Colleen Nicholson didn’t sense that anything was wrong when a woman and her five-year-old daughter came to visit. Not at first, anyway. They seemed like perfectly lovely people who wanted to buy one of the Doberman Pinscher puppies Nicholson had listed for sale. The pups were still too young to travel on that day, so the mother and daughter also spent plenty of time with Nicholson’s adult male Doberman, Magnum, and he loved them both. They seemed like the kind of people who would give a dog a great life—the only kind of people Nicholson ever allows to buy puppies from her Kelview Dobermans business in central Pennsylvania, where prices range from $2,400 to more than $3,500 per puppy.

“The puppies were six weeks old, and we hadn’t met her husband,” says Nicholson, whose sister works with her to ensure everything is in place before the puppies grow old enough to leave. “We want to meet everybody. She’d say, ‘Oh, he’s a surgeon, he’s busy,’ but we insisted. They came on a Friday night in separate cars because he was coming from the hospital. He got out of his Mercedes, and he was this little squatty guy, and his posture was just pure arrogance. We brought Magnum out—Magnum, who loves the world—and he stopped short and growled at him. We asked him to wash his hands, thinking maybe it was the antiseptic smell from the hospital, but it didn’t help. So now, our red flag is up. We trust Magnum’s instincts.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry, clearly something is wrong, so I’m going to give you back your deposit,’” Nicholson remembers saying.

The surgeon did not take her decision well.

“He started pacing back and forth and then he started shouting, ‘You can’t do this to me! I can buy whatever dog I want!’” she recalls. “Then I turned my back to get his check, which I hadn’t cashed, and he grabbed a lamp. The mother put the daughter behind her. She’d obviously seen that before. Magnum was by my side. If that guy had gotten any closer. . . .”