Blondie, Beaten, But Unbowed

The swelling in Blondie’s face is going down. She’s drinking water and eating very little. Yesterday she had milk and raw eggs, which she lapped up like a champ.

Today her face hurt badly enough that she didn’t want scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese. She loves cheddar!

I’m guessing the guy who beat her is the new guy living up the hill. Despite all the discomfort Blondie barked and followed this man up the hill. I could hear in her barking that she was pissed off. Knowing her I think the only person she could sustain this much anger for is the man, who beat her. When continued barking outside his house, I knew she was pissed.

People, who beat dogs in the street create what they fear. They create enemies, where the dogs mostly bark, a somebody’s coming bark, they will bark that an enemy approaches.

In this neighborhood most early morning exercisers walk with sticks. One elderly couple, who walk in the morning, carries nothing. The dogs bark, the somebody’s coming bark, and then, as they get close the dogs whine and wag their tails because these people talk to them as they go by.

When will people learn, it’s not respect you get, when you wave a stick. Raise a stick to make an enemy. Bullies never get that.   

Who Beats a Dog Like This?

In the middle of the night somebody beat the shit out of Blondie. The other dogs slept in their beds in the house. I didn’t hear a thing. Dogs bark during the night. I don’t recall the dogs in the house alerting, but that only proves I sleep soundly.

The two inch cut under her eye was minimally swollen, when I first saw it around quarter to four Saturday morning, as I prepared to leave for a meeting of animal advocates in Ponce. The tear on her rear leg didn’t look terrible; a day of sleeping in the house would do it some good.

When I returned home her check looked like a big softball. Her eye seemed pulled to the side with the swelling. She didn’t get up, when I came home.

Shaking, could not hold the camera still.

You can only imagine how shocked and vulnerable I feel. Some cruel sadist crawling the hillside hurt her. Night walkers, men roaming the roads at night looking for opportunity carry a variety of walking stick weapons to use against the dogs, or whatever.

The force of the blow to her face had to be massive to create this much injury. This wasn’t a warning strike; clearly, whoever hit her wanted to hurt her.

In Puerto Rico Law/Ley 154 correlates cruelty to animals with violence towards women and children.  Statistics honor this belief, so this isn’t a comfort.

Ok, here’s the QUESTION:

If someone is attacking or beating a dog on my property, legally, how far can I go in protecting or defending that dog?

Is it the same as if I found somebody beating another human being? Or is it less?