Considering how much adoration the world seems to have for cuddly animals, you’d think it would be universally understood by now that you don’t mess with somebody’s pet.
But it seems that doesn’t stop some people from either trying to take an animal that clearly isn’t theirs or trying to get rid of their partner’s pet despite knowing how much that would hurt them.
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After all, as if that sudden separation isn’t painful enough for pet owners, the fact that the animal could be anywhere and in any condition tends to have people assuming the worst.
And yet, we can sometimes find that the culprits aren’t even sorry for the misery they’ve caused when they do something like that. And as one story illustrates, that’s often because they’ve already found a way to justify what they’ve done in their heads no matter how divorced from reality this justification is.
Every day before the incident we’re about to get into, a woman would walk her 21-year-old Akita named Mickey (not pictured) through her neighborhood.
As she explained in a Reddit post , this is usually done without a leash as she had trained him to walk about 10 feet in front of her at the age of nine.
This apparently led her newest neighbors to believe Mickey was a stray until she explained all this to one of them, which she thought settled the matter at the time.
However, that changed after a four day period in which Mickey suddenly went missing. Because she learned something shocking after asking about him door to door.
Because while the wife of the man she had explained her dog’s dynamic to intially offered sympathy, she was forced to come clean when he told her to show the woman the dog she’d “found.”
What the woman learned was that she saw Mickey “wandering” in the woman’s yard, at which point she trespassed, opened the gate and took him away because she claimed she thought he was a stray.
She then told the woman that she gave it to a friend and reluctantly gave her this person’s name and address.
Again, it would have seemed to the woman that the matter had been resolved when she arrived at this friend’s house and got her dog back after conclusively proving it was hers.
That is, until the woman was shown a screenshot of a Facebook conversation claiming that she was in the wrong for wanting her dog back.
Apparently, her neighbor and the friend were saying things like “How would she think taking a dog from a kid is ok?” and “She’s had enough time with him, she should let others have a turn” during this conversation.
As the woman put it “They had manipulated the story so it looked like I took their dog, and there were other moms criticizing.”
Unsurprisingly, this enraged her and she stormed over to her neighbor’s house.
And what followed was a rant that made her wonder whether she was in the wrong for saying it.
Naturally, she felt reasonable in her outrage at the fact the woman took Mickey from her property and stood by her statement of “You’re acting as if he’s a toy people can take turns with!”
But at the same time, she did curse in front of the woman’s children and this fact along with unspecified emotional stress is what the neighbor complained about in a further Facebook message.
As a result, the woman is now wondering if she could have handled the situation better.
And while the community she reached out to considered her reaction reasonable considering the neighbor had just committed an actual crime against her, they were also full of other opinions and advice.
Chief among them was the prevailing belief that the woman should under no circumstances be walking her dog without a leash.
Indeed, people felt strongly enough about this that she continued to receive angry comments on the very update in which she pledged that she would no longer do this.
She was also advised to file a police report, get her dog chipped, and purchase a lock and camera for her yard and she’s since done all of this as well.
All that aside, the bottom line is that nobody was taking the neighbor’s side.
h/t: Reddit
