This is fucked and awful and just really, really sad.
A Darwin woman whose missing dogs turned up dead over the weekend fears that it may have been her widespread social media campaign that caused their deaths.
After Jen Clarke‘s dogs JT and Norris disappeared from her property earlier this month, she embarked on a massive social media campaign to get them back.
As far as attention goes, she was incredibly successful. Her Facebook post asking if anyone had seen them attracted over 1,000 shares, and her page dedicated to finding her dogs got over 1,100 likes in just under two weeks. Dozens of people across the Darwin and NT territory sent in possible sightings.
And now Clarke, 44, is wondering if the huge amount of attention she generated resulted in their deaths. Animal death is, sadly, nothing new, but the National Dog Theft Survey found last year that more dogs were stolen for profit than for dog fighting.
“Did someone take them and then the person thought it was too risky because of all the media?” she told the ABC.
She’s also considered the possibility that they simply wandered onto someone else’s property and were shot.
“I don’t have any children,” she told the ABC, who reported that she was “trying to hold back tears”. “They were my kids.”
