Saving Gracie (8 page)

“This is a pattern we see all too often,” Menaker added in a statement. “Breeders stop registering with us in order to avoid inspection after we take disciplinary action against them. Unfortunately, however, many of these people continue breeding and sell dogs, and register them with a for-profit registry that has no inspection requirements to monitor care and conditions standards.”

His comments drew a stinging rebuke from Margaret “Peggy” Mickelson, a breeder and veteran AKC judge. In a lengthy e-mail she sent to an Internet chat site about Cavaliers—which was swiftly forwarded to other sites—she accused the AKC of willfully ignoring the problems at Mike-Mar Kennel while continuing to accept registration fees paid by Wolf.

“[Wolf’s] facility has been notorious in the dog world for many, many years, AKC inspection or not,” Mickelson wrote. “The only reason AKC is doing anything publicly now is because the world is aware of the conditions. . . .”

For years, Mickelson added, “it was known that [Wolf] kept Pekingese in rows of wire crates stacked one on top of the other so that the rows were five wide and four high, with no flooring to prevent feces and other excrement from falling from top to bottom. The Pekes were never out of the crates except to be bred and to whelp . . . and when there got to be too many, he simply put them down [himself], in terrific numbers, and started keeping the younger ones in the same fashion.”

She ended her e-mail with a flourish. “This whole matter disgusts me from
any
view, and everyone connected with this fiasco should be hung up by their genitals, if they all have them. And that includes the AKC and Mr. Menaker.”

•  •  •

At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 11, the case against Wolf, Trottier, and Hills got under way in the town of Oxford. Presiding was judge Harry Farmer Jr., the same judge who had signed the search warrant authorizing the raid.

The courtroom was so tiny that the defendants had to sit behind their attorneys, in the front row of the spectators’ gallery. Behind them was Trottier’s mother, Wendy. Ten SPCA staffers, representatives of other animal welfare organizations, and a camera operator for a television station filled the rest of the seats. Onlookers unable to find a seat were told to leave. The judge refused to allow spectators to stand in the rear.

Anyone who came expecting instant fireworks was disappointed. At the outset, Farmer questioned the need to have a separate attorney for each defendant. “You got two counsel. Why do you need him here?” he asked, referring to Iannuzzi. After the judge finally acquiesced, the defense then moved to suppress the search warrant the SPCA had used to enter Wolf’s property. The breeders’ attorneys also asked Farmer to recuse himself from hearing the motion on the grounds that he’d signed the search warrant authorizing the raid and might need to be called as a witness. This was news to Farmer. Nobody had told him they intended to call him to the stand. “Now, all of a sudden, you are alleging I have a conflict and, you know, I’m a potential witness. Am I or am I not?” the judge said.

Farmer refused to recuse himself, but the rest of the morning was consumed by the motion to suppress the search warrant. Two days before the raid, Coates argued, Shaw and Siddons had reached an agreement with Wolf whereby he would have a veterinarian examine and vaccinate his dogs, an understanding Coates said Shaw neglected to disclose to the judge when she requested the search warrant. Coates also argued that Shaw took more animals from Mike-Mar Kennel than she had identified in the warrant.

That point was true, but it didn’t constitute grounds for dismissing the case. Finnegan called Siddons to the stand. She asked her to describe the powerful odor of ammonia that struck her when she’d first stepped into Wolf’s home two months earlier.

“The smell was overwhelming,” Siddons testified. Throughout the visit, she said, her eyes watered, she had problems breathing, and she had to retreat three times to compose herself enough to continue.

Inside and outside of Mike-Mar Kennel, Siddons said, she saw heavily matted dogs and feces. Excrement littered the deck outside and overflowed from the dogs’ pens inside. In one of the rooms, soiled newspaper spilled out of a fifty-five-gallon trash can.

