Charles Pet Owners Seek Justice

"He was too scared to go up in the hutch to protect himself, so the dog got in and killed him," she said in an interview. "I cried for weeks."

The hearing board, however, does not deal in feelings; it takes its legal role seriously. Even though evidence pointed to Pettko's dog, there were no eyewitnesses, as Pettko noted in his cross-examination.

"How do you know it was my dog, actually?" he asked, turning to his right to face Burch. "It could have been, but you didn't see it."

The board members agreed with Pettko. After 10 minutes of deliberation, they rejected the charges that his dog was dangerous and vicious and that it had destroyed someone's property.

But Burch was satisfied, too, for Pettko earlier had pleaded guilty to having his dog at large.

"I just wanted on record that his dog got out of the yard," Burch said.

If both parties in this case left satisfied, they are perhaps an exception. The board's every session is filled with contentious cases.

In one, Gaynor Glessner-Robben said that her cat Ariel was killed by Buster, her neighbors' chow.

An English-born resident of Waldorf, Glessner-Robben said in an interview that she was "not at all impressed" by the court because of its "expectation that we all know how courts run and know what 'sustained' means," she said.

It was bad enough that her cat had been killed, she told the board, but on top of that, she said her neighbor, Kenny Wells, stuffed the animal into a bag and drove it to a construction dumpster, thus depriving her two children of a chance to pay their respects.

"They couldn't even bury the cat they had for eight years," she said.

Wells said that Glessner-Robben asked him to take the cat away from her yard because she couldn't bear to see it.