It’s one thing to give up the throne of England for the love of a woman, but to give up the mayor’s office for a scruffy dog named Puddles?
This is a story that you can file under “Only in Texas.” And the woman at the center of this dog fight insists she would do it again.
“Being the animal lover that I am, I think it’s worth it,” Grace Saenz-Lopez told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira on Thursday from Alice, Texas, where until early this month she had been mayor.
On her lap, oblivious to the international attention he’s generated, a perky Shih Tzu snuggled happily in her hands.
Saenz-Lopez says she rescued the dog, which she has renamed Panchito, when she agreed to care for it when her neighbors, Shelly Cavazos and Rudy Gutierrez, the dog’s owners, left for a short vacation last July. Cavazos and Gutierrez say she stole the pooch, which they had purchased early last year and named Puddles.
Puddles/Panchito was a sick puppy when Saenz-Lopez agreed to care for it last summer. On that, everyone agrees.
He was infested with fleas, and so seriously ill from chemicals used to kill the fleas that a veterinarian had recommended a blood transfusion to save his life. Unable to pay $700 for a transfusion, Cavazos and Gutierrez were treating the dog with vitamins and other medicine.
While on vacation, the original owners called Saenz-Lopez to ask about the dog, and the then-mayor told them Puddles had died. But several months later, a friend told Cavazos that she had seen Puddles at a grooming parlor in a nearby town.
Why, Vieira asked Saenz-Lopez, would she say the dog was dead when he wasn’t?
“Because I knew if he went back in this condition, he would definitely die,” the 64-year-old woman said.
Instead, she hid the dog at her twin sister’s house. When she was found out, she refused to give the dog back. Initially, police would not charge her with theft, but public sentiment in the small town was such that a recall petition was initiated. Before it could go to a vote, Saenz-Lopez, who in January was indicted for stealing the dog, resigned her office.
“I didn’t steal the dog,” she told Vieira. “I did not return him to save his life. I did not steal it. She turned it over to me. I just did not return it. But I did not go to her house and steal it.”
Cavazos said she did not neglect the dog, arguing that she has another dog that’s now 7 years old and two cats.
She left her sick dog with Saenz-Lopez, she said, because, “I trusted her. I knew he was sick. I never thought this would happen.”
“Two wrongs do not make a right,” said Deeann Torres, attorney for Cavazos and Gutierrez, who joined the discussion from nearby Corpus Christi. “She kept the dog when she was only supposed to have her for the weekend.”
Saenz-Lopez, with her own attorney, Homero Canales, beside her, clutched Puddles/Panchito, and insisted the dog was a victim of neglect.
“They cannot take care of it,” he said of her neighbors and former friends. “They will not take care of it. It took time for him to get in such a deplorable state. It was neglect.”
“She knows she did wrong,” countered Gutierrez, who said he never believed Saenz-Lopez when she initially said the dog had died. “She’s just trying to wipe her hands clean of this thing and say she’s a humanitarian. It’s not true. We’ve done nothing wrong in this case. We will continue to fight until we get this dog back.”
“I saved him, and he’s healthy and happy and hopefully I can keep him,” the woman who gave up her office for a pooch told NBC News in an earlier interview. “He was neglected ... I told myself, ‘Little guy, you’re not going back.’ ”