He weighs 110 pounds and answers to a name that sounds like a punchline. Sergeant Snuggles, a year and a half old Anatolian Shepherd who used to lie down next to the family’s older dog when the older dog got anxious, like he understood something about comfort that most humans forget by the time they’re thirty. Two little kids called him Snuggles because that’s what he did. He cuddled. On a ranch style property outside Tucson he did what his breed has been doing for three thousand years, watching, alerting, standing between the people he loved and whatever showed up in the dark.
Since October 2025 he’s been sitting in a kennel at Pima Animal Care Center, waiting to find out if the county is going to kill him over one bite, on his own property, with no prior history of aggression behind it. The family’s first run through the legal system didn’t go well, and by May a woman named Alexandra Zacovic, organizing out of Chandler, had started a GoFundMe because the lawyer they’d had wasn’t enough and the clock on the next appeal was already running. That’s where most of what follows comes from, the county’s own memo on one side, and on the other side a fundraiser page written by people who watched this dog get sentenced to death and decided the only thing left to do was ask strangers for help.
Let’s not pretend the bite was nothing. It wasn’t. Pima County says the victim suffered facial lacerations, scalp wounds, injuries to her arm, leg and groin area, and needed stitches, staples and plastic surgery. That’s a body that got hurt badly. Nobody gets to wave that away with a petition link and a sad photo of a dog with his head on his paws.
But here’s the thing that keeps gnawing at me. Serious doesn’t automatically mean unmanageable. That’s the assumption baked into every line of the county’s memo, and it’s the assumption nobody in power wants you to look at too closely, because looking at it too closely means admitting there might have been another way.
The county’s version, laid out in a memo released after the public started asking questions: Tucson Fire called PACC on October 7, 2025. Snuggles was tied out. A family member had walked past him carrying another pet, and according to PACC, had passed him several times before that, petting his head, calling him a good boy. Then the attack happened, and according to the county it didn’t stop until the victim used her own tie out to roll away from him.
Zacovic’s fundraiser tells it differently, and it’s the version that’s been doing the heaviest lifting in the family’s defense. Snuggles wasn’t just standing around when this happened. He was actively guarding the home against coyotes, locked into the kind of alert state his breed is built for, when a person approached him mid watch and provoked him. According to the campaign, that same person later testified in court that the incident was her own fault.
If that testimony actually exists, it should have changed everything. A guardian breed reacting while it’s already wound tight in a defensive posture is a different animal, legally and morally, than a dog that bit someone for no reason at all. That distinction is supposed to be the entire point of a vicious dog hearing, the difference between a threat and a mistake. The fundraiser says it never got the weight it deserved. More than a hundred character witness statements, never presented to the court. A professional behavioral evaluation, not properly considered. The family’s own legal representation at the hearing, by their account, simply wasn’t equipped to make the case that needed making.
I can’t independently verify all of that from here, and nobody writing about this from a keyboard hundreds of miles away can either. What I can say is that if even half of it is true, this wasn’t a fair fight the first time around. It was a county with a standing legal apparatus and unlimited time against a family trying to save their dog with whatever attorney they could find on short notice, and now they’re trying again with better representation because, by their own telling, the first round failed Snuggles before it ever got to the merits.
A livestock guardian dog expert reportedly reviewed the case separately and said the reaction tracked with the breed, the age, the circumstances on that property. Shelter staff, the people with the least reason to be sentimental about an animal taking up a kennel for eight months, have said it themselves, in their own words, the kind of line that ends up on a fundraiser page because it’s too good not to use. He is incredibly sweet, gentle, and kind. Write that down. A county employee, on the clock, in a building full of dogs nobody wants, picked this one out as the good part of her shift.
None of that erased the court process. Tucson City Court held a hearing on November 24, 2025, found him vicious, ordered him forfeited to PACC for euthanasia. The family appealed. Superior Court denied the petition on March 26, 2026, finding the lower court’s ruling was supported by the record. Then on May 1, 2026, Superior Court set an $11,000 bond, ten days to pay it if the family wanted another shot at an appeal. PACC says it pushed for a lower bond and got told no anyway. The family paid the full $11,000 on May 13, which is around when Zacovic’s campaign went live, because eleven grand doesn’t come out of a checking account for most people, it comes out of a GoFundMe page and whatever else can be sold or borrowed against in ten days. The appeal brief is due June 22, 2026.
