A Ballito resident is reeling after watching video footage showing a neighbour allegedly poisoning her dog last Saturday.
In the video, which has been viewed by the Courier, a man can clearly be seen coming out of a neighbour’s house across the road at about 11am and throwing sausages over the gate of the Salisbury Road property.
He returns to the gate 10 minutes later, apparently to entice the dogs to eat the sausages. Bella the German Shepherd eats the viennas, takes a few steps and then keels over, dying within seconds. The man then returns to the neighbouring house.
Salisbury Road resident Dashni Abbas was close to tears as she explained that this was the second dog of hers to have been poisoned after another incident 12 months ago.
“In January last year another of our German Shepherds, Tyke, got very sick. We took him to the vet and they found that it was poison that had made him ill, but he recovered,” she said.
Tyke then died in March after being injured and traumatised by a fire cracker that exploded in his mouth, which they suspect had been thrown over their garden wall.
“After that I used to lie in bed at night and hear the firecrackers going off in the garden. They were really big, loud ones and they sounded like gunshots. In the mornings we could see the remains of them all around the garden,” said Dashni.
The Abbas have seven remaining dogs – two Rottweilers, a German Shepherd and four puppies from Bella, the dead German Shepherd.
“We had to start keeping the dogs in the house because I was afraid something would happen to them in the garden. That’s when we put up the cameras,” she said.
Umhlali police arrested their neighbour on Saturday night. The identity of the 45-year-old man
cannot be revealed until he has been formally charged in court. He is out on bail and the court date is March 10.
Dashni’s father, Amir Abbas, said that in 2012 their neighbour complained to the SPCA that their dogs were making too much noise.
The SPCA visited the property and, according to Amir, the SPCA investigated but after speaking to all the
surrounding neighbours, dismissed the complaint.
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