Petition: Milo Is a 14-Year-Old Rat Terrier. A Mount Kisco Groomer Slammed Him Unconscious and the Charge Caps at One Year.

Milo is a rat terrier. He is fourteen years old and weighs fourteen pounds, which is to say he is roughly the size and sturdiness of a cat. On 26 July he was taken to Dogtopia of Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, New York, for a nail trim.

His owners noticed afterwards that something was wrong. He wasn’t walking properly. He slept constantly. He stopped eating. A veterinarian examined him and found bruising running along his torso, consistent with recent trauma, which is not a finding anybody expects from a nail appointment.

The surveillance footage was found by the business itself. According to SPCA Westchester’s Humane Law Enforcement Unit, it allegedly shows an employee slamming Milo down onto the grooming table, after which the dog loses consciousness and collapses. Cole Kamrath, of Peekskill, was arrested on 4 September. Dogtopia terminated him and contacted law enforcement after reviewing the video, and has said it is cooperating with the investigation. He has been charged, not convicted, and was scheduled to appear at Mount Kisco Justice Court on 24 September.

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Here is the number that should annoy people. The charge is a Class A misdemeanour under section 353 of New York’s Agriculture and Markets Law. The maximum exposure is one year in jail and a fine of one thousand dollars. That is the ceiling, not the likely outcome, for an incident in which a fourteen-year-old animal was allegedly rendered unconscious by someone paid to handle him.

New York does have a felony provision, aggravated cruelty under section 353-a, but it requires proof of intent to cause extreme physical pain, or that the act was done in a depraved or sadistic manner, and a single violent act during a routine procedure is difficult to fit into that frame. So the charging decision is probably correct as a matter of law. It is the law that is the problem, and it is worth being clear about which of the two you are angry at.

The other thing this case rests on is a camera. The owners had a dog who was off his food and sleeping too much, and a vet had bruises with no explanation. On that evidence alone there is no case: no witness, no admission, and a fourteen-year-old dog whose decline could be attributed to being fourteen. What produced an arrest was footage that the business went looking for and handed over. OGP has reported on a Florida grooming case that surfaced the same way, through footage rather than through anyone noticing at the time. Most facilities are not filming the grooming table, and most owners never find out.

The petition asks the Westchester County District Attorney to pursue the case to its full statutory limit rather than dispose of it with a fine, and to seek a prohibition on working with animals as a condition of any sentence. The employment prohibition is the one that matters here, because dismissal from one franchise is not a bar to being hired at the next, and the industry has no licensing body that would catch it.

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The SPCA’s account of the footage, the veterinary findings and the charge are reported by Daily Voice in Westchester.

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