After spending more than six months in a cage at Metro Animal Services in Puyallup, Meesha the dog is back at home.

“It was great,” Meesha’s owner Darcie Severson said on Friday. “If she could smile she would be smiling all over the place.”

Meesha, a 2-year-old chow mix, was taken into custody Feb. 11 after she was seen running in the road just 10 days after being labeled a “potentially dangerous dog” for allegedly killing a chicken in a neighbor’s yard.

She has been at Metro ever since, awaiting an appeal by Severson of the Hearing Examiner decision upholding the potentially dangerous dog designation.

Though the city stated the goal was to reuinte Meesha and Severson, because of Meesha’s designation as a dangerous dog, there are several requirements before she could be returned, including the purchase of a dangerous dog license, proper fencing in the yard and a $50,000 surety bond.

On Wednesday, after getting a dangerous dog license and putting in fencing, Severson picked up Meesha and took her home.

According to Bonney Lake police chief Mike Mitchell, she was not yet required to get the bond.

“We haven’t pushed the bond right now,” he said, adding that the wording on Bonney Lake’s ordinance is “not as clear as it should be” regarding a distinction between a “potentially dangerous dog” and a “dangerous dog.”

Mitchell said if Severson loses her appeal at Pierce County July 16, she would be required to get the bond and to get the dog micro-chipped.

Otherwise, Mitchell said Meesha was released because Severson had met the other provisions, something she had not done to this point.

“I couldn’t release the dog when I knew it would go back to the same place,” Mitchell said. “I felt I would be setting them up for failure.”

Mitchell also said that the enclosures Severson added to her property made it easier to release the animal to her.

“She stepped up and improved the property,” Mitchell said. “They’d done a lot of really good work.”

Severson said she plans on debating the need for the bond because in her interpretation, a chicken is a farm animal and not a domestic animal and also because the bond applies only to a “dangerous dog” and not a “potentially dangerous dog,” which was the designation given to Meesha. She signed the paper about the need for a bond, however, because “I just wanted to get my dog out.”

Sccording to the Bonney Lake Municipal Code, dangerous dogs are labeled as such when they attack “domestic animals” while the definition of “small farm animal” includes “domesticated fowl,” proving, in Severson’s eyes, that chickens are not domesticated animals.

Severson said she is “super happy” to have Meesha home, but still feels “sick to (her) stomach” over having to go to court July 16 for the appeal.

“I don’t have any faith in the system anymore,” she said.

Severson also said that in the future, Meesha would remain inside, in the kennel or with her at all times to prevent the possibility of Meesha running free again.

However, even if she wins her appeal, Severson said she is considering finding a new home for Meesha because of the restrictions.

“She can’t even run in the yard,” she said.

For now, however, Severson said she is just happy to have Meesha back at home, where her other animals excitedly welcomed her home and they all slept together in the same room for the first time in months.

It was an outcome that Mitchell said he too was happy to see.

“We were happy to release the dog to its owner,” he said.