1. Introduction
I realize that I'm publishing this article here of mine on my PEAKD channel inasmuch as I probably would not be able to do so on a traditional writing platform without it being censored. I may even lose subscribers in doing so, but I simply have to get this gripe of mine off my chest.
No, this is not an article about bestiality or anything off the wall of that nature, but it may trigger a number of emotions with its readers inasmuch as many of us have owned a dog at one time or another in our lives or may still own one. In no way am I looking to encourage animal cruelty. However, I have strong reservations about certain laws pertaining to dogs that just don't sit very well with me.
2. A Possible Scenario For You
The first time that I ever had to serve on a jury was when I was living in Los Angeles, California. Throughout the time that I have lived elsewhere, I have never been summoned to jury duty. However, for some reason or another, the court system throughout the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is aggressive about contacting people for jury duty, especially those who work in the public sector.
There may come a day that you will be getting the mail out of your mailbox, and you'll find a letter from your local courthouse, summoning you for jury duty. Of course, you have to follow up on it, because you don't want the police knocking at your front door for evading jury duty. I must admit that I once missed a deadline in responding to such a letter, but, fortunately, one of the court employees got me off the hook.
Anyhow, if you get a letter summoning you for jury duty and you respond, of course, you'll be provided with a date to report to the jury assembly room at the courthouse. Usually, having to go to court can be a scary ordeal. However, you quickly learn that reporting to jury duty is merely a pain in the backside instead. The upside about it is that if you get a parking ticket, usually the court employees will take the ticket to a judge to get it cancelled.
You get assigned to serve on a jury in a particular courtroom. You find out that you will be hearing a case of animal cruelty. During the voir dire, the criminal defense attorney tries to make sure that nobody on the jury has ever been a dog owner.
From the opening arguments of the case, you gather that the defendant is on trial for shooting and killing a neighbor's barking dog after his repeated attempts to get that neighbor to take the dog inside at night while people are trying to sleep. The judge tells you that the only thing that you should be concerned about is whether or not the defendant did or did not kill the dog.
You still know that you and the other jurors are going to evaluate this case on your emotions instead of purely on the laws of your particular state jurisdiction. After all, upon putting yourself in the defendant's shoes, you develop an understanding that perhaps you would have committed the same crime as he did; and it really starts to anger you that the law is not taking the defendant's frustrations into consideration as mitigating circumstances.
The prosecuting attorney will try every trick in the book to get you and your fellow jurors to view the dog as a victim who had no say in the matter. However, you know that if a dog were to keep you awake at all hours of the night and nothing legal could be done about it in an expeditious manner, you'd feel tempted to go outside and put a bullet into that dog's skull to shut it up for good.
The defendant is the sole breadwinner in his household. He works hard for his money to support his wife and three kids. However, once his sleep was constantly interrupted from the endless barking of the neighbor's dog, his work productivity began to suffer as a result. His boss subsequently placed him on a performance improvement plan, which is usually a sign that one is in danger of being fired.
The defendant knew that if he lost his job, chances are he would lose his house as well. So, where would he and his family live? And it would all have been because of a stupid dog that would never stop barking. He even almost got into a car accident, because he was very tired when he was driving to work. It was like an endless torture for him with no way out.
The defendant has spoken to the dog owner numerous times, but the dog owner always tells him that it's not his problem. The dog owner has even gotten belligerent with the defendant, even though the dog owner is the one at fault. The dog owner is a bully, and you can even see that in his demeanor there in the courtroom.
You're thinking in your mind that the defendant should have shot and killed the dog owner too. There would likely have been a whole line of people waiting to spit on the dog owner's grave in that event.
You know that if the defendant is found guilty and is sent to prison, the quality of life for his wife and three kids is going to take a major downward spiral. Somehow it just doesn't seem fair that everything would play out that way all for the sake of some noisy dog that should have been euthanized years ago.
You get into the jury deliberation room, and none of the other jurors have discussed the case with you previously in accordance with the instructions from the judge. It is equally as much of a mystery to you what the other jurors are going to decide as it is for them on what you're going to decide. The jury deliberations proceed.
