A Dogfight in Haddonfield

 MAYBE, THOUGH, THE WORST was over. After Judge McNeill’s decision exonerating Rocky, Bob Taffet told the Daily News, “We’re looking forward to going on with our lives, hopefully peacefully.” A few months later, he paid $829,400 for a 143-acre farm in Alloway Township, Salem County, on which he raises goats.

On November 18, 2009, he invited an acquaintance, Cindi McVeigh, to bring her young son Patrick and daughter Claire to see the goats. Inside a barn, three-year-old Claire stumbled and fell. As she got up, she looked one of the Taffets’ dogs in the eye — Duke, son of Rocky, son of Pluto.

Duke ripped Claire’s ear off her head.

Surgeons at duPont reattached it, with 65 stitches. More surgery lies in Claire’s future. Salem County’s animal control officer charged Taffet with owning a “vicious” and “potentially dangerous” dog — Duke.

“He’s permitted his dogs, three in one bloodline, to attack six people — five of them children — in a decade,” Susanne claims.

Bob Taffet can’t discuss what happened to Claire because of pending litigation. He will say this, though: “The reason I’ve gone to this extent to defend my dogs is that they didn’t do anything wrong.”

IN MARCH, A two-judge Superior Court panel overruled Judge McNeill and reinstated the municipal court’s finding that “Rocky poses a serious threat to cause bodily injury to another.”

Meanwhile, borough solicitor Iavicoli and commissioner Ed Borden had been working behind the scenes for months to try to heal their town’s schism. They were seeking an agreement with the Taffets that would cover all their dogs, not just Rocky. Rocky was getting old, and once he died, the borough would have no legal recourse against the rest of the Taffet menagerie.

The Taffets were amenable. Borden and Iavicoli were proud of the consensus eventually laid out. The Taffets would keep only two dogs in their Haddonfield home at any given time. (An exception was made for one Kangal puppy until she turned seven months old.) They would maintain the electric and aluminum fences, and extend the latter all the way around the property. Their dogs would be muzzled and leashed when off the property. And the Taffets agreed not to appeal the most recent decision to the state Supreme Court. In return, the borough agreed not to enforce the state requirement that Rocky be caged when he was in the yard, and to waive the $1 million in liability insurance. Duke wouldn’t be allowed to return to Haddonfield until the Salem County court proceedings regarding him were concluded. The dogs would be muzzled or crated inside the Taffets’ house except in the presence of family and/or guests who signed a waiver.

“Our attorney kept telling us: ‘You don’t have to sign this,’” Bob Taffet says. “I just said — I want her off my back.”

“We lived according to the terms of the agreement for two months,” adds Michele. “We put Duke in a kennel, which was upsetting to my kids. All the kids love Duke. He’s the goofiest, funniest dog — ” She shows a photo of him astride the dining room table; he jumped up there when the Haddonfield runners’ club came down their street.

“He’s the Ridgeback equivalent of Marmaduke,” Bob Taffet says.

Early in April, Borden invited Susanne and her husband to preview the agreement. They weren’t happy with it at all. They were concerned that there was no mechanism to enforce compliance. They worried that the four-foot fence was too short to contain the Ridgebacks. Most of all, they didn’t see any reason to expect the Taffets, who in their view had been flouting laws for years, to suddenly comply with the agreement.

Susanne’s supporters showed up in force at an April 13th borough hall meeting to speak out against the agreement, to urge the borough to uphold the law. They ranted and raved. In the end, reluctantly, Iavicoli and Borden agreed to go back to the Taffets and ask that the four-foot fence be raised to six feet. A vote on the agreement was tabled until the next meeting, on April 26th.

That meeting was once again packed with opponents of the agreement. Standing before the crowd, the borough solicitor announced that the Taffets — Iavicoli had advised them not to attend — had renounced the document they’d signed, after deciding “they were never going to satisfy their neighbors no matter what they did.”

Bob Taffet says he reached that conclusion as he watched a videotape of the April 13th meeting: “One of our friends was going to speak up on our behalf but didn’t, because of the mob mentality. She thought she would get stoned.”