Woman fears for her life, but won’t return Buddy the dog

A woman at the center of a dog adoption controversy claims she is being harassed and is fearful for her life.

In an exclusive interview with KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show Friday, the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because of the backlash, said she knows Buddy the dog was micro-chipped to another family, but she’s not willing to give him up.

Monson asked why.

“Because they didn’t search for him,” she said. “He went missing on July 9. They didn’t start searching for him until they saw me thanking the world for helping me find my (lost) dog.”

The woman said she lost her dog Apollo, a Blue Healer resembling Buddy, a year earlier and had posted on numerous websites for people with missing dogs. One of those websites reached out to her with a potential lead and phone number to the Wenatchee Valley Humane Society.

Believing Buddy was Apollo, she pursued an adoption the next morning.

“I adopted him and this chaos has broken out,” she said.

It was discovered a couple days after the adoption that the dog was actually micro-chipped to the Biddles of Leavenworth. The Biddles have said they owned the dog since 2003.

Trudy Biddle told Monson on Thursday the family believed Buddy had been killed by a cougar spotted on their 8-acre property.

“We actually had found fresh bones during that same few days that were of a size that led us to believe that,” Biddle said. “So that is actually what we thought, that he’d simply died on our property.”

Monson asked Buddy’s new owner if she’d be willing to return him to the Biddles in exchange for another dog.

“I think the loser on that would be this dog,” the woman said. “I’m not going to denigrate the Biddles, but I have received information since all this chaos happened about how this dog was treated.”

She said she heard the dog was kept in a barn on the Biddles’ property.

Monson said he believed the Biddles were loving pet owners, but that didn’t sway Buddy’s new owner, who said she was beginning to feel pressured during the interview.

Monson told her he would make sure she could get another Blue Healer and offered to cover the adoption fee.

“In all honesty, you’ve acknowledged that that’s the Biddles’ dog. I’m trying to help out here. If you say no, I think the chaos is going to intensify,” Monson said.

The woman declined to comment further. She ended the conversation saying, “I thank you for the opportunity and I will pursue everything I need to pursue to keep him safe.”

Monson called Trudy Biddle to get her reaction to statements made by the new owner. She said she’s sympathetic to the woman, but wants Buddy returned.

“I understand she’s hurting. I understand her pain. I’ve tried to be super sensitive to the pain that she’s experienced, but I’m just asking her to do what she knows is right. She doesn’t know me. I haven’t contacted her. I haven’t harassed her. I’m simply asking her to do what is right.”

Biddle said many people would vouch for how well-treated Buddy was and said the woman must have seen his belongings in the barn during another news report. She said they’ve been storing his bed out there until the children were ready to say goodbye.

“My daughter did not want anything washed … until she could just touch it and smell it one more time. So we left that just in case,” Biddle said.

She said they will do whatever they have to do to get Buddy back and they are looking at their options. Biddle did have a message for the woman:

“What I would like to say to her is there are dogs that are truly not loved and abused. This is not the case here and I beg her to just return him so that not only her life gets back to normalcy and chaos stops for her, wherever she feels she’s getting that, but so that we can actually have peace in our family and have Buddy back.”

Biddle said it was hard to think they’d lost Buddy once and it’s heartbreaking to know now that he’s alive and not with them.

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Family fighting to reclaim dog mistakenly adopted out