When she first glimpsed Trottier and Hills, Siddons said, they were “furiously trying to clean.” Asked what she meant by that, she said, “trying to clean before somebody else gets in there. In other words, being very quick about it, because they knew it needed to be cleaned.”

Coates saw an opening.

“If you have to clean for 137 dogs . . . if you want to do it twice a day, you have to move pretty quickly, right?” he said. “You don’t clean a pen and the dog waits twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours to urinate or poop. It happens all day long, is that right?”

“Yes,” Siddons responded.

“But [the defendants] are not expected to stand there and clean up after every waste, are they?” Coates said.

He interrupted again after Siddons described seeing four dogs each in pens approximately two and a half feet by three and a half feet in size.

“So it wasn’t a crowding situation?” Coates asked.

“No, not as far as size of the dogs was concerned,” the dog warden replied.

Coates asked if Siddons was present when Shaw contacted the veterinarian, Tom Stevenson, to verify that he’d had an appointment with Wolf the day of the inspection, but hadn’t made it for some reason or another. Siddons said she was aware that Stevenson showed up the next day.

Later, Coates asked, “Have you ever cleaned pens before?” Finnegan objected, so Coates rephrased the question. “Can you tell me which of these dogs appears to be the object of cruelty?” Under questioning by Iannuzzi, Siddons conceded that at the time she and Shaw left Wolf’s property that afternoon, she had no plans to remove the dogs.

Siddons stepped down from the witness stand. Other than describing the acrid air inside Wolf’s kennel, she hadn’t done the prosecution any favors.

Finnegan next called Shaw to the stand. The prosecutor walked the officer through the events of February 8—how, upon exiting the van, she’d seen approximately ten dogs in the front yard of the kennel, a handful of dogs in the gated area of the rear residence, several Cavaliers sitting on the couch inside Wolf’s home, and back rooms filled with cages full of dogs. At the rear of Wolf’s house was a deck covered in feces. It, too, was overrun by Bulldogs and Cavaliers.

“Describe what you noticed about the dogs,” Finnegan said to her.

“There were several that were heavily matted,” Shaw replied. “There appeared to be feces, dirt imbedded into the mats. A lot of the dogs had clouded-over eyes. There were a lot of dogs that had a green mucusy-type substance coming from their eye area.”

Some of the crates lacked water. In crates that had water, the insides of the bowl were ringed with slime. The cages were soiled by waste. The smell was overwhelming, Shaw reiterated.

After touring the house and the kennel, Shaw issued Wolf a notice of mandatory corrections, she testified. He needed to provide all animals with clean drinking water, a clean and sanitary environment, and veterinary care for their skin and eye infections. He needed to remove the matting and the dirt from all of the dogs, and he needed to reduce the number of dogs on the premises, possibly by surrendering some of them each week to the SPCA. In any case, Wolf needed to provide documentation for the animals’ whereabouts.

Coates cross-examined her. “Do you know what happens to water containers when there is a lot of iron in the water?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Shaw replied.

“If I told you that there was high iron content in the water, that it would make containers turn brown—”

“Objection,” Finnegan said.

“—It gets brown,” Coates finished.

The defense attorney noted that in the report Shaw filed the day of the inspection, she described the matting and mud on the dogs, but failed to mention the presence of any feces. Coates accused her of ignoring her agreement with Wolf and instead seizing the animals and filing charges against him.

Coates also faulted Shaw for failing to obtain search warrants for two separate properties from the outset. “All they had to do was do it right, but they didn’t,” Coates told the judge. “There’s enough taint there to say that everything has to go—all the pictures, all the photographs, all the dogs, everything . . . because they didn’t give you all the facts.”

The judge didn’t buy it. The inspectors may have had an understanding with Wolf, but that didn’t preclude them from returning to remove the dogs, Farmer said. He denied the motion to end the trial and recessed court until 1:30 p.m.

