Devastation

The heading alone will tell you this isn't going to be good.

I've been gone from blogging and cross stitch for several months, just real life and such. I am yet to stitch a single stitch this year, and can see that going on for the foreseeable future. I stop in and check out my groups occasionally and a few blogs.

But things in my life have come to a screeching halt, my devastation and grief is so raw. Below will explain to some degree I still can't fathom it in my mind.

What you are about to read was written nearly a month ago in the early hours of the morning on one of many sleepless nights...

Please understand if I don't respond.

The Innocent
Evie, Ava, Podge

These are the faces of the innocent. Look at them and you tell me what harm have they ever done?

Every year around this time between August and September I take a week off work and come to Tamworth to visit my parents. My dogs always come with me. Evie, Quincy, Podge and this year little Ava.

For a week these spoilt four get to rough it a little in the country. They get to live in a big enclosed run with a kennel and plenty of blankets.

With early morning runs before the chooks are let out. Town dogs and chooks don't mix.

They run and play in the crisp morning air, smelling things I'm sure they dream all year of doing. Horse and cow manure, the chooks and the ducks. Maybe even pick up the scent of a rabbit or a fox.

Before being safely locked back up. Secure.

Well on Sunday 4 August, everything was not safe. A person or persons unknown had thrown baits over the front boundary fence of my parent's and neighbouring property.

At 1pm we received a phone call from the frantic neighbour one of her dogs was dead, the other dying, the second dog died on the way to the vets, were our dogs alright?

I never gave a second thought to my girls they were safe and secure.

They were already dead.

The horror of finding them Sunday afternoon in their pen, their bodies cold, unmoving, stiff will haunt me for the rest of my life. And my poor Quincy had spent the day with her friends. She had watched them die.

Imagine her as she went from body to body confused as they would not respond to her, as they grew cold where they had always been warm, someone to wrap around and sleep.

So to this person, some will call you an animal, but you are wholly a human being, animals don't poison each other.

I don't live in Tamworth, my dogs don't live in Tamworth I don't know if you did this because some dog or dogs in the area was annoying you. I do know that baiting is never an option.

If you didn't want to contact the owner, a note in a mailbox is an easy thing. A simple "keep your dog at home" or "your dog barks all night, all day". If you didn't know who owned the dog or the dog was allowed to go on unchecked phone the Council Ranger.

Or maybe you thought it would be fun to see how many dogs you could kill.

In either case I can't help you. You are a sick, twisted individual as the police officer told me, "people do bad things."

Family and friends have told me that karma will get you, karma doesn't help me, Evie, Podge and Ava or my poor heartbroken Quincy.

But let me tell you what you have done. You have murdered my dogs, you planned this with the intention of killing, well you did my dogs are dead, the neighbours dogs are dead.

Evie was five years old, she had lived with me for three years, and she loved unconditionally from the moment she came into my home. Evie never hurt a soul, she certainly never hurt you.

Podge two and a half, as my mother said, 'Could you have picked a worse name?' But she was Podge from the moment she was born, don't know where it came from, she was and will always be Poddy Podge.

Little Ava nine months, loved by everyone bright and happy in only the way a puppy can be, and her big sister Podge was the best thing ever.

Podge and Ava will never again chase each other in the back yard, around the car, zip through the pot plants, past the clothesline and back again, while Evie and Quincy sat in the sun watching them.

Ava loved strawberries, always in my strawberry patch, Podge helping, I suppose I will have strawberries now.
None of them will ever again wrap themselves around my neck and snuggle in.

This is what you have done, I hope you can live with the five lives you took on Sunday 4 August, your life will go on, so will mine but with a very big hole.

I have in the past always said 'going home' to visit my parents. I have never lived in Tamworth, but it is where my parents live so it was going home. Now Tamworth will always be the place where my dogs were murdered.

I hope you are proud of what you have done, so proud that you will step forward and take ownership of this malicious act, it won't bring my girls back.

But I doubt it as you are a spineless, gutless individual and a lot of other words that can't be printed, I do hate you, but mostly I pity you, a poor pathetic excuse of a human being.