In the Matter of Otis: a twelve-page statement to a village board

Statement of Margaret A. Wysocki, 418 Delmar Street, Village of Halbrook, submitted in advance of the hearing scheduled for July 30, 2026, concerning the determination of the County Animal Control Administrator dated June 22, 2026.

To the Members of the Board:

My name is Margaret Ann Wysocki and I am the owner of the dog Otis, who is the subject of the Administrator’s determination of June 22, and I received that determination by certified mail on June 25, which I signed for at 10:52 in the morning, and I have read it four times. I understand that under 510 ILCS 5/15.3 I have thirty-five days from receipt to file in circuit court and that I have not done so, and I want to say at the outset that I am not filing in circuit court because the two attorneys I called both wanted three thousand dollars to start and I do not have three thousand dollars, and because I would rather explain this to people who live in the village than to a judge in Yorkville who has never been down Delmar Street. So I am writing to you instead. I am aware this is not the same thing. I am doing it anyway.

I would also say at the outset that the complainant in this matter is my father, Stanley Wysocki, of Rockford, and that I am not disputing that a bite occurred, or that it broke the skin, or that it required attention at an urgent care on Route 34, all of which happened, and I have the discharge paperwork and it is attached as Exhibit A. I dispute the characterization. I dispute the word unprovoked, which appears twice in the Administrator’s report and which is the entire basis for the finding, and which I do not believe any person who was in my kitchen on June 6 would use.

I apologize in advance for the length of this. I read deeds for a living. I have been a title examiner for the county for nineteen years and it has ruined my ability to leave anything out.

I. THE HOUSE

I mention the house because the Administrator’s report describes the property as “the residence” and because I think it matters where a thing happens.

418 Delmar was built in 1911 by a man named Albert Vosberg who worked for the interurban, and I know this because I pulled the chain myself out of curiosity in 2014, which is the kind of thing you do once and then cannot stop doing. Vosberg to Vosberg’s widow, to a family named Hurst in 1938, to the Hursts’ daughter, to a bank in 1979, to my grandmother Helen Wysocki in 1981, and to me in 2019 by transfer on death instrument, which she executed herself in 2016 at Nowak’s office on Main and which is recorded at Document 2016R0034811 and which is clean. I want that on the record because of what comes later. It is clean. There is no encumbrance on it and there never has been and it does not require anybody’s signature to stay that way.

The kitchen is at the back and it has the original floor, which is fir, which is soft, which is why there are dents by the sink where somebody’s mother stood for forty years, and there is a table that seats four and a door to the back porch that does not latch right in humidity. I am going to refer to that door again so I am telling you about it now.

II. THE DOG

Otis came from the county shelter in Sandwich on October 3, 2019, which was six days after I moved into the house and about four months after my grandmother died. He had been surrendered by a family in Plano who gave the reason as “moving” and he had heartworm, stage two, and he went through the immiticide protocol in November and December of that year, which for those unfamiliar means he could not run or climb stairs or get his heart rate up for eight weeks, and he spent that entire winter in a laundry room being told to be calm by a woman who was not calm. He was called Rufus at the shelter. He did not answer to it. He answers to Otis and has since the second day.

He is fifty-eight pounds. The Administrator’s report says seventy, which is not correct, and I have a printout from Dr. Sanjay Bhatt at Halbrook Veterinary dated May 2 of this year showing 58.4 pounds, and I recognize that twelve pounds is not the issue before the Board but it is in the report and the report is what people will read, and I would like the record to be accurate about a dog that is being described as dangerous.

I had him DNA tested in 2021 because a woman at the dog park told me he was a Plott hound and I did not believe her. He is 22.4% American Pit Bull Terrier, 18.1% German Shepherd Dog, 9.6% Chow Chow, 7.2% Australian Cattle Dog, and 42.7% what the company calls “Supermutt,” which is their term for ancestry too far back and too broken up to name, and I will say that I found that percentage upsetting for about a week and then decided it was the most honest thing anybody had ever put on paper. He is not a Plott hound. He has never been a Plott hound.

