Pet shop employee fired after video shows dog thrown to concrete floor

Yelp reviews claim similar instances have occurred before

A dog store employee has been fired after a video showed the worker throwing a dog across the room where it landed on its head.

In the video, several dogs can be seen playing and running around on the concrete shop floor in Bark n’ Bitches Dog Boutique in Los Angeles, California.

After one dog begins to play aggressively, a worker grabs the dog by its neck and throws it several feet.

The employee’s behaviour is immediately met with shock by other people in the store, who gasp and run over to see if the dog, who is hiding under a table, is okay.

While the dog seems to be awake following the incident, it does not get up or move out from under the table as people begin to stroke its head.

Following the “unacceptable” attack, the dog boutique’s social media was flooded with comments from people outraged by the employee’s behaviour.

“Animal abuse is now a felony. That employee needs to be arrested, all animals in your care need to be rescued and your business needs to seriously reconsider how it’s going to be run,” one person wrote.

The boutique has since issued multiple apologies for the incident on social media.

“My deepest apologies for this incident,” the owner Shannon von Roemer wrote on Twitter. “The dog was playing and acting normal after this horrific incident. She is at the vet right now being checked out to assure she is okay.”

On Instagram, the boutique said that it will “not tolerate this or any actions that put our rescues in harm's way” and that the “appropriate actions had been taken”.

In a follow-up video, von Roemer again addressed the “horrific, intolerable incident,” claiming that it was the first time it had happened in the shop’s fourteen years of business.

Promising that actions “will be taken to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” she continued: “I do want you to know that the employee is no longer with us and the dog is actually doing fine.”

Despite her assurances, people demanded that the former employee be investigated for animal abuse.

Someone else pointed out that on Yelp, where the store has been flooded with one-star reviews, a past review from 2018 alleges a similar incident.

“I literally watched an employee pick up a medium-sized dog and slam it from mid-air onto the ground and scream at it,” the review reads.

The Independent has contacted Barks n’ Bitches for comment.