Dog’s death drives woman to advocate pellet gun safety

WASILLA — Denali was a full-grown, healthy Labrador retriever, which is why his owner, Jen Tanner, said she was surprised when he got sick around Christmas time.

“He was just moving super slow with his head between his legs,” Tanner said.

He vomited up his dinner and they put him in a backroom to rest,” she said. When they let him out, “He just went down to the landing and stopped moving.”

Tanner said she’d already talked to a veterinarian and was giving Denali water through a syringe when her husband, Jesse, told her she should probably load Denali in the car.

“It smells like that smell when an animal is dying,” Jen recalls Jesse telling her.

Denali, who would have turned 4 in April, died on the way to the vet. Tanner still has trouble talking about it.

“To me, he was way more than a dog,” she said. “People have that one animal in their lives who is more than an animal, and he was that for me.”

But if the severity of Denali’s sudden illness was shocking, the cause veterinarians found was equally shocking to Tanner, if not more so. In Denali’s abdomen they found a pellet from an air rifle. The pellet had been likely there for days before Denali showed any signs.

“There was no way to know that he had been shot in any way,” Tanner said. “He didn’t act any different.”

Denali was always confined to the Tanners’ yard with an invisible fence. So Tanner said this wasn’t a case of a neighbor trying to shoo him out of their garbage. She thinks it was a prank or maybe carelessness.

“Whoever did it knew once he hit Denali (and) that it hurt him,” she said.

Tanner said her vet told her he sees pellet gun injuries more often than people might think. A quick search of the Internet backs that up — animal deaths due to pellet guns seem to make the news with surprising regularity.

“They see it all the time,” Tanner said. “And it’s a slow, long, awful death.”

Tanner said she was surprised at first to find out a pellet gun could cause that kind of damage to a dog. But since she’s started researching it, Tanner has learned that some pellet guns fire projectiles as fast as a traditional rifle.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, muzzle velocities of pellet guns range from 150 feet per second to 1,200 feet per second. Traditional gunpowder-powered firearms are more in the 750-1,450 range. In 2000, according to the academy’s study, 21,850 people were injured by “nonpowder” guns. Four percent of those injuries required hospitalization. The Consumer Product Safety Commission claims pellet guns kill an average of four people each year in the U.S.

Tanner said she’s seen those statistics, too, and they frighten her.

“I have a 16-month-old daughter,” she said.

These guns are the type of things people give their kids. Indeed, Tanner said, she doesn’t think it’s necessarily a coincidence that Denali died soon after Christmas. She said she wants to raise awareness in the community.

“I don’t think parents really know what they’re buying,” she said.

Pellet guns this powerful, Tanner said, should be treated like any other firearm — locked away from children and unloaded when not in use.

She said she would even count herself an advocate of better regulation. If you need a background check to buy a .22-caliber rifle, she said, what sense does it make to allow just anyone to pick up an equally powerful air rifle?

Tanner said she’s well aware of how that makes her sound, but she’s not anti-gun.

“We hunt. We have guns in our home. It’s not about that,” she said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.