Looks like it'll be at least a year, maybe two, before there's any resolution in the animal-cruelty case against West Hartford resident (and former Chihuahua owner) Alan Weisenberg. That's a long time to have the threat of a year in jail hanging over your head, especially when you insist you're innocent.

But innocence is tough to prove in this case. So is guilt. Problem is, when you're talking about an elderly Chihuahua suffering the normal indignities of old age, there's no firm line you can draw to say "Once she reaches this point, continued existence is a cruelty." We discussed the case with the Humane Society of America and the National Animal Control Association, and they couldn't tell us where to draw the line either. But wherever that line is, West Hartford says Weisenberg crossed it.

Here's what we know thus far: Last Sept. 17, Weisenberg tied his dog Bambi to a tree.

"She wanted to be outside that day," Weisenberg said. "She followed me to the door, and she looked up at me — I'd never left her outside before, but ... it was such a nice day."

So he tied her to a crabapple tree whose sprawling branches shade most of his front yard, and then went to work for a few hours.

At some point Bambi either fell asleep or passed out, and a neighbor called animal control. Weisenberg says he returned home to find Bambi in the custody of animal control officer Karen Jones. He also says Jones made an offer: Euthanize the dog or face criminal charges of animal cruelty (and excessive tethering of an animal, it turned out).

Weisenberg refused. The cops kept Bambi at a vet hospital for 10 days, until Weisenberg's attorney Fred Boland demanded the dog back. Bambi spent her last week of life at home, and died in her sleep on Oct. 5. The arrest warrant came out Oct. 16. Weisenberg turned himself in and had a pre-trial hearing in December. At that time, Judge Gary White and prosecutor Mark Brodsky offered two years' probation, with the stipulation that Weisenberg give up his other pets while serving it.

He refused, and his second court appearance was scheduled for Jan. 15.

This is the fourth story we've done about the late Bambi Weisenberg. Our first one ran in November, and we published an update after Weisenberg's December hearing.

Both stories generated a huge uproar, with commentaters on our site and throughout the blogosphere vociferously siding with either Weisenberg or Jones. So we wrote an opinion piece about that: Why, we asked, do stories about harm done to animals generate so much more outrage than tales of cruelty to humans?

Jan. 15, Weisenberg's court date, was also the last day the opinion column ran in the paper and our Web site's front page.

Court convened at 10 a.m. We got there around 9:45 and found Weisenberg waiting for us in the lobby. In lieu of "hello," he greeted us with a bit of news: "The prosecutor told Fred to stop writing those newspaper articles! He's really pissed."

"Who, Fred?" we asked.

"No, the prosecutor." (Boland later clarified: prosecutor Brodsky understands that Weisenberg has the constitutional right to tell his story to the media, but constitutionality doesn't preclude a behavior's annoying the hell out of the prosecution.)

Despite this exciting beginning, not much happened that day. With numerous cases on the pre-trial docket, Weisenberg's turn to go before Judge White didn't come until after the morning recess. Boland went into chambers to speak with White and Brodsky, while we waited in the lobby with Weisenberg.

Boland came out 20 minutes later. "OK, the prosecution doesn't want your story in the Advocate anymore," he told Weisenberg. "He's pushing for you to do [probation] again. He said, '[Weisenberg's] showing no remorse whatsoever;' I said 'I don't think remorse is appropriate.'"

"I didn't do anything wrong! I loved that little dog!" Weisenberg said indignantly.

"If I ever get arrested around here I am so screwed," we muttered as we wrote this all down. Weisenberg overheard.

"If you get arrested anywhere you're screwed," he said bitterly. "The whole system's corrupt." (Weisenberg's 58 years old, and the Bambi incident was his first run-in with the police. He's grown steadily more cynical in the short time we've known him.)

Boland changed the subject. "[The prosecutor] told me there's about 200 criminal cases in Hartford. He said there will be dozens of hearings."

