(happened a long time ago, submitting for my mom. Just curious about how people would feel about it because I feel like it could be mixed. Apologies for clunky writing it's a pretty traumatic memory and I was shaking the entire time.)
TW animal death/abuse/murder
AITA for shooting at my neighbor's dogs?
Over ten years ago now, my family and I (25/26ish F) had left for a few short vacations over the summer and had asked our neighbors to pet sit (4/5 years old F who we'll call Vasco for privacy). The demands weren't extremely high, just the occasional check up, and the trips were no more than a week long at a time. My neighbors, a married couple, were both fully aware of what was needed from them, and that because of the husband's aversion to our pets, the wife would be the one to do the checkups. Nothing required from them. The first time we went away, everything went great. Then the next trip, once again no more than a week long MAX came
The husband decided to do the check up instead of the wife (who was available) for some reason. The last time his wife and come over, she had played with Vasco but forgot to close the lock on her cage properly and she had come out and was sitting in the middle of the living room when he opened the door. She is completely non-violent, there is no world in which she would have attacked him or have been any kind of threat that would have meant my neighbor couldn't have walked back to his house right next store and gotten his wife. Instead, he took our rain stick by the door and beat her to death and left her bloody body where it lay.
When I got home I discovered my beloved Vasco's body exactly where he had killed her. My reaction was obviously terrible, the grief was immense. I see no need to go into details especially since how just recalling it is affecting me now. My neighbor then show up, bottle of wine in hand, and with a smug look on his face says "it's just an animal, right?"
Here's where I may be TA. Obviously we were no longer friends after that. I screamed at them and even tried to sue, but because of how animals are considered just property by the law, I could only get back what I had paid for her. There was not even an ounce of justice. I had pretty low tolerance for my murderous neighbors afterwards. They had a dog or two who would continually try to dig under our fence into our yard. Despite my obvious hatred for them I warned them multiple times to try to keep control of their dog or I would take a BB gun and start shooting at them. They didn't care and didn't listen. So that's what I started doing. Whenever I'd catch their dogs poking through the fence into our yard I'd shoot really close to them to scare them off, and when they were hit, it wouldn't hurt more than a sting and they'd run off. And it worked, eventually they stopped trying to get to our yard, and they were never injured because of it.
So TL;DR: My neighbors intentionally killed the animal they agreed to petsit and then showed zero remorse for it, so I shot pellets at their dogs (not injuring them, just scaring them) when they tried to dig into our yard
AITA?
Voting ended onOct 11, 2023
