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?

SUSANNE LAFRANKIE—PRINCIPATO and her husband Bob — he grew up in Haddonfield — moved into their handsome home on Colonial Ridge Drive in 2002. Ever since, Susanne had become increasingly worried about the dogs across the street at 133 Upland Way. Every now and then, she’d see them running loose through the neighborhood where her children played. She’d spoken to Michele Taffet about them. Oh, they won’t hurt anybody, Michele assured her. They’re out of your yard a lot, Susanne pointed out. Michele said the electric fence that encircled her yard — the steel fence hadn’t yet been built — was broken, and her kids didn’t always shut doors.

Susanne instructed her three kids to climb the low-branched magnolia tree in the front yard if the Taffets’ dogs ever bothered them. She put a stout stick out in the yard, too, just in case. “Who puts a dog’s welfare over people’s?” Susanne asks, sitting at her dining room table, surrounded by stacks of documents she’s accumulated relating to the Taffets’ Ridgebacks. She has the casually elegant good looks you’d expect of a woman who was a reporter for Channel 6 News for more than a decade, but her mouth is drawn tight.

Susanne has made the Taffets’ dogs her personal crusade since a day in the summer of 2006 when her neighbor, Julie Hughes, whose property adjoins 133 Upland, was out in her yard. Three of the Taffets’ Ridgebacks came over to do their business on Julie’s lawn. Julie tried to shoo them off. Susanne was watching from her front yard. One of the dogs charged Julie, who thought it meant to bite her. Julie shouted for Bob Taffet, then for Michele. Nobody answered. Then Elizabeth Taffet appeared, and took the dogs home. Not long after that, the Taffets installed a new electric fence.

But as Joanne Thomas, who lived a few blocks away, was walking her two terriers past Susanne’s house later that year, one of the Ridgebacks came at them, straight through the electric fence. The same thing happened to Thomas on another walk. And once, when she was watching a group of kids — 10 or 12 of them — in a neighbor’s backyard across the street from the Taffets’ house, one of the Ridgebacks suddenly appeared, and went right up to a two-year-old’s face. Michele Taffet came and got the dog. But Thomas changed her route so she didn’t walk her terriers past the Taffet house anymore.

The pet count kept mounting at the house across the street from Susanne’s. “They have the four Ridgebacks and now at least two puppies — Kangals,” she says, pulling up photos on her laptop that came from the Facebook page of one of the Taffets. “They grow to weigh 120 to 150 pounds. They’re used to protect herds from cheetahs or something. And they have a couple of cats, and I hear they have a boa constrictor. And oscar fish, which are like piranhas.”