You decide that you're going to vote for the complete acquittal of the defendant despite that you know for a fact that he is as guilty as guilty gets under the eyes of the law. Some of the other jurors get annoyed with you and tell you that nobody has the right to kill a dog for barking all night.
You stress to the other jurors that you don't want to ruin this man's life and send him to prison for a situation over which he had no control. The evidence and testimony shows that the defendant had phoned the police on a number of occasions to ask them to force the neighbor to take his dog inside, and they stopped responding after so many times. The defendant attempted to ask the dog owner politely to take his dog in at night.
The dog owner was an absolute jerk who deserved to lose a dog to a disgruntled neighbor. You insist to the other jurors that justice will not be served if they find the defendant guilty as charged. Also, you feel that perhaps this decision to acquit the defendant will send a message out to other dog owners to take heed to what their neighbors tell them whenever their dog barks incessantly during most people's hours of repose.
Eventually, a few of the other jurors see the reasoning behind your logic, and they decide to follow suit with your decision to acquit the defendant. Some of them even wonder why the defendant would have even admitted to the police that he shot and killed the neighbor's dog in that nobody saw him doing it.
Those other jurors that finally agree with you understand that it could not have been cheap for the defendant to hire a criminal defense attorney to represent him in this trial and that sending this man to prison would definitely be the kiss of death for him and his family. They all noticed the defendant's wife crying throughout the trial.
After so many hours, the other jurors who appear to be stubborn about acquitting the defendant are starting to get tired and they want this trial to come to an end once and for all. Most of them cave in and decide to go along with you on acquitting the defendant.
There is one holdout in the jury, and she emphasizes that she cannot understand why anyone would shoot and kill a dog or any living creature. The other jurors convince her that this was not her dog that the defendant shot and killed, but it was an irresponsible dog owner's animal instead. She cites one of the Ten Commandments that say "Thou Shall Not Kill." However, some of the jurors are either atheists or agnostics and couldn't care less about what the Bible has to say about anything.
All of the jurors finally agree that it would not be in the interest of justice for there to be a hung jury. The one juror who has held out throughout most of the jury deliberations finally decides to follow the herd and vote to acquit the defendant of all criminal charges. The concept of jury nullification ultimately prevails in this matter.
The courtroom goes back into session, and the jurors take their original places there. The jury foreman reads the verdict and announces that they have found the defendant NOT GUILTY of all charges. The defendant's wife and kids begin crying and hug their father now that they are certain that he will not be going to prison.
Meanwhile, the dog owner goes berserk and charges at the defendant, screaming that he is going to kill him. The bailiffs restrain him and haul him out of the courtroom in handcuffs on a number of criminal offenses.
After you are home, you see on the evening news that the dog owner had to be locked up in a psychiatric ward. Eventually, he has to be locked up in an insane asylum.
You begin to question why the dog owner didn't simply take his dog in at night whenever the defendant complained to him about the dog keeping him awake through the night. Then again, there is a saying that goes that you never know how someone is going to act about their dog.
There is an entire community of people on YouTube that hate dogs. Below is a video from one of them.
A YouTuber Bashes All Dogs In His Video
I don't deny that dogs are a man's best friend. However, I absolutely refuse to accept that dogs have more rights than humans do. The above-described imaginary trial is a scenario in which we, as a society, have to take the bad over the worse.
No, I don't like the idea of someone shooting and killing their neighbor's dog or harming one in any manner. At the same time, I understand that there are unusual situations that make such drastic measures inevitable.
3. My Sentiment About Dogs
I don't want anyone who is reading my article to believe that I condone animal cruelty or that I like the idea of someone killing a dog needlessly. I am not that person.
In fact, I have been a dog owner twice in my lifetime, and losing both of my dogs was among the most tragic events in my life. My first dog, Scarlett, died in a freak accident. My second one, Heather, was hit by a car and killed. These were the two events in my life when I wish I had some way of traveling backward in time to prevent these tragedies from occurring.
The first time that I ever heard the song titled "Shannon" by Henry Gross, it brought tears to my eyes. If you have never heard that song, it is in the video below.
