Woman’s dog rescue leads to cruelty case

Shana Best had just started working for rancher CJ Tobler on his 50-acre property in Caldwell County, tending to chicken coops and pig stalls, when she found Brock, a French bulldog, lying on a urine-soaked shred of cardboard with piles of feces around him.

Brock was resting on his right side with his front legs skinned from the elbows down, bite wounds on his back legs and face and an abscessed right eye.

“Something in his eyes told me not to leave him behind,” Best said.

She picked up the dog, drove off the property and didn’t look back.

Three years later, Tobler, who ran Owner’s Pride Companion Ani- mals in Lockhart, is to be sentenced July 26 after being convicted of animal cruelty and neglect.

“I am the one who screwed up,” Tobler told the American-States- man in an email. “I am the one who must accept the poor choices that I have made. This happened three years ago. I will be haunted with this for the rest of my life.”

The Texas Department of Licensing and Registration cited Tobler in 2017 for breeding puppies and piglets without a license, said Adalis Cardenas, a member of Bailing Out Benji, an animal advocacy group.

Cardenas’ group recognizes at least five puppy mills and two pet stores that commercially sell dogs from them in the Austin metro area. A map provided by Bailing Out Benji shows most of the known mills concentrated in northeastern Texas.

“Because it’s rare to have a puppy