Animal Rights Lobbyist (Still) Supports Woman-Killing Dog

It’s been a while since we checked in on the situation with Humane Society of the United States lobbyist Annie Hornish. In 2019, Hornish’s dog, a pit bull, savagely attacked and killed a 95-year-old woman in Connecticut. It was a mauling so brutal that a local animal control officer said it was the worst he had ever seen.

And in the latest news, Hornish is still fighting to keep the state from euthanizing her killer dog.

Hornish is the state director for the Humane Society of the United States. In November 2019, 95-year-old Joyce D’Aleo arrived at the house of Hornish’s mother to visit, whereupon she was attacked by Hornish’s pit bull mix, named Dexter. D’Aleo’s nurse assistant attempted to fight the dog off with a stool, to no avail. D’Aleo later died from her injuries.

In 2020, the state of Connecticut issued an order to have the killer dog euthanized. Hornish has fought that order ever since. Having previously been unsuccessful, in June, she filed a second appeal against the order, “centering mostly on the fairness of the couple’s first appeal and the constitutionality of the statute that addresses what can be done with biting dogs,” according to Connecticut Insider.

That seems like scraping the bottom of the barrel for legal arguments.

Hornish has argued that the dog was provoked by D’Aleo’s assistant, a theory that state counsel ridiculed. “It defies common sense, that during Dexter’s biting of Ms. D’Aleo, in which he ultimately killed her, that Ms. Nicholls’ attempt to stop the attack could be considered provocation,” the state responded.

Adding insult to injury, last year, Hornish stopped paying for the dog’s care–meaning the taxpayers are now footing the bill while Hornish tries to keep her killer dog alive. It’s cost about $30,000 to date.

Hornish has now dragged out this ordeal for nearly four years after a woman was viciously killed by her dog. She’s wasted taxpayer dollars and the court’s time. Is this the “humane” attitude that HSUS wants its employees to exhibit? Then again, given how HSUS employees have been treated in other matters such as sexual harassment and personal medical decisions, perhaps Hornish is merely taking an example from leadership in how to be shameless.