In a Reddit post shared to r/AmITheAsshole (AITA), a site user shared that she lives with her husband and their seven-year-old daughter.
“My daughter and I recently went on a short trip out of state while my husband stayed as he had work and was supposed to look after our dog,” she wrote.
But on the last day of their time away, her “distraught” husband called her to let them know their dog, Ellie, had run off and he hadn’t been able to find her.
“He claimed she just bolted away from him in the park, into some bushes and he could not find her,” the original poster (OP) wrote.
She had her suspicions
Ellie, the dog in question, is a tiny 13-year-old mini poodle mix. And while the dog is still active, “It is really unlike her to run away from us and I was suspicious,” OP says.
Nonetheless, she “chose to believe my husband and me and my daughter were in grief but did not want to blame him.”
When they returned, she said her husband seemed “surprisingly okay.”
“Ever since the pandemic, my husband started working from home and he has always been annoyed at how much attention we gave Ellie and hated how Ellie begged to sit on our laps and his while he worked,” she added.
Then, they got a call
A couple of days later, the family received a call on their landline ― not a number most people called them on ― as someone had found their dog and had rung the contact on Ellie’s microchip. The call was from a pretty faraway location.
The author of the post says she accepted the call, which turned out to be from an animal rescue centre who’d found Ellie. “I told my husband and he just said ‘that is great, I am so happy,’ but it felt kind of blunt and insincere,” she said.
When the poster said that the circumstances of the alleged dog escape seemed strange ― how did she get so far? ― the poster’s husband “responded that someone must have stolen her and then abandoned her.”
That didn’t check out to OP
The post author said that she didn’t think that quite made sense.
So, “When he was out drinking with his buddies, I copied the videos from his dashcam for the days I was away and saw that he had indeed taken Ellie far out of state, and clearly dropped her in front of his car thrown a frisbee-like object into a field, yelled fetch and drove off without her.”
She says she was “livid” and confronted her husband. When challenged, “he just stupidly muttered how he dropped her there so she could find a farm and have a better life and then the next day got really angry at me for viewing his dashcam.”
People had *thoughts* in the comments
Unsurprisingly, commenters were not fans of the poster’s husband.
“Keep your dog and daughter and leave the husband in another state to find another family he’d have a better life with,” one commenter said.
Another Redditor beseeched the poster never to leave Ellie with her husband again, saying, “He didn’t drop it at a shelter, he left a senior dog alone to starve or die of exposure. A dog who clearly loved and trusted him.”
“Anyone who would do this isn’t safe for you or your daughter to be around,” another site user went so far as to say.
“The fact that he could do this to a small, old dog shows that he’s completely lacking in empathy. The fact that he’s jealous of the attention given to a dog really makes him look like a narcissist. And he felt nothing for your grief and lied to your face repeatedly. Please consider the getting away part seriously. The call is coming from inside the house,” they wrote.
What do you think?