Also appreciate LFF for being a solid pet owner.
To change the tone of this thread entirely, I have a question about a completely different scenario.
We have a couple rescue dogs that we adopted when they were 6-8 weeks old a couple years ago. They are Female/Male littermates from an abandoned litter. We knew nothing of their breed so did one of those pet DNA tests that came back as German Sheppard/Lab mixes, which matches what their appearance and behaviour.
They are great dogs. We take them to dog parks all the time, and they get along with the big dogs/little dogs/aggressive dogs/passive dogs/etc. My step son has a 3 yo daughter who has poked and prodded them and they just take it and cuddle them.
So here is where the story takes a turn. I was out of town a couple months ago. The housecleaners were cleaning our house and my 17 yo son was keeping them locked outside with him on our porch until they were done. They had turned off all the lights, and my son thought they were done, so he brought them inside. Unfortunately the house cleaners (who are independent and I've had for at least 15-20 years) left both the door to the garage and the door from garage to the outside open because they were coming back in for a bag of trash. So the dogs ran straight outside and my son chased right after them and about 100 seconds later found them standing above a 15 yo 20 pound cat with some bloody wounds.
My son got the dogs, and brought them home by the collar. He called me out while I was in NC, and I tried calling my wife and ended up getting her 23 yo son and my son to go over. The cat wasn't there any more but she had a pet sitting business and a phone number on a poster. So they called the number, and we offered to help with any vet bills they have, and do anything they needed.
They talked for a bit and apparently the woman took the cat to the vet, and they said she had minor puncture wounds, and trouble breathing, but they needed to go to the ER.
The women texted back my wife that they decided to bring the cat home because they don't like emergency vets.
And then she texted back a couple hours later saying the cat died in her arms that night and she was so distraught that she couldn't talk for a couple days.
A couple days later she texted my wife that the vet bills were 1472.29 and our dogs also broke their pipes in their crawl space and wanted $300. The pipe damage was almost impossible since this took place in only 2-3 minutes at most and my son saw most of it. I was out of town and wanting to be cooperative so sent her 1800 and hoped there would be no repurcussions to our dogs.
Well, once she got her money, she went all out crazy calling our dogs murderers and blaming them for her outdoor cat deaths before they were born, and saying my son was lying and he was walking them offleash in her neighborhood.
She then went to animal services to try to get them declared as dangerous dogs. Apparently in Virginia, a dangerous dog declaration requires some evidence that a dog has seriously injured or killed a person, dog or cat.
The animal services people came over to tell us that the woman was wanting to pursue these charges. They said that they tried to talk her out of it and she should be appreciative that we paid her bills because that usually doesn't happen, but she still wanted to proceed. The animal services officers told me to get a lawyer and fortunately I have a legal plan through work I can use for a lawyer. Somehow the guy is a fairly accomplished criminal lawyer who had a (human) murder trial lined up next month, so didn't have a lot of time for pre-trial work for us. He got there and did a solid job trying to make our case, but the judge ruled against us. The judge said it was pretty clear by the law that our dogs should be declared dangerous.
At this point the cat owner jumped out of her seat and ran at our lawyer screaming "How can you F'ing sleep at night?" and the bailiffs had to run down the aisle and tackle her and brought her down the aisle out of court while she was still screaming at our lawyer and us.
The law does allow us to appeal it, and we did that in court. As I looked over the law more, there were a lot of inconsistencies on the judgement. The judge proclaimed a lesser burder of proof (since he's a civil court judge), and said there was clear and convincing evidence, but the code for dangerous dog says that it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There are also a couple other clauses that weren't in the summary the judge was looking at the could help our case. And one more section about jury trials being allowed at appeal.
I know that was a whole lot to read, but I've been thinking a lot about AITA.
First of all I feel awful about her cat. Our dogs were likely responsible but have not acted aggressively to another dog or a human in their life and have never been face to face with a cat.
Her having 3 outdoor cats including a very old, overweight cat is not being a responsible cat owner, right? I can understand my dogs chasing cats for fun, but they'd never expect to catch one. Our female dog was missing a patch of fur above her eye after it, so they have just tried to play with it and got clawed and they fought back.
We'll keep pursuing this, but just wanted a sanity check from pet owners to see if we are really as awful as this woman is claiming.
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