Police in North Carolina have charged Katharine F. Lemansky, 45, with animal cruelty after she posted a photo on Facebook of her chocolate lab-mix with its mouth taped shut with duct tape. On Friday, Katharine F. Lemansky, who uses the name “Katie Brown” on Facebook posted the picture of her chocolate lab-mix with the caption that said “This is what happens when you don't shut up!!!" On Monday, Lemansky was charged with cruelty to animals by the Cary Police Department after she told police that the incident took place in North Carolina. “Taping the dog's muzzle shut was a terrible decision on Ms. Lemansky's part, and charging her with animal cruelty under North Carolina law was the right thing to do," Cary Police Captain Randall Rhyne said in a release on Monday. Because animal cruelty is a misdemeanor charge, Lemansky was not arrested or taken to jail. "At the same time, it's important to also note that our animal control officers who physically examined both Brown and her littermate found the dogs to be very well cared for, which is why we did not and could not remove them from the owner. "The dogs are current on their shots, spayed and microchipped," Rhyne said. "They are clean and well-nourished and appear to be comfortable in their surroundings." And there were no signs of injury to Brown's muzzle, not even detectable hair loss,” Rhyne said. On Saturday, Avon police said they went to the address that she had lived at but she reportedly hasn’t lived there for some time. It resulted in hundreds of calls, Facebook messages and emails to the South Daytona Police Department from places as far away as Australia, causing the department's email server and computers to crash.
– A woman who attracted the wrath of animal lovers around the world with a Facebook photo of a dog with its muzzle duct-taped shut has been tracked down. Police in Cary, NC, say Katharine Lemansky, who posted under the name "Katie Brown," was charged with animal cruelty but is being allowed to keep her two dogs because they appear to be very well cared for and are clean, well-nourished, "current on their shots, spayed, and microchipped," WFSB reports. "Taping the dog's muzzle shut was a terrible decision," a police spokesman says, but animal control officers who examined the chocolate-lab mix found no sign of injury, "not even detectable hair loss." Lemansky, 45, is due in court Dec. 14 and could get up to 150 days in jail, the Orlando Sentinel reports. In South Daytona, Fla., where Lemansky used to live, police say they spoke to investigators in two other states after receiving a deluge of complaints about the photo over the weekend. A spokesman for the Volusia County Sheriff's Office tells the Daytona Beach News-Journal that the office dealt with more than 1,000 phone calls and a similar number of Facebook messages, which he tried to respond to individually. The "greatest burden fell to our extraordinarily patient dispatchers, who picked up hundreds of repetitive, emotionally charged phone calls, dealt with them appropriately, and continued to run a highly organized and efficient dispatch operation for our entire county," he says. (A Texas woman was arrested after posting photos of her neighbor's diapered dog.)