Monday, September 24, 2018

September 24, 2010: the day they took Brindi for the second time

Eight years ago today was the last time I saw my dog Brindi alive. Only 10 weeks earlier I had finally managed to get her away from the clutches of the city’s rogue animal control officers and the SPCA, where she was locked up for two years and held without contact to other dogs, me, our vet, or our trainer. On the 14th of September, a strange incident happened that – just as the first time they took her – resulting in no significant harm to anybody, human or canine. But just as in 2008, that fact wasn’t going to stop the animal control people – most prominently, one Lori Scolaro – from taking yet another shot at killing my dog. 

I can’t even talk about what happened in the period between the 14th and the 24th; as it is, telling any of this sets off triggers that are painful and unbearable enough to send me into depths of despair. Suffice it to say that, realizing from minute the incident on the 14th happened that Scolaro and Co. would be after us, I tried and failed to keep Brindi safe from harm, and can barely live with myself today because of that alone, not to mention what transpired the years before and since. 

On September 24, 2010, sometime around 6 pm, a rookie animal control officer, eager to please her murderous supervisor, busted into my home with the aid of an overzealous RCMP officer. She found Brindi in the only hiding place I could think of at the moment – I later kicked myself for not thinking of the upstairs knee-wall – leashed her and put her into one of the closed, airless metal compartments of the animal control truck. Not long afterwards, Scolaro made sure to send me, along with bogus paperwork, her intake photo of Brindi, muzzled and looking absolutely terrified and traumatized. One look at that photo and I burst into sobs and screams. I've posted it here and on Facebook, but I still can barely handle the sight of it. 

Photos were all I had of Brindi from 2010 to 2012. The last photos I saw were in local media, sometime in January 2016. Since then I haven't seen Brindi in person or in a photo. Nobody else has either, at least as far as I know.