To the Editor,

This letter is in response to the article “Learning to live on three legs” that was published on Jan. 11, 2022.  

The article is about Amanda Femling’s dog that was caught in a trap on her “neighbors” property and ended up having to have his leg amputated.  She indicates that the purpose for this “sad tale with a happy ending” was to encourage people with traps on their property to let their neighbors know of them.  

What isn’t being said is that she was told to keep her dog off of the neighbor’s property on multiple occasions beginning back in early September and continuing into late October. The dog continued to go onto all areas of the property and there wasn’t any action taken to ensure that this would not continue to happen.  

On Nov. 28, she was once again notified that the dog was on the neighbor’s property, but this time it was caught in a trap and had been released, yet it took 3 weeks for the dog to receive any medical attention.

In her statement in the article, she also indicates that the Femling family had been searching for the dog for three days and on the fourth day a neighbor placed it on their porch and explained that it had been found in a trap.  

There are multiple discrepancies in this story that I will not address, however, the fact of the matter is that the dog was not left in a trap in the woods on the neighbor’s property for 3-4 days because those traps were religiously checked at the minimum of every day by the trapper and also by the landowner.  

To say in this story that the dog was trapped for days sheds a very bad light on a trapper or landowner that would allow that to happen to any animal, not just the dog and it is simply not true. A landowner does not have an obligation to list every scenario where a dog could be hurt or even worse, killed on their property when they inform the owner/guardian to keep the dog off of it. It is the owner/guardian’s responsibility to keep their pet safe!  

It would have been nice to have had the opportunity to share the “other side of the story” before the article was published as it is quite different than what is in the newspaper.

Bruce and Toli Lubitz

Landowner/neighbor