We went back into the courtroom, and when Weisenberg refused again to plead guilty he got another court date, this one for Feb. 15. Boland explained to his client: "Every day the prosecution is delayed is another day your civil case [against the town] is delayed, because the civil case can't go forward until after the prosecution. ... They're going to delay it as long as possible."

It's not just Weisenberg's civil case that's on hold until the criminal case is resolved; neither Karen Jones nor anyone else from the West Hartford police can (or will) discuss the case while it remains open.

That puts us in an awkward position. There's two sides to every story, and what do you do when only one side can be told? One option is to cobble Jones' side together from what's written in the arrest warrant.

It's a dense document, six typewritten pages long, and describes a dog in horrible health. "Bambi was generally diagnosed as non-ambulatory [unable to walk] with severe muscle atrophy [muscle loss]," the warrant says at one point, and goes on to describe a thin and dehydrated dog with bad teeth, poor eyesight, a heart murmur and paralysis of the back legs, among other problems.

But an affidavit signed by Weisenberg's neighbor Sebastiano Buccheri says the dog could walk; the afternoon of Sept. 17, Buccheri saw Bambi as far from the tree as her rope would allow. He picked her up and carried her back to the base of the tree; at some point she returned to the edge of the sidewalk, where animal control later found her.

As for the warrant's other health complaints: The dog was nearly 19 years old, equivalent to a human centenarian. What 100-year-old woman doesn't have bad teeth, lousy eyes and a weak heart?

Then, too, there's Weisenberg's claim that Jones demanded the dog be killed. (Weisenberg's roommate Rick Bouchard said the same in a signed affidavit.) Jones wrote in the warrant that "Bambi ... seems to have a very poor quality of life. If treatment is not pursued, then [the vet] would recommend that Bambi be humanely euthanized."

Sounds like Jones truly felt the dog was suffering, and offered Weisenberg a deal: "I can arrest you for cruelty, but won't if you put Bambi out of her misery."

Weisenberg couldn't bear to do that. "I've had her since she was a pup. I didn't want to put her down. If she was showing she was in pain, crying or something, then I would've said 'All right.' But she didn't." And Weisenberg's own vet at the non-profit Fox Clinic, who gave Bambi a check-up on Sept. 27 before she was returned to Weisenberg's custody, made no mention of euthanasia.

The Humane Society of the United States has no qualms against euthanasia. We spoke to Dale Bartlett, the society's Deputy Manager for Animal Cruelty, and he said, "If animals are suffering terribly, the Humane Society believes they should be euthanized."

So does the National Animal Control Association. Debbie Dawson is one of NACA's directors, and when we called her to discuss this case and its ambiguities she said, "That is a hard one ... the animals can't speak for themselves as humans could ... we had [a case with] a really old dog, 19 years old, who escaped out the front door, and we took it to the vet and he said 'Whoa, 19 years old, he's lucky he's walking.'"

Neither Dawson nor Bartlett could give a solid answer to the question "Where do you draw the line between actual cruelty versus a forgivable lapse in judgment?"

"If only it were so easy, a line where you could tell," Bartlett said ruefully. "I know nothing about the case, so I can't say if the owner or the animal control officer was out of line."

Dawson said basically the same thing with different words. But she agreed with our "he said/she said" theory behind Jones' alleged euthanasia ultimatum. "So often, it is the perception of what is said, not what was actually said."

Talking to Dawson and Bartlett, it's obvious they pursued their respective careers out of a desire to save animals from suffering. Karen Jones presumably shares that motivation. But any suffering Bambi experienced ended when she died.

Tying Bambi to a tree on Sept. 17 was a bad idea. In retrospect, even Weisenberg agrees. But was it such a bad mistake that he deserves to spend a year in jail for it? Based on the criminal proceedings against Weisenberg, it appears that the town of West Hartford says "yes."

Write to us at editor@hartfordadvocate.com or jabel@hartfordadvocate.com