I am attaching as Exhibit C a list of every person who has been inside 418 Delmar since October 2019 and the date each of them came, because the Administrator’s report states that Otis “has limited socialization,” and I want to address that directly. The list has, I believe, one hundred and forty-one entries. It includes Ron Kessler, who has carried our mail since before I owned the house and who gives Otis a biscuit at the door and has for six years. It includes the substitute carrier in August 2023 whose name I do not have, a young man Otis had never seen, who came up the walk while I was in the yard, and Otis barked twice and then sat down and let him pass, and I am including that specifically because it is the closest thing to an incident in six years and it is a dog barking at a stranger. It includes Dave Wiencek from Wiencek Heating who was in my basement for four and a half hours in February 2022 with a torch. It includes both of Angela Petrusiak’s grandchildren, one of whom was two and a half at the time and who took hold of Otis’s ear with a whole fist and pulled it, in my kitchen, in front of me and in front of Angela, and Otis got up and walked into the front room and lay down under the piano. That is what he does. He leaves. That is his entire vocabulary for being unhappy and it has been for six years and there are one hundred and forty-one people who can tell you so.

III. JUNE 6

I want to be careful here because this is the part that matters and because I have gone over it enough times that I no longer entirely trust my own version, so I am giving you the parts I can support.

My father called my cell phone on March 3 of this year for the first time since 2015. I did not answer. He called again on March 4, and on March 11, and then not again until April, and then more often. My sister Deborah, who lives in Machesney Park and who I do not blame for any of this, called me on May 19 and told me that he had been to a lawyer about my grandmother’s house on Lawn Avenue in Rockford, which is a separate property from mine and which was sold in 2018 and is not before this Board, and that there was a question about the proceeds, and that what he wanted was for me to sign a quitclaim deed. I told her that a quitclaim deed conveys whatever interest the grantor has, without warranty, and that a person who asks you for one is asking you to give up a claim without telling you the size of the claim, and that I would know, because I have read nine thousand of them. She said he just wanted to talk. I said all right.

I want to be clear that my father did not strike anyone and I am not alleging that he did.

He came on Saturday June 6 at 2:37 in the afternoon. The Administrator’s report says approximately 2:40 and I am correcting it to 2:37 because my doorbell camera stamps the file and I have it. Deborah was not there; she had said she would come and then she called at 12:50 and said she couldn’t and we talked for nine minutes, and then she called again at 1:40, and again at 2:14, and I am putting those calls in because of Section V below.

Before I go on I want to correct something about Exhibit C. My father is not on that list. He had been in this house a great many times when it was my grandmother’s, but not once since it came to me in 2019, and so he does not appear on it, and I want to flag that myself rather than have someone find it, because the list is offered as evidence of who this dog has met and I do not want the Board to think I left anybody off.

I will list the day as it happened, since the report does not.

It had stormed hard from about six in the morning to about ten, the kind with the long rolling ones, and Otis does not like thunder and had spent most of it in the hallway. The smoke detector at the top of the stairs had started its low-battery chirp on Thursday and I had not changed it, which was my fault, and it went off roughly every forty seconds for two days. I ran the vacuum around noon because my father was coming, which I recognize is a stupid reason to run a vacuum and I ran it anyway. Deborah called three times. Otis did not eat his lunch, which he has done maybe six times in six years and every one of those times there was a storm.

My father came in the front and I took him to the kitchen because the front room has my grandmother’s chairs in it and I did not want him in there. Otis was in the kitchen, on the floor by the stove, which is where he is. My father did not greet the dog and the dog did not greet him and I want to say plainly that nothing happened for the first eighteen or nineteen minutes. He had the papers in a folder from the lawyer’s office in Rockford. I read them. They were what Deborah said they were. I told him what a quitclaim was, in the plain way I tell it to people at the counter, and he told me he knew what it was, and I told him then he knew what he was asking, and it went from there.

It got loud. I am not going to characterize the volume in a way that helps me, so I will say only that my next-door neighbor Angela Petrusiak was on her back porch and heard it and has provided a statement, which is Exhibit D, and which the Board should read, because she is seventy-six and she has no reason on earth to lie for me.

Otis got up at some point in there and moved from the stove to the doorway of the back porch and he stood there. He did not bark. Angela’s statement says she did not hear a dog until the very end and she was twenty feet away with her window open.

