By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

Three rifle bullets have ended the promising career of Air Buddy, the record-setting, long-jumping competition dog.

Buddy and his pal paid the price for an attack on a neighbor’s calf that left the animal dead.

The pooch’s untimely demise – just before his fourth birthday – and that of his young bull mastiff protégé, Thunder, left owner Zane Capen, 18, distraught.

“The only thing that matters here is that he’s not here. That horrors me,” Capen said Tuesday.

Capen adopted Buddy, a white and black bull mastiff/Dalmatian mix, in 2002 from the Androscoggin Humane Society in Auburn.

“That dog didn’t deserve to have a bullet in his head. He deserved to have one more front-page spread. He had the nationals in Nashville coming up – for all the money – and we were in training. He just didn’t deserve it,” Capen said, overcome by emotion during a telephone interview from his home in Litchfield.

On May 31, Capen’s Buddy, and Thunder, an 11-month-old bull mastiff owned by Capen’s pregnant girlfriend, Morgan Cravitz, escaped from their pen at the couple’s Litchfield apartment on Richmond Road.

Capen and Cravitz moved there three weeks earlier to get Buddy closer to ponds where the dog would practice jumping.

The dogs weren’t gone long, said Capen. He was at work painting and cutting wood when Cravitz arrived with bad news.

Litchfield Animal Control Officer Marty Lord said the couple’s neighbor and landlord, Roger MacWhinnie, said Buddy and Thunder attacked one of his penned calves, critically injuring it.

The calf died the night of the attack, Capen said, but he said it wasn’t his dogs. He blamed coyotes.

Lord and MacWhinnie claimed otherwise.

“Both dogs got in there and did a number on that poor little calf,” Lord said.

“That calf was bit up too badly. Meat was taken right off the ear. It was not coyotes. The farmer seen the attack and had to chase the dogs out of the pen,” Lord said.

Capen disputes that. Calls to MacWhinnie were not returned.

Lord said MacWhinnie wanted the dogs’ owner to foot the veterinarian bill, which Capen said was $800 he didn’t have. He also didn’t have the $1,000 to have the dogs quarantined in a kennel for 10 days, then euthanized. After that, the dogs’ heads had to be severed and taken to an Augusta lab to be tested for rabies.

“I have a kid on the way, and we’re barely getting by. I didn’t know what to do,” said Capen. He blamed his decision to end the dogs’ lives himself on his disease.

“With bipolar, you don’t think. Everything is just at the spur of the moment. I didn’t know what to do. I had just turned 18, and I’ve got to go shoot my best friend,” he said.

He drove Buddy and Thunder to his uncle’s place in Livermore at Brettuns Pond, where Buddy had spent hours training before setting a new distance-jumping world record in September 2004 in Chicago for mixed breed dog – 23 feet, five inches.

Capen killed Thunder first, using a .22-caliber Magnum rifle.

Then he tied Buddy up, but was overcome by emotions. He “let him play” for a while before taking aim.

After being shot twice in the head, Buddy broke his leash and bolted for Capen’s car, Capen said. It took a third bullet to put him down.

Three days later, rabies tests on the dogs’ heads came back negative.

“It’s hard to go to bed at night and not have his head on the side of the bed, not be there when I wake up in the morning. He slept on the bed with us. He was not a vicious cow killer,” he said.