Losing a dog is always horrible, but losing a dog because of someone else’s mistake is even harder. That’s what happened to the Wang family after their dog was mistakenly euthanized by Tazewell County Animal Control in Illinois.
Moses, the family’s 6-year-old lab/shepherd mix had just bitten a maintenance worker that was trespassing on the Wang’s property. Moses was a docile dog, but when he saw the unknown man in their yard, his protective instincts came into action.
When the Wang family got the maintenance worker to a medical facility, they called the Tazewell County Animal Control on their own. They knew that they had to, but they were still surprised when the Animal Control center took their dog for a whole 10 days.
“They called it a ‘cooling off’ period,” Jennifer said. “We were very upset; we didn’t want Moses to be gone for 10 days.”
This isn’t out of the ordinary, however.
The Illinois General Assembly says that an animal that bites a human is then “confined under the observation of a licensed veterinarian. The confinement shall be for a period of not less than 10 days from the date the bite occurred and shall continue until the animal has been examined and released from confinement by a licensed veterinarian.”
Reluctantly, the couple gave up the dog. They visited Moses regularly, as the dog was depressed and didn’t want to eat. Still, things were going all right, until they got a call from the facility’s director.
“He very calmly and matter-of-factly said that he accidentally euthanized Moses,” Jennifer recalled. “I thought it was a cruel prank. I couldn’t believe this was happening.”
When the Wang family got to the facility they found Moses left on the floor in a room.
“He was treated like a wild animal that nobody cared about,” Jennifer said. She added that they “just sat in that room and cried and held him.”
The director kept claiming that he didn’t know why the dog was mistakenly euthanized.
“I asked him many times: ‘How did this happen?’ ‘How could this happen?’ All he said to me was that he didn’t know and that he wasn’t sure,” Tony said.
Heartbroken beyond belief, Jennifer Wang took Moses’s body to get him cremated. As she was leaving, she vowed that she and her husband will take legal action against those responsible for the unnecessary murder of Moses..
“The cost won’t matter; we’re making sure he will get the justice he deserves. For us, it’s not over.” Jennifer Wang insisted.