Chapter 9: Proving Cruelty

Michael wolf’s attorneys had failed to stop the trial. Now, finally, prosecutors could get to the heart of the cruelty charges. Assistant D.A.s Finnegan and Wright felt good about their prospects of winning. They were confident Judge Farmer would find Michael Wolf, Gordon Trottier, and Margaret Hills guilty as charged. The lives of 333 dogs, 2 cats, and 2 macaw parrots rested on the outcome.

Spectators filed in after lunch, and Judge Farmer reconvened court. Finnegan recalled Siddons to the stand. She testified that she had been a dog warden for the state of Pennsylvania for ten years and during that time had inspected 160 or so licensed kennels twice a year. That amounted to roughly 3,200 inspections, if anyone bothered to do the math.

Finnegan needed to undo the damage Siddons had inflicted that morning when, under questioning, she said she hadn’t initially planned to remove any dogs after leaving Mike-Mar Kennel the day she and Shaw paid their unannounced visit.

“Have you ever observed the conditions that you saw on February 8 that these dogs were living in?” Finnegan asked.

Just once before, Siddons said, in a case involving fewer dogs.

Think back to the afternoon in question, Finnegan said to her, “What is your opinion as to the conditions that you observed?”

“Overwhelming, unacceptable,” Siddons responded. “Certainly, by the department’s regulations, it would not be tolerated.”

“And in leaving the premises on February 8, were you concerned for those dogs?” Finnegan asked.

“Yes.”

Mission accomplished. Siddons stepped down.

Finnegan next called Shaw, her star witness. The prosecutor dimmed the lights of the courtroom and turned on Shaw’s videotape of the kennel. She left the volume on at first. As the camera panned room after room stacked with dogs inside Wolf’s residence and kennel, frenzied yelps blared from the speaker. Finnegan waited a minute or so and then switched off the sound. She wanted the judge to concentrate not on the noise but on the squalor: dogs scrabbling for attention in crates draped in dried feces. She wanted him to focus on the overcrowded rooms and the rusty water bowls sitting in the crates. Even without any sound, the footage was powerful.

As the tape continued to roll, Finnegan turned back to Shaw.

“How would you describe that cage there?” she asked as the camera closed in on a small plastic crate.

“It’s a carrier.”

“How many dogs are living in that carrier?”

Wolf’s lawyers objected. No one had said the dogs were living in the crates.

Finnegan asked Shaw again to describe the cages. She said they were filthy and appeared to be coated with dried feces. A number of the crates lacked any sort of water container, and the water buckets that were present were covered with slime.

The videotape kept rolling. Minutes later, the camera panned the interior of a different building. “Officer, can you recall what you’re trying to show us in those photos?” Finnegan said.

“The filth of the cages,” Shaw repeated.

“What was the condition of the cages that you’re photographing?”

“Filthy, soiled newspaper. The animals’ waste. The feces that was on the wires and the grates.”

Outwardly, Shaw managed to look composed. Inwardly, she was wracked with anxiety, certain she would stumble, say the wrong thing, and cost the prosecution the case. “Who knows what might come out of your mouth?” she silently chided herself. “The way you remember things might be different from the way someone else remembers them.”

Finnegan next called Ravinda Murarka, the veterinarian with the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which had taken in sixty-three of Wolf’s dogs. The organization had spent nearly $8,000 treating the medical problems of the animals over the last two and a half months, not counting room and board, Murarka said.

“Almost every dog was emaciated . . . the majority were infested with the fleas,” he testified. “Ten of them . . . they have a very serious skin problem . . . allergic dermatitis. And we had to treat for at least two to three weeks.”

Was there a causal relationship between the conditions observed on the videotape and the health conditions of the dogs? Finnegan asked.

“Yes . . . they are kept in highly unhygienic conditions,” Murarka said. “And what I observed is that that could perpetuate to the skin problem when the dogs were stained with the feces and urine.” The conditions might also cause worms and pneumonia, he added.

