A Dogfight in Haddonfield

Rocky is a Rhodesian Ridgeback, bred in Africa to hunt lions. Rocky has bitten three people and could bite more. Would you be comfortable living next door to him?

HADDONFIELD IS A SMALL town. Folks gossip, in a small town. “I started talking to people,” Susanne says. “I think it was the way I was raised. I just thought it was wrong, what was going on.”

She heard about Dominic Dorazio. He was four when he visited the Taffets in 2000. His mom, Kim, came to pick him up from a play date and heard him screaming. She and Michele ran into the kitchen and found him on the floor beneath Rocky. Michele managed to get Dom free. His clothing was ripped. He had bite marks on his buttocks. His pediatrician reported the incident to authorities. The Taffets’ vet quarantined Rocky for three days.

“They called that a ‘mauling,’” Bob Taffet says. “If he was mauled, he’d be treated in a hospital. A kid wouldn’t go to a pediatrician’s office if he’d been mauled.” Besides, Rocky was only a puppy then.

He was three when, in 2003, Bob Taffet had him and his sire, Pluto, on leashes at a T-ball game. A little boy named Jonathan Erdy kept coming over to hug the dogs. Taffet asked Jonathan’s parents to tell him to leave them alone. He didn’t. One of the dogs — either Rocky or Pluto — bit his ear.

“I moved three times,” Bob Taffet says in exasperation. “The fourth time, the kid ended up … the dog kind of barked. And the kid got, like, a scrape on his ear. I said I was sorry. His mom said she was sorry.”

“We actually forgot about it,” Michele puts in. “But Susanne was going around soliciting people: ‘What do you know?’ She calls herself an investigative reporter. But she’s only investigating one family.”

IN NOVEMBER 2007, Haddonfield’s animal control officer served two summonses against the Taffets. Based on four municipal complaints filed by Susanne since July 2006 and several police reports, the state was charging them with owning four dogs that were “vicious” or “potentially dangerous.”

According to New Jersey law, a dog is “vicious” if a court finds it killed someone or caused serious bodily injury — unless the dog was provoked. The burden is on the state to prove that no provocation occurred. A dog is “potentially dangerous” if a court finds it injured someone in an attack and poses “a serious threat of bodily injury or death.” But again, the dog can’t have been provoked.

Pluto, the older of the dogs Dr. Harkins met in the park, died in 2006. Rocky, now seven, was the only other of the Ridgebacks who’d been accused of hurting anybody. Dog statutes are specific; they don’t cover all the canines in a household. But the Taffets’ dogs were hard to tell apart, and Haddonfield wanted to hedge its bets.

So did Bob Taffet. On December 31st, 2007, he leashed up all four of his Ridgebacks — Bear and Rocky, and Rocky’s two offspring, Mack and Duke — and took them to Haddonfield’s annual First Night celebration. He brought along a camera, to shoot photos of the dogs with other celebrants: various kids, an old lady in a wheelchair. One photo shows Rocky licking the face of a woman seated on the ground with her child. With everything that was going on, Bob thought it was a good idea to have pictures of his dogs playing nice.