The fighter posted a video on Instagram approximately four months ago showing his dog bloodied and having a damaged ear, which led to an Instagram user asking Weaver about the video, which got the following response from Weaver (via Shakiel Mahjouri of Bloody Elbow):
“One of my homies thought his dog could take mine, so we put them to the test. Lol, mine won but lost a lil’ bit of his ear.”
Weaver says his dog Moses was bloodied after getting too rough during a session with a cousin’s dog.
“My dog wanted to play. Moses is like this. When he sees another dog come up in the yard, if it’s a male dog, he really wants to go, I guess you’d say, ‘check him.’ He would come up and try to play with the male dog real rough. He’s trying to play but he’s not trying to attack it. There is a difference. They lived together in my yard for a week and never fought. His dog was pretty much scared of my dog. Once a dog gets a dominance over another dog, they don’t really want to fight ever. They become friends. But my dog also hasn’t seen this dog in six months and now he’s healthy. I don’t know what he’s been doing with his dog,” Weaver said. “When my dog went up and tried to play with his dog, his dog got aggressive and growled and snapped my dog’s ear off. He took a little piece of my dog’s ear, so now my dog fought him. My dog won. I went over and broke it up. I kicked them and broke them up, but every time I kicked them off they would run up under my legs and fight two or three more times.”
One thing that Weaver is quick to do is denounce dog fighting and all those who participate in the illegal activity.
“I take full responsibility for what happened. I know now that I can’t just post anything because the world isn’t going to take it as just anything,” Weaver said. “It was dumb for me to even reply back to that dude [with] what I said, but you live and you learn. The society I was born in, I was raised around this area in the woods. Dog fighting was a thing at one time. I grew up very scared of dogs. I feel like I’ve beaten my fear by owning dogs. It’s a different breed when you have a dog [whose] daddy was a fighter [versus] a dog whose daddy wasn’t a fighter. When that dog’s dad is a fighter, it’s bred in him. They’ll want to fight any dog when they get to a certain age. My dog is not that dog. He just wants to come up and play... When that dog wants to be aggressive back, then my dog will fight. I don’t agree with anything Michael Vick did. I could not take my dog, Moses, to a dog fight and risk my dog being killed. It would kill me. I wouldn’t be able to live without Moses. He’s like my son,” he assured. “No way I could take him to a dog fight. Even if I had full belief in him, I could not chance that my dog could be killed. I grew up around dog fighting owners. These people are still to this day not good men. They live around me. There is just something evil about them. That’s not me. I don’t have that kind of heart. I can’t just raise a dog and love it and risk its life.”
UFC Fight Night: Woodley vs. Burns takes place on Saturday, May 30 from the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, Nevada with Tyron Woodley and Gilbert Burns headlining. Fightful is providing live coverage of the event, which airs live on ESPN.
