To FC & Wife, I am so sorry for you loss, and what your wife has had to go through. Like most everyone has posted, she did the right thing.
To all those who are giving OP a hard time, have any of you tried to take a rawhide away from a dog, big or little. No matter how much you yell, scream, throw at them, they will not let it go. These dogs were in her coop, she had every right to do what she did.
I had a similar situation, there were 3 dogs on my street who were let out at night to roam. I called animal control, gave them the address. I was told that I could come & pick up a trap or try to catch the dogs myself & bring them in. One was a Sheppard, the other was a Rot mix, the other a big dog, mixed breed. There was no way I was going to try and catch them myself.
We had at the time a duplex rabbit hutch & a large metal hutch with 3 rabbits. The hutch had a interior for sleeping & a fenced exterior, raised off the ground 2 ft & the enclosure was taller than me (I am 5'2").
My aunt went out that morning to feed the rabbits, and I heard the most horrific sound I will never forget. My aunt was screaming, crying & moaning, she's gone, she's gone. I thought for a minute she was going to pass out on me. I raced out there (the side yard of our house) and the underside of one hutch was ripped out, the sturdy mesh, the holes so small that rabbit poop sometimes did not go through. My uncle built this and he built things like Fort Knox. The other metal hutch was on it's side, two of our 3 rabbits were gone. I do not know how my angora, Whitney survived, but she was traumatized.
The next night (Whitney was inside) I heard scraping on our side gate, I went out to look & all three are jumping back over our fence and heading down the street. 3 nights in a row this happened, and after calling animal control, and the police, nothing could be done unless I trapped them.
My poor aunt was despondent, Gidget was a little dwarf dutch, that was her pride & joy, my aunt was in her mid 60's when this happened and suffered from High Blood Pressure to the point of nearly having a stroke a few times.
She could not even go out the sliding glass door onto the patio, she would get light headed.
We are all animal lovers in our family, but this could not happen again. I bought gopher poison, a large can of wet dog food, mixed it together in a pie tin & set it out that night & waited. I heard them scale our side gate, and leave, they never came back again.
And to this day, I never felt a ounce of guilt for what I did. The terror & fear my poor rabbits went through that night & the screams of my aunt the next morning, justified what I did to protect my remaining rabbit, who from then on, lived on the enclosed patio.
No one, human or animal has the right to come on to your property and hurt or kill your animals. If they do, a price will be paid.
