‘I don’t want to shoot a dog.’ Woman kills neighbors’ dog after alleged attacks on chickens in Lincoln County
LINCOLN COUNTY, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Avery Haney and Morgan Dean have decided to cremate the remains of their 8-month-old labradoodle, who had to be put down late Easter Sunday. The puppy’s spine was severed by buck shot which peppered his body just a few hours earlier.
Ruger was shot by the couple’s neighbor, Brenda Howard, who claimed that he was among a group of animals who had killed several of her chickens over the past week.
“He had never killed anything in his life,” Dean explained to Queen City News just days after Ruger was killed.
The Lincoln County couple explained that on Sunday morning they had let Ruger and their other dogs out to run around in their front yard.
“It was a nice day,” Haney explained.
Ruger had been dressed in an Easter bandana and had posed for photos before the couple let him out of their site for a split second.
Haney said he began to call for Ruger when he started to walk toward his neighbor’s property line. That’s when he heard the sound of a shotgun going off.
“It was the loudest shot I’ve ever heard,” Dean explained.
Haney claims he found Ruger still alive but unable to move in the middle of his neighbor’s backyard and nowhere near Howard’s chicken pen.
Haney scooped up Ruger and rushed him to multiple vets, one in Denver and another in Charlotte, who determined Ruger’s spine had been severed by one of the buckshot pellets, two of which were still inside of him.
Ruger was ultimately put down late Sunday evening.
Dean described the heartbreak as being unlike anything she’s lived through before, and that she’s upset Ruger was made to suffer on his family day.
“All she had to do was shoot in the air, shoot beside of him,” she said.
When Queen City News spoke with Howard, she shared a different side of the story.
She claimed that she has had multiple chickens killed by animals over the past several weeks, and claims that her home security system has captured this on video.
Some of those animals, she claims, are Dean’s and Haney’s dogs.
However, before Sunday’s shooting, she said she’d asked law enforcement to help establish some sense of boundary to protect her livestock.
She said she had asked them to “Please help me. Please do something about this before it gets bad. I don’t want to shoot a dog.”
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She claims that law enforcement, along with animal control, spoke with the neighbors and later told her that she was within her right to shoot any animals that were on her property and that harmed her or her pets.
“You can’t let them run, you can’t let them destroy other people’s property and kill their animals,” she Howard said.
Sunday morning, she claimed that she witnessed four dogs walk up to her chicken pen, which was captured on a security video she shared with Queen City News.
The five-second clip shows a dog, she claims to have been Ruger.
The video, however, ends before you see any of the dogs attack any chickens or the shooting itself.
Howard explained that Ruger had a chicken in his mouth and growled at her before she ultimately shot him.
“He stayed right there, he would’ve move. So, I shot him.”
Howard is not facing any criminal charges and has offered for local law enforcement to view her security video from the time of the incident.
The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to inquiries for information.
Dean said of her labradoodle: “We have said too many times that we believe he’s not here anymore because he was too good for this Earth.”
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