Dog's Plight Shows Why We Have Cruelty Laws
By Tamara Dietrich
www.DailyPress.com
September 30 2004, HAMPTON ROADS, VA -- Imagine being so hungry, you eat wood chips. So starved, you willingly chew and swallow hard plastic.
People in desperate straits do desperate things. On Sunday, we ran a story about a mountain climber who, trapped for days in the wilderness by a boulder that had rolled onto his arm, recovered and drank his own urine. Then he used a dull pocketknife to saw off his own putrefying hand.
The drive to survive is a powerful thing.
When we land in treacherous territory, it's often because we've done something to put ourselves there.
When it happens to a pet, it's because we're idiots. Or we're cruel. Or we're criminally careless.
In James City County, a particular dog owner is one or all of the above. Moniko Harris was sentenced to jail last week after kids stumbled upon his starving pit bull chained up behind his house and, to all appearances, left to die.
"It's horrifying what that dog endured," Shirley Anderson, supervisor of James City County Animal Control, told the Daily Press.
The dog was alive when the children found her: skin and bones, barely able to move, maggot-infested, riddled with heartworms and so famished, she had devoured, yes, wood chips and plastic.
We know what her final meal was because she was too far gone to save and was put down by a veterinarian. The subsequent necropsy revealed the pitiful contents of her stomach. The plastic had ripped up her insides, and blood oozed out of her system, attracting the maggots that were subsequently devouring her.
Anderson calls it "one of the worst cases of cruelty I've ever seen."
Sadly, I've seen worse.
In upstate New York many years ago, a police officer walking up to a house one winter's day passed a bundle of debris in the snow-covered yard next to a tree. Something made him look closer.
The debris was actually the skeletal carcass of a dog lying at the end of a chain, frozen in place. Horrified, the officer got closer. And heard the carcass whimper.
Veterinarians tried valiantly to save the dog, Shahin - efforts that went far beyond the call of duty and even beyond what most people would consider sensible. But the feeling was that any animal that could survive that kind of misery deserved every last scrap of a chance to survive even longer.
But he was just too far gone.
A necropsy found that in his desperate bid for life, Shahin had eaten whatever he could reach and choke down. In his case, tree bark and pine needles.
Predictably, Shahin's owner got a slap on the wrist.
A few years later, in Arizona, a motorist found a large mixed-breed dog stumbling half-dead along a highway: badly beaten, throat slashed, a gash in his forehead crudely closed up with staples. He was still trailing the tape and rope that he'd been bound with.
Thankfully, veterinarians were able to save this one. Somebody started calling him Braveheart, and the name stuck. Good people lined up for the chance to adopt him, once he'd healed.
His owner admitted that he'd done those terrible things but claimed his dog was vicious and attacked him. He said he was taking the dog to a hospital when it somehow escaped from his vehicle. He had the gall to call himself a dog trainer.
At the time, this sort of abuse was a misdemeanor in the state, not a felony. So a judge sentenced the owner to three days, which the law considered reasonable. At least the judge had the wit and sense of the poetic to order him to serve it one day a year - always on the anniversary of the day that he brutalized his dog. It would, the judge reasoned, give him something to think about.
On the first anniversary, I visited Braveheart, by then happily situated with a great family.
This "vicious animal" was romping with the kids and the other family dog. He had, by all accounts, never set a paw out of line.
Strangers were still recognizing him on the street. He calmly endured every pat and cuddle.
A postscript is that Braveheart's ordeal finally inspired lawmakers to make cruelty to animals a felony.
On Thursday, Moniko Harris was sentenced for misdemeanor animal cruelty, and his attorney told a reporter that his client felt "really bad" about it.
The judge could have given him up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
Instead, she sentenced him to six months, then suspended five of them. In all, Harris might serve a couple of weeks.
He also incurred a small fine and must pay restitution. He's not allowed to own another animal for two years.
He also must do 100 hours of community service, which you hope he doesn't serve in an animal shelter. Those poor creatures have been through enough.
You wonder how bad animal cruelty has to get before a judge imposes anywhere near the maximum; being shackled and slowly starved to death has to rank right up there. It's an agonizing way to go.
From a legal standpoint, maybe it just lacks the shock value or the impact, so to speak, of a physical beating.
Like many states, Virginia considers extreme and willful animal cruelty a felony, especially if it's not a first offense.
We've got the laws on the books. Now let's use them to protect those creatures who can't protect themselves.
Creatures who need defending from members of mankind who fail miserably to live up to the definition and every nuance of that word.
