On the stolen-dog front, there is good news and bad news.
First, there is Daisy, the friendly pit bull that was stolen recently from the back yard of Mary McGinty, who operates a day-care center in her Old Town home.
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This is the dog that McGinty found five years ago in a weedy lot after it had apparently been left near death as a result of being used in the dogfighting matches that are popular in nearby Cabrini-Green.
McGinty had nursed it back to health. But a few weeks ago, the dog was taken from her yard by a gang of punks from Cabrini-Green who tried to shake down McGinty for $200 to return the dog.
When they suspected that she had called the police, they stormed off and vowed that she’d never see her dog again.
And for a few weeks, it appeared that she wouldn’t.
But Monday afternoon, a couple of cops from the East Chicago District noticed a woman, 23, and a boy walking a pit bull on a leash near the Cabrini-Green building where the two live.
Because the dog fit the description of Daisy, they questioned the couple.
“They told us they bought it from someone for $15” said Officer Steve Bigden.
The police took the dog and showed it to McGinty. It was Daisy, a bit thinner but in otherwise good health. So Daisy is back home.
“They (the woman and boy) knew the dog was stolen, but they had no intentions of giving it back to anyone. We’ve charged them with possession of stolen property,” Bigden said.
“They know the names of the people they bought the dog from, so we’re going to try to locate them.”
Now for the bad news.
It appears that the punks who stole Daisy wanted to get even with McGinty for refusing to pay them $200 and for calling the cops and telling me the story.
They were probably also upset because the story brought heat from the police on their dogfighting matches.
So Friday, another pit bull that had apparently been badly mangled in one of the dogfights was tossed over a fence and into the back yard of one of McGinty’s neighbors.
McGinty thinks they intended to throw the injured dog into her yard but left it in the neighbor’s yard by mistake.
“It was terrible,” McGinty said. “A neighbor came and told me about it. I couldn’t bring myself to go and look. One of the parents who works with me went and came back and said it wasn’t Daisy. But seeing the dog almost made her sick.
“It was alive but badly mangled. It had bad head injuries.”
The city’s animal care and control office was called and took the dog.
Peter Poholik, the unit’s executive director and a former Chicago police officer, said: “We picked this one up on Friday morning. It was in such bad shape, with no tags or collar, so it was humanely put to sleep.
“Yes, it looked like it had been used in fighting.
“Cabrini-Green is one of the areas where we get a lot of dogfighting calls. About 99.9 percent of the time, we get the calls from the police department and it’s a spontaneous thing. They’ll pull up to a garage or alley or courtyard and the fight will be going on.
“What we’re up against, it’s tough. There are people in that neighborhood who enjoy it. They snatch up other people’s dogs and use them in fighting.
“We get dogfighting in places besides Cabrini-Green. Some parts of the Hispanic community still do it. They fight dogs and they have cockfighting. Some of it is done by youths, and it is impromptu fighting.
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“There are more sophisticated, organized fights, but they are more clandestine. If we can prove there was advertising or tickets sold, that it was a planned event, then we have elements to make it a felony.”
Dogfights aren’t staged merely for the satisfaction of morons who enjoy seeing blood and gore, although that’s part of it.
There is money to be made by the dog owners and those who stage the matches and clean up on the betting. The cops say that the owners of the dogs can make from $2,000 to $10,000 a match. And thousands more in bets are made among the spectators.
And, as Poholik says, they are well-organized and difficult to catch. When they are caught, the punishment isn’t too stern because the courts have more than enough to do with people who maul other people. Dogs don’t have a high priority.
Too bad. A suitable punishment might be to just take the two-legged beasties down to the animal control shelter and put them to sleep. Humanely or otherwise.