- The assailants shot Ryan Fischer four times, but he's expected to make a full recovery.
- Lady Gaga offered a $500,000 reward for the safe return of the dogs.
For dog owners, a missing or runaway pet is an absolute nightmare. There’s the uncertainty of not knowing where your dog is and the danger of an animal running free in a world with traffic and nefarious individuals. On rare occasions, those nefarious individuals make themselves known. In a straight-from-daytime-TV new story, multiple assailants approached Lady Gaga’s dog walker just before 10 pm Wednesday and shot him four times before stealing two of the dogs while a third ran away.
Doctors expect the dog walker to recover.
Photo by Petr Urbanek on Unsplash
Ryan Fischer, Lady Gaga’s friend and dog walker, is expected to make a full recovery despite sustaining critical injuries. The runaway dog, Miss Asia, was recovered by the LAPD that night.
Lady Gaga is in Italy but issued a statement through her rep offering a $500,000 reward for the dogs’ return, no questions asked. All of Lady Gaga’s dogs are French bulldogs. She received Miss Asia as a gift from her then-fiance, Taylor Kinney. A year later, she got Koji from the same breeder and added Gustav to her pack most recently. It was Koji and Gustav that the gunmen snatched.
Do people know dogs are $50 at the pound?
Photo by Deric Yu on Unsplash
French bulldogs are frequent dog-napping victims since they fetch a high price on the doggy black market. The average Frenchie pup can set you back between $1,000 to $3,000, with reputable breeders of blue and merle varieties getting upwards of $5,000 for a puppy. The litter sizes are small, and the dogs are hugely popular in the states.
It’s unknown if the gunmen knew they were stealing Lady Gaga’s dogs or if they simply saw the dog walker and saw an opportunity to make some fast money. It’s hard to believe that your average dog-napper both carries a gun and will shoot someone four times to make off with a few pups.
Guess there’s not much community in Hollywood.
Photo by Jake Nackos on Unsplash
One of the pop star’s neighbors took a video of the incident but refrained from stepping in to help. In it, two people confront Fischer as he’s walking the dogs, getting out of the back seat of the car. They tell Fischer to “Give it up,” and Fischer calls out for help before the shots are fire and he falls to the ground. The assailants grab the dogs and get back into the car which drives away.
Maybe then the neighbor stepped in to help?
A half-million is no small reward, which might be why the shooters took the dogs. Lady Gaga’s dad made a public statement to also plea for the animal’s safe return saying, “Shooting someone in order to steal dogs is wrong.”
He also asked for the public to “Help us catch these creeps.”