Replies

re: “Criminal charges are ridiculous. It isn’t like he abandoned the dog in his back yard. If you go out into rough country, you can find yourself in danger of dying. If a storm was moving in, and he didn’t have the equipment to take the dog out...abandon the dog.”

The dog is “property”, but the dog is different than a bike or a car or other inanimate object - right? The dog is a living creature that can feel pain and starvation. A person can be “cruel” to a bike or a car, but the bike or the car do not experience pain and suffering like a living creature. There is a difference because an animal can feel pain and suffering at the hands of an owner.

I do not blame the owner for making a possible life and death decision to take the younger hiker to safety, and, I do not know, without more information than given in the story, whether criminal charges against the owner are justified. However, he should have checked on the dog as soon as he possibly could to verify if the dog died or survived. To just assume it was dead is a pretty big assumption.

If he had left another person behind because that person was also injured and he could only take one of them, then yes, you make the best decision you can, but then you try like h*ll to get help for the one you had to leave behind. You wouldn’t just assume the one you left died. Even if you did you would still attempt to verify it and try to get all the help you could.

This guy is suspect to me because, at least according to the article, he never even attempted to check on the dog. And, another thing, the dog’s paws were cut to ribbons by the rocks during their original hike and that’s why the dog couldn’t follow them down the mountain - who in their right mind would try to bring their dog on such a hike.

Once you saw the dog was hurting itself on the rocky terrain - that is the point you decide you need to turn back. Even if criminal charges aren’t justified, there is NO WAY he should get the dog back because he’s demonstrated he doesn’t know how to properly take care of the dog.