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A groomer at a PetSmart in Texas was fired after a video of her aggressively handling a dog went viral.
Terah Leder was inside the west Houston store when she witnessed the incident that took place inside an enclosed room with glass walls.
“My wife immediately noticed this woman and said we should watch what’s going on and get closer,” Leder told the Daily News.
The video she recorded shows a PetSmart employee forcing a small dog’s mouth shut and jerking its head around as she trims the fur around its head and neck.
“This woman was being aggressive, she was ripping this dog up by her ears — she was just being extra mean,” Leder said. “You could tell that she was frustrated about grooming this dog,” she added.
Leder — a dog-lover — decided to wait around for the pet to be claimed so that she could alert the owner to what she had witnessed.
“I would have prayed and hoped that someone would have told me if they had seen that with my dog,” Leder said.
Leder said she was disquieted by her interaction with the store’s manager.
A viral video posted on social media shows a dog being mishandled at a PetSmart grooming station in west Houston on Feb. 1, 2018.
(ABC 13)
“I didn’t trust that this employee wasn’t going to put her hands on any other dogs,” Leder said. “I didn’t think they were going to take care of this.”
She added that the employee continued to groom the dog even after Leder had confronted her.
Leder later contacted PetSmart’s corporate office, and the employee in question was promptly fired.
“This treatment is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” read a PetSmart statement provided to the Daily News.
“At PetSmart, we all love pets, and this video does not represent who we are as a company,” it added.
Leder said she waited for about an hour until Brooke Vowers, whom she didn’t know, arrived at PetSmart to claim her dog named “Boo.”
She had dropped her pet off hours earlier and was unaware that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
A woman filmed the mishandling.
(ABC 13)
After Vowers watched the video, she shared it on Facebook.
“It’s unfortunate someone had to loose there (sic) job but i truly hope this is an eye opener to new policies with grooming monitoring in the future ! I hope changes are made and this prevents future damage,” she said.
Vowers says she’s sickened by the way her 2-year-old Shih Tzu was treated, and is concerned for other pets.
“If this happened to my dog, it probably happened to other dogs, and I don’t want it to happen to future dogs,” Vowers she told ABC 13.
Leder is happy she spoke up. She suspects the abuse would have continued unchecked had she not recorded the incident and pursued remediation.
“I hope that everyone watches what they do from now on and don’t act like that,” she said. “I hope the video gets seen and people get put on blast for being cruel.”
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