's death, I saw Dave out in his side yard and went down to his house to talk to him. When I got closer I was delighted and surprised to see Tank. It turned out that Tank was not hurt as badly as I had been told. The bullet had gone through his back leg without hitting the bone and he was doing fine. I knew Dave would be devastated by the loss of his dog and so I was not surprised when he told me had cried off and on for the previous three days. He said the it had been hard telling his two boys that Scooby had been killed. He was still dazed by it all and could not understand why the man had shot his dogs. He told me that he would have gladly paid for the chickens. He was really having trouble understand how someone could shoot a dog over some chickens and blurted out, " A chicken brain is nothing like a dog brain."

Scooby left behind eight puppies. She was still feeding them before she died and Dave had been worried that they would not be able to make the change to baby formula. Fortunately the puppies took to the formula without any problems. Having the puppies there is making the loss of Scooby a little easier for his boys. He told them that they could pick whichever one of Scooby's puppy they wanted to keep. Out of the five black and three chocolate brown puppies they picked one of the chocolate brown ones. She looks just like Scooby.