The awful day my dog killed Snowy the Chihuahua

The awful day my dog killed Snowy the Chihuahua: With those doleful eyes, Clover was no vicious American Bully dog… But here, SHONA SIBARY tells a cautionary tale every owner should heed

• ‘It seems barely a week goes by without hearing of another horrific dog attack’

The panicked commotion outside the cafe where I had popped in to grab a coffee was frenzied and impossible to ignore. ‘Get water!’ a man was yelling.

Standing at the till paying for my cappuccino I could see that a crowd of people had gathered and one woman was on her knees on the pavement sobbing.

‘I wonder what’s going on?’ the server commented, handing me my change. As I moved towards the exit, I had one of those freefall moments you get in life where it suddenly hits, and you know with a visceral certainty, exactly what is going on.

With a rising feeling of horror, I saw my dog, Clover, sitting where I’d left her, but then I clocked her lead lying on the ground, snapped in two. Next to her was an inconsolable woman cradling a dying dog in her arms. A tiny Chihuahua who was bleeding his last on the pavement. It took a fraction of a second to put two and two together — my dog had just lunged at it and managed to get to the jugular.

If there was ever a moment in my life when I yearned for the ground to swallow me whole, then this, on a busy market day in Chichester, had to be it.

With those doleful eyes, Clover was no vicious American Bully dog

Today, it seems that barely a week goes by without hearing of another horrific dog attack. As the Mail reports, a West Midlands man was jailed for nearly five years yesterday, after his American bulldogs escaped and killed Lucille Downer, an 85-year-old great-grandmother, in her garden.

The animals responsible for these sorts of deadly attacks usually belong to a breed associated with aggressive behaviour. But Clover wasn’t a stereotypically ‘aggressive’ breed. Any onlookers that day seeking the culprit of this terrible tragedy were probably expecting to see one of the American Bully XL dogs experts are calling to have banned, but certainly not the small, skinny, cocker spaniel/whippet cross that was lurking nearby. With one blue eye, one brown and cute, soft ears that had a tendency to flop forwards, surely she couldn’t be responsible.

Yet what happened will come as no surprise to experts at the Royal Veterinary College in London who, last month, revealed that English cocker spaniels are the most vicious dogs of them all, with aggression almost twice as prevalent as any others in the UK. Their results were down to ‘cocker rage syndrome’, a rare, uncontrollable condition that causes dogs to suddenly flip out.

If I am to be brutally honest, Clover’s ‘flip-out’ on that May morning five years ago wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Stupidly and naively, I brushed her increasingly concerning behaviour under the carpet. It just seemed inconceivable to me that a dog who was so gentle inside the house with humans could turn into a crazed killer when confronted with a Chihuahua on the High Street.

We bought Clover four years previously from a farm in North Devon. She was listed as a whippet/poodle cross and advertised on Pets4Homes, a website I now know has faced a lot of controversy after unscrupulous puppy breeders advertised dogs that have been smuggled into the country, and it carried listings that turned out to be scams.

Still, she was adorable and not expensive. A whippet/poodle cross was a bit of an odd combo, I thought at the time, but who could resist that face? She had a mischievous look that seemed to say, ‘Leave a pack of sausages out on the kitchen counter at your peril’. I withdrew £250 from a cashpoint and drove back to the farm to collect her.

Looking back, I should have paid more attention to some red flags. Stupidly, I had brought along our five-year-old daughter. Anyone who has ever gone to pick up a puppy knows that you can’t walk away empty-handed when you take a child to buy a dog. So, at that stage, I couldn’t have changed my mind, even if I’d wanted to.

There were so many dogs running around on that farm — none of them looked like poodles. I did question the breeder and she mentioned that this particular litter was an ‘experiment’ of her son’s.

We saw the mother — a whippet — as well as dozens of cocker spaniels. I remember thinking: ‘This puppy looks a lot like a spaniel and nothing like a poodle.’ It didn’t really matter to me. As it turned out, it should have done.

We brought 12-week-old Clover home and, on her first night in the house, she ate the entire contents of a Chinese takeaway we had taken our eyes off for a split second.

She was naughty but endearing. As she grew older she developed a habit of bringing shoes, socks and occasionally underpants to welcome guests who came to the house. She loved humans and, at first, other dogs, too.

I was determined for Clover to be well socialised and trained. Every morning we walked Clover with a big group of other dog owners so she could get used to doggy dynamics and become adjusted and friendly.

And she was brilliantly behaved for the first year or so. Then something shifted. Obviously, I’ve racked my brains trying to work out why this was, but all I can recall is that when she was around 11 months old, she was attacked by another dog — as it happened, an older, springer spaniel. Could this have been what triggered her aggressive behaviour or was it simply genetics?

A vet later told me that, in his professional opinion, Clover was definitely a whippet crossed with a spaniel, and it was probably one of the worst crossbreeds you could ever hope to get.

