Cattle prodding has been a centuries-old tradition of tattooing animals in order to identify their owners. A North Carolina man's recent decision to tattoo his five month old pit bull, however, has many animal lovers screaming cruelty.
As Ernesto Rodrigues describes it, he was simply putting a mark on the dog in order to easily identify it should the pup ever get lost. A permanent dog tag of sorts. The disabled veteran and father of three certainly does not believe he has been cruel to the animal.
"Even my kids are like, 'Man, those dogs eat better than we do," Rodriguez said.
While that statement may lead to questions of child neglect, it certainly doesn't point to a man who wants anything less than the best for his pit bull.
Rodriguez states that he had taken his dog, Dutches, to the vet to get her ears clipped, and while she was still sleeping he took her back to his tattoo parlor and gave her a tattoo with her name and a family crest. Rodrigues is a licensed tattoo artist by profession.
"Usually, when you pick up a dog or cats they're already awake after the procedure. They don't usually hand you over a dog that is asleep," animal advocate Caleb Scott observes. "On his first Facebook post he said he was bored and tattooing. I think now he's backpedaling, saying he's identifying it."
Rodriguez vehemently denies these claims, stating that the dog was asleep during the entire event and that he did not do it out of boredom:
"It's just like judging someone for wearing a tattoo. You judge and you think that they're bad people. It's not. It's just art. I'm an artist, I want to put art on my dogs. She was already asleep, so I took advantage of that."
Regardless of the motivations for why he would tattoo his dog, this story has already taken a bad turn for Rodriguez. The local county Health Department has already closed down the shop he worked at after an investigation because they don't have a business permit.
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