Dear Editor,

I am deeply horrified by the headline you chose for your recent article in the Jamaica Observer.

Animal cruelty across the Caribbean, especially towards dogs, is rising at an alarming rate. Your headline made it sound like dogs don’t mean anything in this world.

I have a dog. I am a huge dog lover and I would do exactly what this little boy did for his dog.

The piece you wrote was fine, but if you could have changed the headline to something a bit more realistic like, ‘Mother endangers son’s life’, or ‘Cruel mother throws family pet in river’, or even ‘Boy, 12, nearly dies after mother throws family dog in river’.

What that mother did is an act of animal cruelty. I hope you will follow up on this story and highlight it in a better way. You represent a newspaper that is the voice of the public, and I am asking you to follow up on this story with an update telling us how that child is doing, and also contact the Jamaica Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and request a quote as to what they think about what the mother did.

In my eyes she should be named and shamed for her actions and that little boy, as well as the man who rescued him, deserve a medals for bravery. The mother deserves jail time.

She had a choice to surrender that pet but, instead, discarded him like trash and that’s not what dogs are.

Deborah O’Flanagan

deby.oflanagan@gmail.com