CROWN HEIGHTS — Local dog owners got slapped with a summons for not providing adequate shelter for their pet after a recording of the pooch howling outside surfaced online during this weekend’s historic blizzard, police said.
NYPD officers and representatives of the ASPCA and the city’s Animal Care & Control division visited President Street between Franklin and Bedford avenues on Sunday where, a day earlier, Crown Heights resident Evelyn Tully Costa posted a video on Facebook showing a dog crying inside a backyard shed as snow pelted down.
Old dog left outside in blizzard.
Posted by Evelyn Tully Costa on Saturday, January 23, 2016
Tully Costa told DNAinfo New York that over more than ten years, the dog has often been left outdoors behind her neighbors' President Street home where he whines and barks constantly. Police in the area said they have responded to the home a number of times in the past decade for complaints about noise and neglect.
Police added that the owner has been summonsed several times, though they could not provide an exact number.
“These people don’t care about animals and they don’t care about their neighbors. It’s very clear,” Tully Costa said of the dog’s owners.
► READ MORE: Seven Things You Should Know To Keep Your Pet Safe When It's Cold
Tully Costa posted the clip to Facebook Saturday night — as snow reached 34 inches in some neighborhoods — where it has been viewed over 300,000 times, spurring a deluge of phone calls to the local precinct about the dog’s plight.
But despite all the attention paid to the pooch on the Internet and in multiple news articles, the ticket for "inadequate shelter" given to the dog's owners on Sunday is about all the NYPD can do, experts said.
According AC&C, state law dictates that dog owners must provide adequate shelter when their pets are kept outside, but police said it’s not an arrestable offense.
A spokeswoman from the ASPCA summed up the dilemma this way in a statement: “In New York City situations do arise where an animal’s living conditions may not be ideal, but do not meet the definition of animal cruelty as defined by the law, making seizure by the police impossible.”
AC&C and local police both said they will continue to monitor the home in the future.
But Tully Costa is frustrated that more cannot be done for the dog under current rules.
“They can’t enforce a law that doesn’t exist,” she said of the NYPD. “It sort of boggles the mind that somehow this is OK.”
The ASPCA representative said the group “fully supports strengthening existing sheltering laws” while at the same time “strongly” encouraging pet owners to bring their pets inside during extreme weather.
