Many people want and need dogs to do certain jobs for them and indeed part of the reason dogs have evolved so successfully with us is that they have been incredibly useful. They are good hunting partners, they protect our homes and crops and now dogs are doing even more incredible work by detecting human and animal disease and helping conserve our planet – the subject of my new television show that is currently in production. Research has also shown that a dog’s attachment to a human is like a child’s to a parent. In fact dogs behave similarly to young children in that they are more apt to explore new situations and environments when a human they trust is nearby, than if that human is absent.
When the baby’s parents, Hope and Benjamin, hired a sitter to look after their newborn, Finn, their dog, Kilian, instantly realized something was wrong. He would snarl at the nanny whenever she got too close to Finn, as though he instinctually knew she had no place beside a vulnerable member of his family Benjamin and Hope needed to find a nanny to watch over their young child. After doing their due diligence, they thought they’d found the right person. Five months after the sitter was hired, however, the parents began to notice a change in their dog’s behavior. Benjamin reportedly: “He started getting real defensive at first, he would stand in between her and our son, and then gradually turned into more aggression towards her. That’s when Hope really started to notice something’s wrong.”
He later went on to say: “He’s a very personable dog. He’s easy going, an eighty-pound lap dog, so for him to show aggression towards anyone is a sign to use that something’s wrong, because he never shows aggression.” With Hope’s suspicions growing, the couple decided to set an iPhone to record background noise. They left the phone under the couch for seven and a half hours in order to document what was going on when they weren’t around. When Hope played the recording back it was, in her words, “a nightmare”. “For seven and a half hours my son cried nearly the entire time. She was cursing at him, calling him horrible names, and the thing about it is it came for no reason. He wasn’t acting up, he hadn’t been crying until she left him alone in his crib for hours, or, of course, the physical abuse.”
Benjamin and Hope also heard “slap noise” over the audio, and sounds that alluded to the idea that Finn was being shaken. After pleading to assault and battery, the judge sentenced the babysitter to the maximum of three years in prison. In their state, child abusers must add their names to a statewide child abuse registry, which is meant to prevent them from ever again working with children. Dear readers, we are republishing this story to raise awareness about child abuse.