The mood in the courtroom was tense. Under cross-examination, Coates asked the veterinarian how long it would take for a dog to contract fleas. In high temperatures, they could hatch quickly, Murarka said—in as little as four to five days.

Coates asked Murarka what evidence he had that the dogs he examined weren’t already being treated. They could have been treated for fleas on February 9 and still had fleas on the eleventh, the day they arrived at the Pennsylvania SPCA, the attorney said.

No, that wasn’t possible, Murarka said. If the dogs had been treated, he would have noticed dead fleas in their coats. “The way the dogs were infested with the fleas, they were crawling all over the place,” the veterinarian said. “If they are treated, the condition of the dog would not have been like that.”

Coates surmised that perhaps the dogs had acquired fleas on February 10, the same day they were removed. Murarka dismissed that theory, too. “I don’t know how somebody can pour that much quantity of the fleas on the dog,” he said. He added that dogs develop allergic reactions to the fleas’ saliva only after a long infestation.

The defense was trying to muddy Murarka’s testimony, but the judge was not confused. “It takes the fleas to bite the heck out of the dog until he gets it,” Farmer interjected from the bench.

Coates moved on. He questioned the cause of a congenital hernia found in one dog. He commented that congenital hernias can develop regardless of how a dog is treated. Murarka agreed, but said that hernias left untreated can cause problems later.

Coates then asked about a 3-year-old Papillon of Trottier’s who had been taken in by the Pennsylvania SPCA and was described as being dirty and missing hair. “What caused the hair loss?” he asked.

Murarka responded that a skin infection and allergies to fleas could cause a loss of hair.

Coates asked about a dog of Wolf’s who died on February 15, four days after the Pennsylvania SPCA took her in. An autopsy showed the dog died of pneumonia, Murarka said. Coates asked if that was an common occurrence when a dog is 10 to 12 years old. “Normally not,” the veterinarian replied. He said the ill dog must have contracted some kind of upper respiratory infection.

Coates noted that several of Wolf’s dogs were missing teeth. He suggested that older dogs often lose teeth, and this time the vet agreed.

Seizing an opening, Coates asked, “It is fair to say that with regard to all these dogs in here that went to Philadelphia, there are some of them that were dirty and they needed grooming. Some of them had tartar on their teeth. Some of the older dogs were suffering from congenital whatever or losing their teeth, like we do when we get old. Some of them may have had mange. But mange is a treatable condition, is that right?”

“Yes, sir,” Murarka responded. “But there are ten dogs that have the skin problem.”

“When you have that many dogs, is that unusual for skin problems and mange to develop?” Coates asked.

“Yes.”

Coates was finished. Prosecutor Wright had just one final question. “How do dogs react to having fleas?” she asked.

“They scratch. They feel discomfort,” Murarka replied.

The next witness was Bryan Langlois, the veterinarian at the Humane League of Lancaster County. He described the dry eye condition found in a number of Wolf’s dogs who had been sent to his facility. All but four of the animals had chronic skin conditions that were most likely caused by fleas. A number of the dogs were diagnosed with intestinal parasites, several had diarrhea, and some of the dogs were a little underweight; he would not call them emaciated, Langlois said. Finally, a number of the dogs had very serious and chronic ear infections.

Asked if he saw anything unusual about the environment the animals had come from, Langlois said, “The feces that is caked on the cage doors is not something that would be cleaned twice a day. Feces do not dry that quickly.”

Coates pressed him on that point. The discoloration on the cages looked like rust to him, he said.

“It can appear as rust,” Langlois responded, “but to me, it looked like caked-on feces.”

The problems he found were all treatable, Coates countered. The dogs were responding to treatment. They were going to get better. “They are not going to die from these things,” he said.

“There was nothing at the time that I saw them that indicated that they were in imminent risk of death, no,” Langlois agreed.

Finnegan rose to redirect. She asked Langlois to enumerate the many steps taken to treat the dogs. All of the dogs with lice were shaved down, the vet said. Those infested heavily with mites were dipped with lime sulfur, an insecticide. Their ears were flushed out, they all received dewormers, and they were started on medication.

