Rural dog killings raise questions

It’s mysterious and scary at the same time.

And Tracy Brock and her neighbors just want it to stop.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Brock said. “It makes us go, ‘Is this a coincidence?’”

Brock is referring to a twice-occurring animal killing near Rantoul that began a few weeks ago with a neighbor’s dog.

Brock, who lives on Rock Creek Terrace, said a neighbor’s dog was found dead in its pen one day — its throat slit.

“I don’t know what kind of an animal does that,” Brock said. “It seems like an animal would not go into a pen and do that.”

Franklin County Undersheriff Steve Lunger said he wasn’t aware of this particular situation, but in a similar instance, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office would investigate it as animal cruelty.

Cruelty to animals is classified as a misdemeanor, Lunger said.

As it is, Lunger said animal cruelty is not something the sheriff’s office deals with very often.

“It’s not a real common case for us,” he said. “I would say that citizens of Franklin County are sympathetic to animals.”

But if it’s not a human who attacked the dog near Rantoul, then who killed Brock’s dog a week later?

That’s the question Brock wants answered.

“It came up missing,” Brock said of the stray she took in for a month that was later killed. “We found it under a bush with its throat cut.”

Brock said her husband found the dog under a bush in the driveway after it was missing for a long time.

“After the first dog died, I thought maybe it could be some sort of a freakish thing,” Brock said.

Brock added that she and her neighbors kept a watchful eye out for a while, but things have quieted and there hasn’t been another dog killing.

“Everybody was just really scared for a while and listening at night,” she said. “It just struck everybody as odd.”