At some point last night, someone smashed in the glass front door of Medallion Animal Clinic on Northwest Highway with a rock and stepped into the lobby. They rifled through the cabinets and drawers in the reception area, opted not to walk to the back of the clinic, which would have required passing the kennel full of howling dogs, then left empty-handed.
Around the same time, just on the other side of White Rock Lake, someone broke through the glass door of A & B Animal Clinic on Garland Road. The same thing happened a couple of miles to the southeast.
All told, burglars have broken into six Dallas animal clinics in four days. In each case they smash through the glass, causing several hundred dollars worth of damage, and in each case they come away with nothing, save for the $40 they made off with from A & B.
The obvious conclusion is that some drug-addled lunatic is smashing into vet clinics in search of narcotics, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A & B's Dr. Jim Ahumada said vets don't keep the hard stuff on hand, at least in any quantity. Drugs are easy to trace, too, if a thief tries to sell it. Even flea and heartworm medications can be easily tracked by drug companies.
More than that, there doesn't seem to have been much of an effort to actually get hold of any medication.
"I don't understand it," Ahumada said. "I myself think here somebody got some deranged street person" camping out at the lake who decides he needs a little spending money.
It's a bizarrely common phenomenon, considering that the thieves rarely steal much of anything. The owner of Buckner Terrace told police that it happens every six months, almost like clockwork: someone comes in, rifles through drawers, and leaves empty-handed.
"Sometimes they don't even come in," said Tiffany, a receptionist at Medallion. "They just smash the window."
Sometimes, of course, they do. Tiffany remembers one break-in several years ago in which the burglar was going through Medallion's filing cabinet. The dogs in the kennel were barking so loudly that he didn't realize when police entered the building.
So, to review, breaking into vet clinics is a) risky and b) not very rewarding, yet it still seems to be a thing.
"Why somebody's stuck on vet clinics is beyond me," Ahumada said.