That is the door I told the Board about in Section I, the one that does not latch right in humidity, and June 6 was humid, and it was standing open about four inches the whole afternoon. Otis has pushed that door with his head and gone out into the yard by himself probably two hundred times. He does it in thunder. He did it that morning during the storm. It was four inches open and he was standing in it and he did not go out of it, and I have thought about that more than I have thought about anything else in this, and I do not have an explanation for the Board that would sound like evidence, so I am just putting it down.

What happened at 3:04 is that my father stood up out of the chair and put his hand and forearm out across the table, over the papers, in my direction, and he was still talking, and Otis crossed the kitchen and bit his right hand and let go.

He let go. I am putting that by itself because the report does not put it anywhere.

The wound is documented in Exhibit A. There are two punctures on the back of the hand between the second and third metacarpals and one on the palm side and the deepest measured four millimeters, and there is no tearing, no laceration in any direction, no bruising pattern consistent with holding on. Under the Dunbar scale, which is the standard scale for this and which the Administrator’s office does not appear to use, that is a Level 3, and I will quote it: one to four punctures from a single bite, no puncture deeper than half the length of the dog’s canine teeth. Otis’s canines are twenty-one millimeters. Four is not half of twenty-one.

A dog that intends damage does not leave you a four-millimeter hole. He had a man’s hand in his mouth and he gave it back. I understand that this is not a distinction that matters much to the person whose hand it was and I am not asking anybody to be grateful, I am asking the Board to look at what the animal chose to do with the six or seven seconds it had.

IV. REGARDING THE ACCOUNT OF MR. WYSOCKI

I have read my father’s statement to the Administrator, which was taken by phone on June 11, and I want to respond to three things in it and then I will leave it.

He states that the animal “came at him from across the room without warning.” I have addressed the warning. The dog left the middle of the room, went and stood in a doorway, and stayed there for approximately eleven minutes. In dog terms that is not the absence of warning. That is the only warning a dog has that does not involve teeth, and he gave it for eleven minutes, to two adults, in a small kitchen, and neither of us was looking.

He states that he “was not touching anything of hers.” That is correct and I have never said otherwise.

He states that I “have always had a temper about the Lawn Avenue property.” I do not think that is a question for this Board and I am not going to argue it here. I am including it because the Administrator’s report cites his statement as a whole and I would rather you know what is in it.

V. TRIGGER STACKING

I retained Dr. Kathleen Moraga, who is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, which is a board certification requiring a veterinary degree and a residency, and who is not a trainer with a website, and who charged me seven hundred and fifty dollars for two sessions and a written evaluation, which I paid on a card, which is Exhibit B, and I would ask the Board to actually read it and not just note that it exists.

The concept I want to explain is trigger stacking, and I am going to explain it properly because I did not understand it in June and I think if I had understood it in June we would not be here.

A dog has a threshold, which is the point past which it stops being able to make choices and starts reacting. Below the threshold it can think. Above it, it can’t. Every stressor a dog experiences raises cortisol, and the cortisol does not clear when the stressor stops. It takes hours. For an anxious dog it can take a day or more. So the stressors do not happen one at a time and get resolved one at a time. They stack. And a dog that has absorbed four things over eight hours will react to the fifth thing in a way that looks, to a person who only saw the fifth thing, completely insane and out of nowhere.

Here is what was stacked on my dog by 3:04 that afternoon: four hours of thunder, forty-eight hours of a smoke alarm chirping every forty seconds, a vacuum, a skipped meal, a stranger in the house, and a woman he has lived with for six years whose voice was doing something it does not do.

I put that last one in the list on purpose. Dr. Moraga’s evaluation is explicit that the handler’s state is a stressor and not a background condition, and she uses the word “primary” about it, and I have read that page more times than the rest of the report combined.

And I want to say something here about the word unprovoked, which is the word the whole determination turns on. I looked it up in the ordinance and it is not defined. In the state act it is not defined either. So it appears to mean whatever the officer writing the report thinks it means, and what it appeared to mean on June 22 was that nobody had hit the dog. Nobody had hit the dog. Nobody hit anyone. I understand that. But a standard that only counts what is done to the animal, in a room where the animal is not the thing being threatened, is not a standard, it is a shortcut, and I do not think a dog should be put down over a shortcut.

