Navarre woman: 'My puppies didn't murder anything'

FLORIDA -- The owner of two puppies found in a neighbor’s yard with pieces of dead chicken says her dogs would never have killed anything.

Heather Miller, of Birmingham Drive in Navarre, says she heard her dogs “screaming” from several doors down and went down the street to see them being beaten with a stick in a neighbor’s yard.

She said the puppies’ mother, who was hit by a car and killed two days earlier, might have killed chickens. But the puppies would not have.

“I don’t know if they would have ate the chickens after they were already dead,” she said. “I know my puppies didn’t murder anything.”

The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office is conferring with the State Attorney’s Office to determine whether any charges will be filed against Ronald Bliss, the Navarre man who killed the puppies and an adult dog belonging to another neighbor.

According to Florida statute, satisfactory proof that a dog has been or is killing any domestic livestock or pet is a “good defense” for killing that dog.

Bliss told deputies that he came home Sunday morning to find a large black dog and two puppies eating his chickens, according to the SRSO incident report.

Bliss said he scared the black dog off and went to tell the owner to get his dog. When he returned, he found the three dogs in his yard “eating more chickens,” the report said.

His yard is fenced and the chickens were in his yard, the deputy noted. Of his 16 chickens, only five survived.

The yard was strewn with feathers and pieces of chicken, the deputy noted.

Bliss reportedly beat the dogs with a fence post he pulled out of the ground.

The puppies were found dead on his property, while the black dog ran home.

An animal control officer went to Miller’s house to talk to her about the incident, but she wouldn’t come out and talk to him.

She told the deputy she was too emotional to talk. Her friends told the deputy she had been drinking heavily.

“I about lost my mind,” Miller told the Daily News, denying that she was intoxicated when the deputy spoke to her. “The cops kept trying to put me in jail for disorderly conduct.”

(NWF Daily News - Dec 10, 2015)