One puppy had to be euthanized. “It came in bad shape,” Langlois said. “Cold, hypothermic, in a little bit of shock.” He said the medical issues he diagnosed were directly caused by the unhealthy sanitary conditions found at Mike-Mar Kennel.

Larry Dieter, the veterinarian for the Chester County SPCA, was the next witness. Dieter had been out of town when the dogs were brought in and didn’t see them until six days after the raid. He found them suffering from a long list of maladies, he said. In his opinion, the dogs had “definitely not” received adequate veterinary care at Wolf’s kennel.

The veterinarians’ testimony had set exactly the tone Finnegan hoped for. She recalled Shaw to the stand. The prosecutor asked her to describe the conditions Wolf was instructed to remedy by February 10. Shaw ticked off three steps: Wolf was supposed to provide veterinary care for the dogs, clean their kennels, and provide them adequate water.

“Had that been complied with on February tenth when you reexamined this home?” Finnegan asked.

“No,” Shaw said.

Earlier she’d testified that during the initial visit to Mike-Mar Kennel, she phoned Wolf’s veterinarian, Tom Stevenson, and told him he needed to come to the kennel prepared to inoculate 100 dogs. Under cross-examination, Shaw said she had asked Stevenson to vaccinate the dogs because Wolf was unable to produce paperwork showing that any of the animals had been vaccinated. She said she requested documentation from Stevenson but never received it. The veterinarian did not return her phone call until after the raid. When he finally did so, Shaw wasn’t in, so he left a message. She never actually spoke with him, Shaw said, so Stevenson couldn’t confirm how many dogs he saw. Shaw added that she informed Wolf during the initial visit to his kennel that she planned to cite him for having unvaccinated dogs.

She stepped down, and Finnegan stopped there. It was late afternoon, a good breaking point. The hearing had lasted much longer than anyone anticipated; Shaw alone spent three hours on the stand. The judge adjourned matters for a week, until the following Friday.

Outside the courthouse, Coates told reporters the case was going about as he expected. “I feel good for Gordon and Michael, but I feel real good for Margaret. I don’t think they have a good case for Margaret,” he said. He reiterated that Wolf loved his dogs and simply had too many of them. The breeder had considered turning the dogs over to rescue leagues, Coates said, but not to the Chester County SPCA.

“I hope the people at home will wait till all the evidence comes in before they make a decision, which is what the court will do,” the lawyer added.

A week passed. On April 18, court reconvened in Oxford. Once again, the courtroom was standing room only. The prosecution had four more witnesses to call. The first day of the hearing had given Finnegan and Wright a better sense of how aggressively the defense team would try to downplay the poor health of Wolf’s dogs. His attorneys would try to make the state prove that every single dog taken from Wolf’s property had been neglected or abused.

But Wright convinced Finnegan that it wasn’t necessary to parade every dog into the courtroom to prove the prosecution’s case. They could easily show that the environment at Mike-Mar Kennel was so filthy that every dog was at risk. Every single cage was encrusted with feces, the ammonia fumes were pervasive, all the bowls were filthy, and there wasn’t a single dog who didn’t suffer from fleas, dermatitis, and matting. A number of the animals were worse off than that.

Finnegan called forward SPCA humane society police officer Beswick, who described walking into Wolf’s home the day of the raid. The judge had heard similar testimony, but Beswick was able to paint a fresh image of the misery.

Opening the door, she said, she was greeted by an odor so pungent, “I felt like a brick had hit my face. . . . It burned my eyes and throat . . . the stench was overwhelming.” The temperatures were so hot she had to escape the building every fifteen minutes in search of fresh air, she added.

The condition of the cages “was horrendous,” Beswick went on to say. “There were feces, there was dirt, there was vermin in these cages. Dogs were filthy.”