Families feud over dog they both claim

MARTINSVILLE, Ind. (WISH) - Thousands of dogs turn up missing every year in central Indiana; some are found and returned to their owners but others never make it back home.

Last November, Annita Caincross was watching her sister’s 7-year-old Yorkie mix named Ritter. He somehow got out of her Martinsville backyard and never returned.

“I called the shelter, I reported him missing,” said Caincross, “My sister recently went through a divorce and the dog was the only thing she had left.”

She filed a missing dog report with the Morgan County Humane Society but never heard from them.

She thought Ritter was gone for ever.

That was until she saw him on WISH-TV exactly four months later.

Our crews were in Martinsville covering the shooting at West Middle School. While we were there we interviewed the mother of a student there, Jessica Skaggs. Sitting next to Skaggs in her car was her dog Chance.

“I saw the dog in her car and I though, ‘Oh my gosh that’s Ritter,’” Caincross said.

As it turns out, Skaggs and her boyfriend, Adrian Butler, adopted the dog from the Morgan County Humane Society.

“We have three kids altogether, we’ve combined two families and the one thing that was missing was the dog,” Butler told 24-Hour News 8.

Just before Christmas the family went to the humane society and adopted the final element of their new family.

“The dog was found several miles away from where (Caincross) reported him missing and several weeks later. The description just didn’t match. We just did not feel it was the same dog,” said Debbie Cole, the Director of the Morgan County Humane Society.

Caincross and her sister have now filed a lawsuit against the humane society, Skaggs and Butler. In the suit they ask the judge for custody of the dog and $6,000 in damages.

Caincross accused the shelter saying “They had my information; they knew I was looking for him, they failed to contact me and they adopted him out.”

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Cole denies any wrong doing on the shelter’s part.

“There were no tags, no microchip, no way to prove this was their dog to begin with,” she explained.

Every year thousands of dogs across the country are found and returned to their owner because the dog has a microchip.

“If there’s no microchip, you’ve got a tag perhaps, or no tag, once that dog is gone there’s nothing that identifies him or the cat with you,” said Ellen Robinson director of the Indianapolis Face Clinic.

The Face Clinic microchips hundreds of dogs each month and highly recommends dog owners get it done.

The suit over the missing dog now goes to small claims court in Morgan County.

“It’s just frustrating, you know…we adopted him 11 days later, that should be the end of the issue,” Butler said, “ I was in the right, I did nothing wrong, absolutely nothing wrong except rescue a dog I guess.”