Whippets are bred to run and kill; spaniels to hunt. What you end up with if you mate these two dogs is a running, hunting, killing machine with a ridiculously high prey drive.

As Clover’s hatred of any four-legged creature smaller than her grew, taking her for walks became an increasingly stressful experience. She would snarl and growl, and I would have to quickly clip her back on to her lead.

Clover is pictured with owner Shona Sibary

But really, it was more of a precaution. Never, in a million years, did I ever think our little ‘cock-pit’, as we jokingly called her, would be capable of attacking another dog.

There’s no denying that it lessens the pleasure of owning a pet when you are constantly worrying about taking them outside for a walk. Within the four walls of our home, Clover was a dream. But it was total Jekyll and Hyde behaviour.

Going for a walk with her became a bit like that scene in Silence Of The Lambs when they have to put Hannibal Lecter in a restraint mask when transporting him.

Clover, too, would be muzzled, harnessed and constrained.

I felt so sorry for her. I even seriously considered renting a field where she could be let off the lead to run free without the fear of coming across other dogs.

I consulted several dog behaviourists and took her to training experts. They all said the same thing — she was clearly stressed around smaller dogs. Her aggression was coming from a place of fear and it would require a lot of therapy (and money) to resolve.

I’m aware, even as I’m writing this, that people will think that I’m an idiot for not being able to predict what eventually happened. There’s no getting away from the fact that things had slightly spiralled out of my control.

Still, Clover had never actually attacked another dog until the day in question.

For some reason we left the house that morning without her muzzle. I was in a hurry to get my daughter, Dolly, off to school and, at the crucial moment, I couldn’t find it.

After dropping Dolly off, I wandered down the High Street with Clover attached to one of those retractable and — as it turns out — utterly useless leads. It was a beautiful day and there was a farmers’ market.

In hindsight, it was as if the entire population of West Sussex was present to witness the dreadful event that was about to unfold.

I tied Clover’s lead around a bench on the pavement and secured it with a plastic lock so she was restricted to around two feet of movement. And that’s when I popped into the cafe to grab a coffee.

At that moment a young mother strolled past with a baby in a buggy and her Chihuahua, Snowy. Clover lunged, the lead broke, and the rest . . . well, it haunts me to this day.

Snowy didn’t die immediately. A kind passer-by rushed her to a nearby vet and they operated all afternoon trying to save her life, but her injuries were too severe and she died on the operating table.

The bill came to £800, which we paid. We didn’t have to, but I couldn’t not.

The police didn’t get involved but, even if they had, there is no certainty they would have taken any action.

Apparently, it depends on the circumstances, but there have been decisions in the past by courts and authorities to suggest that it is the nature of a dog to kill and wound small animals. Therefore, in the event of a pet being wounded or killed by another dog, it is not always a given that the police will act. This only happens if the dog was deemed to be ‘dangerously out of control’.

But even without police involvement, I could see just how awful the killing was — so utterly awful that, I’m ashamed to say, there was a moment just after it happened, when nobody knew I was responsible, where it occurred to me that I could just walk away and leave her there, so terrified was I about what was unfolding in front of me. I looked at Clover wagging her tail and she looked at me, and I thought: ‘I love you. But I don’t love you this much.’

But that would have been irresponsible and cowardly, so I braved it out. I faced the crowd of people yelling, ‘Who owns this dog?’, and I fessed up. I handed my mobile number over, then I picked Clover up and drove her to the vet — to be put down.

What else could I do? How could I own a dog who had done this? I would never be able to cuddle her on the sofa at night or love her in the same way after she had killed someone else’s beloved pet.

And what sort of life would Clover have in the future? We’d be so terrified of it happening again she’d effectively be under permanent house arrest.

It was still a horrible decision to have to make. The kindly vet who ended her life comforted me and said he had put dogs down for far less terrible offences.

He explained that Clover could possibly have had a brain tumour that was causing her to behave this way and, most crucially, he said that you can never tell if and when a dog decides to turn. Even the gentlest Labrador can ‘flip’ apparently. Mine is a cautionary tale and one that every dog owner should heed.

It didn’t rain for weeks, and every day I had to walk past a huge stain of blood in the centre of town where Snowy had died.

I felt so wretched for the owner, and was surprised when she called me afterwards — with unbelievable graciousness, she told me not to berate myself. ‘These things happen,’ she said.

It left me feeling even more guilty while, at the same time, desperately missing Clover. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so conflicted.

Today, we now have two Labradoodles — Rupert, who is almost completely blind, and Otto, who looks just like his name, wiry-haired and a bit bonkers. Both are so gentle and loving — with humans and other dogs — that I simply cannot imagine a scenario where either of them would harm a fly.

But I know, from bitter experience, not to be complacent. Dogs are dogs. And we should never take their gentle temperament for granted.

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