The incident took place in October last year in Bolesławice. Mrs Jadwiga was returning from an afternoon walk with her family. It was still light. Gabi, a purebred German shepherd, was running through a field without a muzzle. “She was a very gentle dog and had exceptional genes,” the woman recalls. “She had been raised with children since she was a puppy. Neighbors and friends joked that she was like a daughter to us.”
Unfortunately, a hunt was taking place in a nearby forest. A frightened roe deer ran into the field. Guided by instinct, Gabi began chasing it. “She had never done anything like that before,” Mrs Jadwiga emphasizes.
After a while, the family heard two shots, followed by two more. The dog fell dead. “The hunters were shooting toward the fields, not toward the forest. People walk there at that time of day; children could have been playing there. What if one of the shooters had been drunk? It could have ended in tragedy,” says a resident of Bolesławice.
The woman claims that one of the hunters quickly drove away from the scene. Mrs Jadwiga’s husband managed to speak only with the second shooter. “Were you the one who killed our dog?” he asked. He heard in response: “No, I only finished it off.”
“The man did not want to tell us who had shot Gabi,” Mrs Jadwiga reports. The couple were told only that the female dog had been treated as a poaching dog. “Except that the Animal Protection Act says that a hunter has the right to shoot a dog when the animal shows signs of having gone feral,” the woman emphasizes. “Gabi was well cared for. It is true that she was not wearing a muzzle. But she was an exceptionally gentle dog. Besides, she was running in an open field. German shepherds need to be able to run around.”
“I was devastated for a week,” the Bolesławice resident says sadly. She told her sons that Gabi had gone missing; she only recently revealed the truth to them. One of the boys took it very badly. He told Mrs Jadwiga to look for Gabi in the forest and would wake up at night. One day he asked reproachfully: “Mom, why are you smiling? Have you forgotten about Gabi?”
Mrs Jadwiga’s family wants to adopt another dog in the spring. “But now I will be afraid to go outside with it,” the woman admits. “I would like hunters to think very carefully before reaching for their guns again.”
We contacted one of the shooters—the one who had finished Gabi off. He did not want to discuss the details of the case. He merely emphasized that none of the hunters had fled the scene and that the dog’s owners should have kept it on a leash. He also added that he had consulted a lawyer. The lawyer, in turn, asked whether the hunting association had notified the prosecutor’s office about the act of poaching. “As a private individual, I sympathize with these people,” the man emphasized. “Twice in my life I have heard dogs tearing a roe deer apart. But I really did not want to shoot this animal. We fired warning shots first. Unfortunately, the dog did not react to them.”
The man stressed that it was not true that hunters were murderers or that they had no conscience. “Shooting animals gives me no pleasure; I prefer watching and feeding them,” he said. “Portraying hunters as barbarians is inappropriate.”
The Bolesławiec District Prosecutor’s Office is conducting the proceedings in this case. Whether anyone will be charged will become clear at the beginning of February. We will return to the subject.
(GA information)