Member-only story
PETS
Both Dogs Died After a Week’s Stay at a Boarding Kennel
Is it a crime or just a medical mystery?
A woman just called our law office, trying to find out if she had a case.
She boarded the family’s two dogs, boxers, for a week’s stay while the family went on vacation. The dogs were one-and-a-half and five years old. Not old, not infirm.
When she picked them up, kennel staff told her that the youngest dog had had some diarrhea, nothing unusual, and the older dog seemed fine.
By the next day, the younger dog was dead, and the five-year-old followed the day after that. She said she was out $6,000 in emergency vet bills, not to mention the fact that the family, including her two children, were heartbroken.
The vet said he’d never seen anything like it.
I immediately asked if the bodies had been necropsied (the animal equivalent of a human autopsy). She said no, because that would have meant sending them to Ohio State University and God only knows what that would have cost.
Honestly, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Depending on my mood, I might’ve said, “Well, I’m already $6,000 deep. I want to know what happened to my dogs.”
