Owner Speaks After Puppy Eats Siblings To Survive

A Chattanooga woman faces animal cruelty charges after officers find five puppies dead and another clinging to life.

The animal control officers say they would have never known about these puppies if they hadn't received an anonymous phone call. And after weeks without food or water, the only puppy who survived is recovering at the McKamey Animal Center, while her owner maintains that she did nothing wrong.

Officer Nick Wilson shows us where Stephanie is recovering just days after officers found her and five dead puppies in a metal shed without food or water.

"The smell, you could smell it, so we obviously knew that the home owners had to have known that these guys were out there in the building," Officer Wilson says.

And that's why Wilson charged the puppies owner, Jenia Taylor, with aggravated animal cruelty.

"I knew that I couldn't take care of them and I'm trying to get rid of them before anything did happen to them," Taylor says.

Taylor says she left several messages asking McKamey officers to come pick the puppies up, but says she never received any phone calls in return.

"For them to say I didn't call anybody and I got proof right here," Taylor says pointing to her phone records. "This is their number where I called and left messages, I done what I supposed to do!"

But Wilson disagrees. He says they never received any messages from Taylor, but says they did receive an anonymous phone call on Wednesday, a call that led them to the shed on Taylor's property.

Officer Wilson says that Stephanie's brothers and sisters had probably been dead for a couple of weeks, and while she has a number of scars, he says that she should return to full health in a couple of months.

"The only way that she has been alive and staying alive is that she probably resorted to eating on the deceased puppies that were in there," Wilson says.

"What sympathy do you have for the puppies?" we ask Taylor. "I have a lot of sympathy for them, I am an animal lover, I used to have a dog," she responds.

A self proclaimed animal lover who now faces cruelty charges, and with Stephanie wrapped tightly and out of harms way, Wilson says he plans to push for a stiff punishment.

Taylor still has the puppies' mom in her possession but tells us that she can't even take care of her - we passed that along to the McKamey officers and they told us they would pick up the dog as soon as possible.