VI. WHAT I AM ASKING FOR

I am not asking the Board to vacate the finding. I want to be very clear about that because I do not want anyone to think I am here to argue that nothing happened.

A bite happened. My dog bit a person in my house and I was the one holding the other end of the situation and I was not paying attention to him, and I have thought about that every day since June 6, and if the Board wants to find that this dog bit a person, the Board would be correct.

What I am asking is that the finding be entered as dangerous and not vicious, which under the act is the difference between conditions and euthanasia. I will accept every condition. I have already done most of them. He is microchipped and has been since 2019, chip number is in Exhibit A. He is neutered. I have obtained the liability policy, which is a hundred thousand dollars, which is a rider on my homeowner’s and which cost me two hundred and ninety dollars a year and which is in force as of July 8, and the certificate is attached. I have put the sign in the front window, the actual one from the county, not a printed one. I have bought the muzzle, which is a basket muzzle in size large, and I have been conditioning him to it in five-minute sessions since the twelfth of July per the protocol in Exhibit B, and he tolerates it for seven minutes as of last night. I will build the enclosure. I have a quote from Kroll Fence for fourteen hundred dollars for six-foot cedar around the back, which I do not have yet but I will have it by October and I will show the Board the receipt.

He has not been off my property since June 6 and he will not be. I am not asking anybody in this village to take a risk on my account. I am asking to be allowed to keep a fifty-eight-pound dog behind a fence I pay for, in a house nobody else has a claim on, under every restriction the county wants to put on me, for whatever years he has left, which Dr. Bhatt says is probably four.

VII. IN CONCLUSION

I have gone on much longer than I meant to and I apologize to the Board for the length, and I am aware that a shorter statement would probably have served me better, and I could not find a place in the middle of it where the parts I cut would not have been the parts that mattered.

I have been in front of this Board twice in nineteen years, both times about a variance for the Kaminski estate on Third, and I know that most of what comes across your table is fences and sheds and a person who is angry about a neighbor’s tree. I know what this looks like from where you are sitting. A woman with a twelve-page letter about her dog.

Otis is six or seven years old, the shelter was not sure. Dr. Bhatt thinks seven. He has a spot on his chest that is white and shaped like nothing and everybody says it is shaped like something. He carries one specific rope toy from room to room and puts it down wherever he settles and he has done it since the laundry room, when he was not allowed to run and did not understand why, and I would sit on the dryer at one in the morning and read to him out of whatever was in my hand, the assessor’s newsletter, a plat book, it did not matter what, because it was the only thing that made him lie down.

I am asking you not to kill him for the one time in six years that he did not leave the room.

Respectfully submitted, Margaret A. Wysocki 418 Delmar Street, Halbrook

ADDITIONAL NOTE

One thing I left out of Section III because I could not find where to put it.

After it happened, my father went to the sink and ran his hand under the water and I got the towel, and we did not say anything for about a minute, and then he said “you’re going to have to get rid of that dog,” and I said no, and that is the entire reason there is a complaint. He did not go to urgent care for two hours. He went at 5:20. He drove home to Rockford first, forty-one minutes, and then came back down Route 34 past two hospitals to an urgent care in this village, and I would ask the Board to consider what a person is doing when they do that.

I have not spoken to him since June 6 and I have not signed anything.

ONE FURTHER NOTE

The Administrator’s report describes Otis’s behavior as unpredictable, and it uses that word twice, and I want to put one more thing in the record and then I am finished.

Since March 3, which is the night my father called the first time, Otis has slept in the upstairs hallway, across the bedroom door. Not in the bedroom, which is where he slept for six years. Not in the crate, which he likes. In the hall, on the floor, against the door, and when I moved his bed in there he would not use the bed, he lay on the boards next to it. I have tried three times. He is fifty-eight pounds and he is seven years old and the floor up there is the same fir as the kitchen and it is not soft enough for that.

The word in the report is unpredictable. He has done the same thing every single night for four months and he started it the night the phone rang, and I had not said one word about it to anybody yet, not to Deborah, not to Angela, not out loud in my own house, so I would ask the Board to tell me which part of that is unpredictable.

I would like the record to reflect where he sleeps.

M.A.W.