Companion Animal Care Articles from All-Creatures.org

The short life and tragic death of Chai

From Nathan Winograd
August 2024

After her family left, Chai watched the door, waiting for them to return. They didn't.

On June 4, 2024, Chai, a brown and white 'pitty-mix,' was surrendered to Columbus Animal Care & Control in Georgia. The reason for surrender was listed as 'no room. '‘ After her family left, Chai watched the door, waiting for them to return. They didn’t.

Still, she was one to two years old and had her whole life ahead of her. And through the agency that is supposed to give dogs like Chai a second chance when things go wrong, she could find a worthy family — one that would give her the life she deserved. This was especially true for a dog like Chai, described on her paperwork as  'affectionate' and 'playful,' and good with everyone: cats, dogs, men, women, kids, and strangers…

Unfortunately, that didn't protect her from being killed by pound staff — and killed in a manner that was unprofessional, uncaring, cruel, and potentially illegal…

[S]taff botched what appears to be six attempts to inject her with a lethal dose of barbiturates… before resorting to intracardiac injection — heartsticking her — a process that involves plunging a syringe through the chest wall and several layers of muscle into a dog's heart. An animal killed by a heartstick feels extreme, severe pain (due to the amount of nerves) and then suffers a heart attack.

To get to the heart, the needle would have to penetrate the skin, body wall with costal musculature, costal pleura, pleural cavity, pericardial pleura, fibrous pericardium, serous pericardium, pericardial cavity, epicardium, myocardium, endocardium, ventricular chamber, and if the lung is penetrated, the needle must pass through the pulmonary pleura and lung tissue itself. It is so painful that Georgia law only allows it to be done when the dog is unconscious. (GA Code § 4-11-5.1(a)(3).)

Posted on All-Creatures.org: August 9, 2024
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