“Today my dog, my partner, was killed at point blank,” the message began.

On Monday, Valley Calderoni and Markie Blackburn, colleagues from an animal rehabilitation center, had taken Calderoni’s 4-year-old dog, Kaoru, and nine other dogs for a walk that ended near Lake Lucille in British Columbia, Canada.

“The hike was amazing; the dogs were so well behaved, training went beautifully,” Calderoni wrote on Facebook.

As they were finishing up, she began to put the dogs back on leashes.

Then the crack of a gunshot turned her day into any dog owner’s nightmare.

“It was so loud, my instinct made me crouch down,” she wrote. Next, she looked up.

“I see my dog, and she was bleeding,” Calderoni told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News. “I turned around and said, ‘Markie, oh my God, my dog has been shot.’”

The white and speckled gray coat of the dog, a Tamaskan breed, was splattered with…