According to their owner, David Ballard, the Saturday morning incident was witnessed by one of his neighbors on Hastey Drive, in a mobile home park off Andy Taylor Road.
“At this point I can say that we are looking into the incident and are concerned,” Dolle said. “I’m not at liberty to say much more than that.”
Sam Bolen of San Marcus, who serves as media relations specialist for this postal region, added that a postal carrier normally will only use pepper spray if they feel threatened, and only as a last resort.
“We take any complaints seriously, we will investigate them thoroughly,” Bolen said. “But we also take the threat of animal attacks seriously.”
Ballard said his two dogs, a 2-year-old, 75-pound boxer and a year-old shepherd-husky mix, were in a fenced yard outside his mobile home — one of 13 in the small rural development — when the postal carrier stopped to deliver a package.
“A neighbor said they watched the carrier get out of his vehicle and grab a tire iron, which she thought rather odd,” Ballard said. After putting the tire iron back inside his vehicle, the carrier was seen with a red package which he left in the middle of the driveway.
Ballard said that for no apparent reason, the carrier sprayed his two dogs with pepper spray as the carrier entered the driveway, adjacent to the fenced yard. After the carrier dropped off the package, Ballard said the neighbor saw him spray both dogs with pepper spray twice on the carrier’s way out.
“I realize that my dogs may look intimidating,” Ballard said Tuesday. “Especially the boxer, but they are both friendly and not at all aggressive. They will bark at any cats in the area, but they haven’t been trained to attack.”
He said they likely moved up to the edge of the fence when the carrier approached, wanting to be petted. “We had the Dish TV man out here recently, and he didn’t have a problem with the two dogs, and whenever the pizza man makes a delivery he usually reaches over the fence and pets the dogs while he is waiting for us to come out,” Ballard said.
He and his wife, Gretta, contacted their veterinarian on Saturday, who told them to rinse the pepper spray residue from the dogs’ eyes and faces with water.
“He said there wasn’t much else we could do,” Ballard said. “Gretta ended up getting a dose of pepper spray herself while she was trying to clean up the dogs.”
Although the canines did not appear to suffer any lasting physical effects from the spray, Ballard on Saturday filed an offense report for animal cruelty with the Hale County Sheriff’s Office.
“I still don’t understand why the carrier had to spray our dogs three times, from six feet away, when they were inside a fence where they were supposed to be.”
Noting that “we’ve had issues in the past” with that specific carrier, Ballard said he has asked that in the future any packages be held at the post office instead of being left unattended in the driveway. “I’d rather have a yellow slip in the mailbox, instead of a package left in the driveway for anybody to stop and pick up as they drive by.”
While admitting he is not familiar with Saturday’s incident, Bolen said statistically 4.7 million Americans are bitten by dogs each year.
“In 2011, a total of 5,577 postal employees were attacked by animals,” he noted. “Dog bites account for about one-third of all liability claims filed against homeowners insurance policies each year, at a cost of about $400 million.”
In 2011, Los Angeles had the highest number of dog attacks involving postal carriers at 83. The five worse Texas cities for postal dog attacks that year were Houston, at 47; Dallas, 41; San Antonio, 39; Fort Worth, 23; and El Paso, 20.
“Postal carriers understand that any dog can bite,” Bolen explained. “And ‘my dog doesn’t bite,’ often is the last thing a carrier will hear before he or she gets bitten. We take awareness and prevention seriously because we want our carriers to realize how a dog is likely to react whenever it feels threatened.”
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Source: Texas Headlines (McDonough, 1/9)
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