Neglecting animals a terrible crime
I was reading the Herald-Standard the other day and it got me thinking about “Dexter.” For those of you who don’t watch it, the Showtime series “Dexter” is about the titular character, a unique serial killer that you can root for.
Part of that has to do with actor Michael C. Hall, who portrays damaged Dexter Morgan with an awkward charisma of Michael Cera mixed with George Clooney. But mostly, it’s because Dexter is a serial killer who kills other serial killers. (The murderer of my murderer is my friend?)
Since he’s – to use his own words – “taking out the trash,” the audience doesn’t have to feel bad about cheering for, well, the bad guy. And while he gladly judges the killers he kills – unlike them, Dexter has a code of conduct his father taught him to ensure he only kills for good – he saves a special amount of ire for those who hurt or kill children. Even for a guy who makes a hobby of killing other people, that someone would hurt a kid is unthinkable.
So what does this have to do with the Herald-Standard? Bear with me, the (tenuous) connection is coming.
Having worked for a newspaper for a number of years, I’ve grown immune to a lot of bad news and terrible behavior. After all, when you work for a newspaper you cover a lot of news, and news is inherently negative. (The definition of news being something out of the ordinary that happened and thankfully good things aren’t out of the ordinary.) And, trust me, I’ve covered or heard about a lot of terrible things, which is why I keep them at arm’s length. It’s a professional necessity, similar to how a mortician must learn to deal with dead bodies.
But, like Dexter, there are some stories that break through the clutter and raise my hackles. They come in two forms: stories involving kids (OK, that was a long way to go for the Dexter connection, I know) and stories involving pets.
Tuesday’s Herald-Standard had the latter. In a front-page story by the inimitable Rebekah Sungala, I read in horror of the dogs and cats found starving to death in a mobile home in South Union Township.
According to the Fayette SPCA, the animals were abandoned in deplorable surroundings that were unfit for human or animal habitation. Kathy Milne, a humane police officer with the Fayette SPCA, said they went to the McKnight Hill Road home in Brownfield after a concerned neighbor called the township’s supervisors worried that no one was caring for the animals. It turns out, the neighbor was right.
What the SPCA found is enough to turn the stomach of any pet owner: three emaciated dogs tied outside the home and four more similarly starving dogs and three cats locked up inside the home. The dogs and cats cooped up inside the home were living in hellish squalor. The home is in such bad shape that the township is already in the process of condemning it as inhabitable.
“This is by far the worst I’ve ever seen,” Milne said Monday. “Those poor dogs couldn’t even find a space to lie down on the floor. The entire trailer was full of garbage and covered in feces.”
No one needed to tell the dogs they were in bad shape. Three of the four dogs were loose in the trailer and had tried in vain to chew or claw a hole in the wall to escape. The fourth dog was also chewing in a futile attempt to escape the plastic crate it was kept in.
But really, if you want the clearest picture of how terrible the conditions were for these animals, you need to go no further than Milne’s description of the cat they found in a crate: “…[It] was so covered in garbage, debris and feces that we didn’t even see it at first,” she said.
Think about that for a moment: they couldn’t even tell something was living under all the garbage and filth. Stunning. Inexplicable. Disgusting.
According to Milne, the animals allegedly belong to 23-year-old Crystal Dodson, who rented the mobile home with her mother Rose Cormier. Neither had recently lived in the home, according to officials, who said the water and electricity had been shut off.
A neighbor told officials that they hadn’t seen anyone at the home for several weeks, which would explain the condition of the home.
However, in a statement that defies belief, Dodson told officials she visited the animals three times a day and brought them food and water. If that were true, you would think that one of those three-a-day trips would’ve involved a broom or a trashcan to give the animals a humane place to live, no?
Plus, Milne said the dogs devoured food the SPCA brought them and that the dogs shouldn’t have been that hungry even if Dodson would have fed the animals every other day.
A testament to their species, all seven dogs are friendly despite their ordeal, and Milne said they will be available for adoption once Dodson releases them and they have been checked by a veterinarian.
Dodson, meanwhile, faces multiple charges of animal cruelty. If she really did leave 10 animals to fend for themselves for weeks, I hope they throw the book at her.
I feel immensely guilty anytime my wife and I have to leave our two dogs cooped up for anything longer than an average work day. I can’t even begin to fathom being able to leave 10 animals for weeks on end.
I think even Dexter would shudder at that.
For more information on the SPCA, visit www.fayettespca.-com. Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.