The Song Titled "Shannon" By Henry Gross
When I was in middle school, I watched an Italian film titled Umberto D. on PBS. In that movie, an elderly man was trying to find a home for his little dog named Flag, but he was having no real luck in doing so. Eventually, he thinks about throwing his dog in front of a train, but he doesn't do it at the last minute. Flag is whimpering and crying in fear from what almost happened to him.
Toward the end of the film, the elderly man is chasing after his dog. The dog ultimately forgives him for what he almost did. That scene touched my heart in a way that almost made me cry. I hugged my dog, Heather, afterwards and never took her for granted ever again.
I used to like to watch horror movies. There was this one film titled Theatre of Blood in which Vincent Price tricks a British man into eating his two poodles. Then Vincent Price and his henchmen asphyxiate the man. I never cared much for that scene in that movie.
4. The Reality Of Incessant Barking
I have never liked the idea of someone killing a neighbor's dog after a situation with its incessant barking through the night becomes hopeless. At the same time, I am well aware that sometimes desperate situations call for desperate measures. At the end of the day, I don't feel that dogs should have more rights than humans do in such situations.
Whenever a dog owner leaves his or her dog outside all night to bark and irritate others insofar as it drives a neighbor into killing the dog to get their peace and quiet back, I don't believe that the person who killed the dog should be arrested for animal cruelty but rather the dog owner instead. It only takes a few seconds for a dog owner to open up their backdoor and let their dog inside the house.
If a dog owner feels that they cannot keep their dog inside their house throughout the night, then they should be obligated to find it a different home. The reason that the United States has so many people on welfare could be that the criminal justice system is forcing these ridiculous laws down their throats that make them unemployable after they feel compelled to take matters into their own hands with dogs that never stop barking. These laws direly need to be changed, period.
If any animal-rights activists plan on lecturing me down below in the comments section, I would prefer that they stop typing. When I was living in Los Angeles, a report came through on the evening news about a man who beat a dog to death after it attacked and disfigured his 5-year-old son. The dog owner never tried to stop him, because he probably knew that man would have come after him also with his baseball bat.
The man had beaten the dog so senseless that people could hear it screaming in pain from miles away. The dog owner refused to give any interviews to the press or the media inasmuch as he knew he could not have done so without making an absolute fool out of himself on camera.
During that news piece on television, an animal-rights activist went running her mouth about how she felt that the man who beat the dog to death should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Yeah, right. She probably thought that speech up while she was chomping on a cheeseburger like the typical hypocrites that many of these animal-rights activists are.
5. Final Thoughts
If you've ever been in a situation in which a neighbor leaves their dog outside barking all night and it has had an adverse impact on your health and quality of life, then you probably understand where I'm coming from with this article. I know that I was very unhappy not too long ago when this one neighbor of mine left his dog out barking until five-thirty in the morning.
Most dog owners are responsible individuals, but there are still way too many of them that are certifiable head cases. For this reason, the laws should make it easier for their dog to be taken away from them whenever they leave it out barking all night along on an ongoing basis.
I once read a discussion thread on the Internet in which people were discussing about when it becomes okay for a neighbor to take the law into their own hands after exhausting every legal avenue to stop a dog from barking through the night. There was one dog owner who threatened that he would kill anyone who ever harmed his dog. Hmmmm. Perhaps whomever he tries to kill will off him first, and then everyone will have reason to celebrate.
The elephant in the room here is that whenever a neighbor kills a dog that barks through the night and he or she gets away with it, these deplorable dog owners won't necessarily learn any kind of lesson. I once read an article in which a neighbor falsely accused a woman of killing her noisy dog, and then the dog owner yelled that she was getting three pitbulls to drive everyone in the neighborhood she could crazy.
A major solution to this problem would be for police to arrest anyone who adopts a dog without getting a dog license and also for elected officials to set very high standards for anyone to obtain a dog license. Then the problem with noise nuisances caused by dogs would go away quickly. I guess that if we cannot like all humans, then we cannot like all dogs no matter how much of animal lovers we are.
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