I see many of these postings every week on Facebook, and although I don’t know the person in question, I can totally empathise with the horror of a pet going missing. I know what the gnawing, empty, sickening feeling is like when you discover your dog is gone. It rises from the pit of your stomach, before exploding in a tsunami of anguish, self-recrimination and raw panic.
But this wasn’t a story of carelessness or thoughtlessness or even an unfortunate accident. Amidst the owner’s frantic cries for help upon discovering Ava was missing, a fast thinking neighbour thought to view some CCTV footage that they were lucky enough to have available to them. It revealed that Ava had not escaped or just wandered off. A hooded man had grabbed her, bundled her into the back of a white van and driven away.
This in itself is nothing new. It seems now that every week my dog-loving friends cross-post appeals for assistance with finding animals that have been dognapped by evil bastards who are obviously careless to the heartache and agony they cause. Its seems to be an epidemic of growing proportions in the UK, and probably elsewhere.
The dogs taken are not necessarily extraordinary. They don’t have to be. The likely destiny that awaits them is as ‘bait dogs’ for ‘training’ those of their kind who are forced into servitude in illegal dog-fighting rings. The mildest mannered and gentlest of family pets are literally torn to pieces to give the ‘fighters’ a taste for blood and something of a work out. It’s the equivalent of a sparring match for a boxer, with infinitely more horrific outcomes.
The theft of the unwitting canines is a particularly vile and egregious one, and those who perpetrate the crimes must be unusually despicable and abhorrent specimens of human beings. Stealing inanimate objects is one thing. But stealing a living, breathing creature with emotions and feelings and a life of its own, is something else.
Consider the levels at which their crimes impact:
The dog itself is stolen away from its owners and everything that is familiar.
It likely suffers physical pain in the ‘snatch’ process.
Then it must endure a mounting swell of emotions, moving rapidly from confusion, to anguish, to fear, to terror, in minutes.
At best, it might be sold to somebody who keeps it as a pet, at which point it is likely that it still has to go through extreme stress, remorse, pining, and heartbreak. It may recover over time, but if it loved its former owners, it will not forget them and always be damaged by the experience.
At worst, it will undergo a prolonged, vicious assault and excruciating pain before meeting an horrific end.
The owners must endure the mental equivalent.
After the mind-scrambling experience of the initial discovery, they may suffer days, weeks and months of gut-wrenching uncertainty, fighting desperately to maintain the hope that their loved one will be returned.
They will search for countless hours; put up ‘Missing’ posters; blitz social media; make endless phone calls; try to enlist the help of every friend and acquaintance they ever had; harass the traditional media; make (probably fruitless) appeals to law enforcement; be teased by (unintentional) false sightings; go through crashing low-points and depression; experience tantalising moments of bitterly unrewarding hope; be plagued by dreams that torment them; feel waves of remorse, guilt, anger and despair.
If they are finally able to come to terms with what has occurred and accept that their dog is never coming back, they will never lose their lingering sadness and their regrets will haunt them. They will pine for their lost loved ones, and periodically, tears will flow with a grief that cannot be assuaged.
In short, they will never get over it until they day they die.
The bastards that did this will seldom be caught. If they are, the law will not punish them in any way that is proportionate to the crime they have committed. Their sentencing will be lighter than if they had made off with someone’s (infinitely replaceable) DVD player.
Yet the wake that is left from the crime they have committed will endure in a way incomprehensible to those who have not loved and cherished a stolen dog. It is an offence of a magnitude that is not yet acknowledged by any legal system the whole world over. Why? Because the lives of any creatures that are not human don’t yet really matter.
Legislation to change this aberration is slow in coming and meets strong opposition. To accord animals rights has implications for all the powerful lobbying industries that still need to subjugate helpless creatures. And it also has implications for how we treat ‘farmed’ animals.
It is with considerable relief that I can tell you that this particular story has a happy ending.
Ava’s owner was fast, forceful and very proactive in seeking to get her dog back. Perhaps thanks to the power of social media (almost 35,000 shares regarding Ava’s plight on Facebook or maybe the $2,000 ‘no-questions-asked’ reward that was offered) Ava was found 80 miles away from her home, tied to a tree.
She is now safely at home and needless to say, her owner vows never to let her out of her sight again. Her owner has been spared many of the unspeakable tortures that she could have been through. And so, mercifully, has Ava.
But whilst we continue to allow a laissez faire attitude towards the wellbeing of animals, evil bastards like the ones who took Ava can continue to act with relative impunity. If we seek to put in place measures that will truly act as a deterrent to the evils that men do, it is a time for a change that will have implications for all of us. And we need to accept that.