Helen was back home Monday, battered, beaten and not quite ready to roll in the mud next to Dave and Patty Thomas’ Greenacres home.

A pair of Rottweilers that live down the street jumped into a pen with Helen, the Thomases’s pot belly pig, last Thursday and chewed up the critter pretty badly.

The 6-year-old pig tried several times to escape its attackers by running up a ramp leading to its house, but each time the dogs grabbed it at the door and dragged it back down. The dogs shredded the pig’s ears, bit an eye and tore a gash in its hind end before animal control officer Jennifer Kline could tear them away.

“It would try to hide its head and they’d pull it out,” Kline said.

The pot belly pig survived the attack, but needed several stitches to close its wounds. Vet bills totaled $255.

Much to the Thomases’s chagrin, both dogs - Athena and Max - were returned to their owner, Bonny Dixon. The Thomases, who have two children, ages 8 and 10, live two houses from Greenacres Junior High, and the bus that carries children to Progress Elementary stops at the corner.

“Why do they have to bite two people before they do something?” Patty Thomas asked.

Nancy Sattin, county animal control director, said the problem is with the law, not the department.

Officers cited Dixon, 29, for two counts each of owning a dog with vicious propensities, a criminal misdemeanor, allowing her dogs to run at large, and allowing them to threaten a domestic animal.

However, animal control is not allowed to keep the dogs unless they bite a person or kill an animal, Sattin said.

Dixon also was cited because neither dog had a current rabies inoculation or was licensed. She has promised to pay the pig’s vet bills, Patty Thomas said.

, DataTimes