Linwood Woman Wants Justice After Puppy Shot by Neighbor

LINWOOD, Neb. -Alyshia Czarnek and her 5-year-old daughter did not even have their dog Link for a year, when they got the bad news from a neighbor on Sunday morning. "(She) came over to let us know that our Husky puppy had actually been shot and killed," says Czarnek. What we know is Link, who was eight months old and around 40 pounds, broke out of the yard and wandered over to a nearby chicken coop. A man then found his chickens dead and Link soon suffered the same fate. When the man was confronted by Czarnek, he told her he had no choice. "(He said) my dog, which was no taller than my knee, and walked on three legs because he had a bad back leg, had somehow chewed through a metal fence and killed 30 adult chickens and then tried to attack him," says Czarnek. Czarnek says when she went over to retrieve her dog, she didn't find him lying on the ground, instead, she located him in a trash can. "Pets to me are family, like you basically threw somebody's child to me, in my mind, in the trash, like he didn't mean anything," says Czarnek. Czarnek also questions that her puppy killed the chickens, saying there were other factors involved that night. "The night before, it was negative-20 with wind chill, it's possible they could have froze to death. There's also a fox den that's literally three blocks from this house," says Czarnek. The man, who was not home when News Channel Nebraska reached out on Thursday, may not even need the self-defense argument, state law says if somebody believes they have "just and reasonable ground" that a dog has been killing their domestic animals, they can take the dog out. "There needs to be a lot more animal cruelty laws than there are," says Czarnek. Butler County Sheriff Marcus Siebken tells NCN all possible criminal matters are being handled by the county attorney. Also, he says his deputies can't enforce a Linwood city ordinance that bans firing guns in city limits, because his office is not contracted with the village to enforce their ordinances.