So yes, there’s a process. There’s a memo. There’s a paper trail the county can point to and say, see, we followed the rules. I’m not disputing that they followed the rules. I’m asking whether the rules were built to find an answer other than death, or whether they were built to make death look procedural enough that nobody has to feel responsible for choosing it.
The victim’s own statement is where this gets genuinely hard to write around cleanly. PACC says that in the hospital, right after the attack, she told officers she didn’t want to be around Snuggles anymore, wouldn’t return to the house if he came back, worried about the kids. The fundraiser’s version has her further along than that now, wanting him back, saying she never wanted him dead, the same person Zacovic credits with testifying that the bite was her own fault. I don’t know which version is current and which is frozen in a hospital bed with stitches still fresh. What I know is that people say things in shock, hours after the worst day of their year, that don’t necessarily hold once the adrenaline’s gone and the scars have started to flatten out. If her position has genuinely changed the way the campaign says it has, the public has every right to ask whether the county is working off who she is now or who she was on a gurney.
PACC’s memo accuses supporters of spreading false narratives online to pressure the shelter into releasing the dog. Maybe some of that’s true, online campaigns get sloppy and people repeat what they want to be true instead of what’s verified, that’s not unique to this case. But if the county wants to win that fight, the move isn’t a defensive memo. It’s records. The current condition he’s being held in. What enrichment, if any, he’s getting eight months into a kennel stay. What the independent behavioral evaluation actually said, in full, instead of summarized into a footnote. Why neutering, reinforced fencing, hot wire, muzzling and supervision, every restriction the family has already offered in writing, isn’t enough to make a managed return possible.
Because PACC is a county agency. The courts are public courts. The people making this call work for the public, which means the public gets to ask uncomfortable questions and doesn’t have to accept a memo as the final word.
Kids matter. The victim matters. Public safety isn’t an inconvenience to wave off because a dog is cute and a family is sympathetic. But killing a dog with no prior bite history, evaluated by at least one behaviorist as manageable, owned by a family willing to accept every restriction the county could throw at them, shouldn’t be the path of least resistance. It should be the last door after every other one’s been tried and failed, not the first door because it’s the cleanest paperwork.
Eight months in a kennel isn’t a delay for a young dog. It’s most of the life he’s had so far, spent waiting on people to decide if mercy is still a thing the county does. Zacovic’s page has raised $13,267 toward a $20,000 goal from 233 people as of this writing, attorney fees and filing costs and whatever it takes to get that hundred plus character witnesses and the full evaluation actually in front of an appellate court this time instead of buried under a memo. Strangers on the internet putting up twenty and fifty dollars at a time because a county with a budget the family can’t touch decided this was the hill to die on, and somebody had to match them dollar for dollar just to get a fair hearing.
Once they kill him, there’s no appeal that brings him back. That’s the part worth sitting with before anyone signs off on the easy answer, and it’s the part Zacovic is betting strangers will sit with too, twenty dollars at a time, until June 22 stops being a deadline and starts being a date Snuggles actually lives to see.
Since this article was published, Clara Garcia Gastelum, the victim, showed up in the comments section of this piece to say that PACC’s memo is not accurate. Not through a lawyer, not through a statement, in a comment thread, like someone who read something about their own life and couldn’t let it stand. She says she never had plastic surgery, there were no leg bites, and she never repeatedly walked past Snuggles petting him and calling him a good boy, which is the specific detail the county used to frame this as an unprovoked attack on a calm, familiar dog.
“I’m the one involved in the incident and pacc’s memo is not accurate. I never had plastic surgery or had bites on my leg. and never kept going by Snuggles petting him on the head and saying good boy. So many inaccuracies by pacc in their memo.”
-Clara Gastelum
She also submitted a six page letter to the Pima County Board of Supervisors laying out the same thing in considerably more detail, saying Kozachik’s memo misrepresents her injuries, her behavior, and her own words, and that the PACC officer who gathered her statement did so during unannounced hospital visits while she was sedated. The county built its entire public case around a victim who is now saying, on the record, with her name and phone number on the letterhead, that they got her story wrong.
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Check out the laws. I have had 2 dogs that bite 1 time each in their life. The first time cost my insurance company 25k. the second only 2. A dog that bites once should not be put down. Call the ASPCA!
I’m the one involved in the incident and pacc’s memo is not accurate. I never had plastic surgery or had bites on my leg. and never kept going by Snuggles petting him on the head and saying good boy. So many inaccuracies by pacc in their memo.