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No animal should be kept in chains, especially not an innocent dog. But apparently some heartless person decided to put a giant heavy chain around a stray dog’s neck.
It was a sight that broke one man’s heart when he saw the dog — but now this pitbull could inspire a real change in how animals are treated.
Robert Riojas, from Oklahoma City, was at home when he got an alert that someone was on his front lawn. When he went to investigate, he discovered a pit bull… dragging a giant heavy metal chain behind her.
The 30-pound chain was padlocked around the dog’s neck, and Robert could see how much suffering it was causing.
“It’s huge,” Robert told KFOR. “It was so aggressively tight on this dog that it was digging into her skin.”
“I don’t see how anyone can be that cruel, that inhumane, that cold heartedness.”
Since pitbulls have an unfair reputation for being aggressive, it’s possible that someone put the dog in chains thinking he would attack otherwise. But Robert found the dog to be sweet and shy. He and his family pet the dog and gave her treats.
“She was amazing,” Robert said. “Everyone that was walking in, she was licking on them, getting close to them, being friendly.”
Robert could not care for the dog, so he brought her to the Oklahoma City Animal Welfare. But while he couldn’t give the dog a home, he did take steps to ensure no dog would suffer like this again.
He discovered that padlocking a dog like this was legal in Oklahoma, and wanted to change that.
So he reached out to Oklahoma state representative Mickey Dollens with the story, and the politician was equally surprised there was no such law: “I was very surprised and alarmed to find how few laws there are on the books that address animal cruelty in Oklahoma,” he told KFOR.
Dollens is now drafting an animal cruelty bill to address this issue: “There’s no law on the books that says you can’t chain a dog up without a collar, proper tether, and that’s something that we want to address.”
He says that chaining up a dog could lead to suffocation, and encouraged citizens to rescue a dog if they could.
We really hope this law is passed and no dog has to suffer like this again!
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