Bring me the head of Diego the dog

A professional dog-walker who volunteered free walkies three times a week to homeless SPCA pooches won’t be marching mutts there anymore after absconding with a Rottweiler named Diego because she feared he’d be decapitated. The now-banished Kate Davey had taken a shine to some of the long-term dogs whose unenviable fate was lonely confinement. “They only get to leave their small spaces to run around the back a bit at night, so they end up going a bit crazy,” she says. “It’s not surprising, considering that dogs eventually go nuts in this situation, because two years for a dog is like a human being in solitary confinement for 14 years.” After one such increasingly frustrated pooch bit a new volunteer, officials questioned whether the dog’s hostility was due to rabies.

“There’s no way he had rabies. He’d been inside since the age of two months,” says Davey, who’s aware that veterinarians sometimes remove the heads of animals they suspect of being infected with rabies.

Davey and a friend took Diego out for a one-way walk in November, a dognapping that left SPCA boss Pierre Barnoti unimpressed. “It’s not for volunteers to disappear with the dogs. We’re responsible for those dogs and if the courts can’t trust the SPCA for the dog not to disappear, then we lose everything we’ve been working for,” says Barnoti. Diego the dog has since been officially adopted and has recovered his docile nature, according to all reports. :

—Kristian Gravenor