Cruelty To Animals

The moon, just out, hung over the Ozarks like a pale opal. Soon families would be saying grace over Sunday dinner; children would be clamoring to turn on the Christmas lights. It was time to go home. But in the darkening woods, four teen-agers lingered, enjoying the rush they always felt when they killed something. A kitten lay crumpled nearby. Sharing some unspoken secret, the boys exchanged furtive glances in the fading light. They were growing edgy.

A former Los Angeles County assistant fire chief was sentenced to three years' probation Friday on animal cruelty charges for beating a puppy with a 12-pound rock, injuring it so severely that it had to be euthanized. Glynn Johnson, 55, of Riverside also was required to do 400 hours of community service working with dogs, take anger-management classes and serve 90 weekend days in jail. He could have been given four years in prison, and the sentence was immediately denounced by those hoping for more jail time as a "slap on the wrist."

Smugglers are flooding the Southern California pet market with disease-ridden puppies from Mexico, prompting law enforcement crackdowns, raising public health concerns and breaking the hearts of owners who watch their dogs die, often within hours of buying them. Animal control officials estimate that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of puppies have died since an underground market, stretching from puppy mills in Mexico to street corners in San Diego and Los Angeles, was uncovered last year.

A retired Los Angeles County assistant fire chief was found guilty of animal cruelty Tuesday after punching a neighbor's puppy, breaking its jaws and beating it with a rock, an attack that eventually led to the death of the 42-pound dog. "Karley, this one's for you!" a tearful Shelley Toole shouted outside Riverside County Superior Court after the verdict was read. "This is for you, girl!" Glynn Johnson, 55, faces up to four years in prison on animal cruelty charges for killing Karley, a 6-month-old German shepherd mix that prosecutors said was the victim of a long-running feud between Johnson and the Toole family.

Five misdemeanor counts have been filed against a Hawthorne woman accused of keeping a yard full of malnourished and lice-infested animals, which authorities suspect were to be used in religious sacrifices. Catalina Sierra, 55, will be arraigned Aug. 15 in Inglewood Municipal Court on charges of animal cruelty and illegally keeping barnyard animals in a residential neighborhood. If convicted of all counts, she could be sentenced to up to four years in jail, Hawthorne Assistant City Atty.

The operators of a San Fernando Valley-based Christmas tree company were charged with cruelty to animals Wednesday for allegedly keeping a herd of reindeer in a debris-littered lot without food, water or adequate shelter. City animal control officers found the eight reindeer at a lot in the 12000 block of Jolette Avenue in Granada Hills. The officers reported that one animal died shortly after their arrival.

After four years of protests against alleged animal cruelty at the Orange County Fair's rodeo, a Costa Mesa-based animal rights group announced Friday that an agreement with fair officials had been reached and that its members would not demonstrate this year. "This is a fair agreement for everyone," said Ava Park, founder of the 1,500-member Orange County People for Animals, the county's largest animal rights group.

A well-known Christmas tree magnate was charged Wednesday with cruelty to animals after the death of one of the European deer he uses as stand-ins for reindeer on his sales lots. The animal died after it snagged its antlers in coat hangers and chicken wire in a debris-littered Granada Hills pen where eight deer were kept without sufficient food, water or shade, animal welfare officers said. Stuart T. Miller, 52, and his son, William T.

A Riverside County jury convicted animal sanctuary operator John Weinhart of child endangerment and animal cruelty charges Tuesday for keeping malnourished tigers and decomposing carcasses at his facility, and tranquilizers and live alligators within reach of his young son. The convictions leave Weinhart, 62, subject to a maximum prison term of 36 years when he is sentenced March 22, although his attorney argued that Weinhart deserved no jail time.

The case began with a malodorous van, and by the time investigators tracked the evidence across two counties, the body count had risen above 700. Seven hundred dead red-eared turtles, sliders, coolers, diamond-backed terrapins and eastern painted turtles, that is. They died in horrible ways--baked, crushed, drowned, starved and dehydrated, with cracks in their shells and gaping wounds on their limbs, authorities said. Live turtles spent days squeezed next to dead ones.

Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer Little, Brown: 340 pp., $25.99 Looking forward to your turkey dinner? Think twice. It's time, argues Jonathan Safran Foer, to stop lying to ourselves. With all the studies on animal agriculture, pollution, toxic chemicals in factory-farmed animals and exposés of the appalling cruelty to animals in that industry, he writes in "Eating Animals," "We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better.

Could the government outlaw a hypothetical "Human Sacrifice Channel" on cable TV? That question became the focus of a Supreme Court argument Tuesday on the reach of the 1st Amendment and whether Congress can outlaw videos showing dogs fighting or other small animals being tortured and killed. Last year, a federal appeals court, citing freedom of speech, struck down a law against selling videos with scenes of animal cruelty. The law applied only to illegal acts of torturing or killing animals, not legal hunting or fishing.

Authorities on Wednesday raided a dogfighting operation that was being run out of a suburban Chicago day-care facility, arresting three people and seizing nine dogs that required surgery, authorities said. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said children "were playing on a swing set just 10 feet away from a vicious fighting dog and blood-stained floors. . . . To be engaged in this sort of activity is disturbing enough, but to take a chance with anybody's children is reprehensible." Dart said one dog was missing an eye and another had had its genitals nearly severed.

Seeking to buy eggs produced in a more humane way, McDonald's Corp. said Thursday that it would undertake a large-scale study involving tens of thousands of hens. But the Humane Society of the United States said the study probably would delay any significant move by McDonald's into the U.S. cage-free egg market -- a step some of its rivals have taken. Most eggs produced in the U.S.

It seems so very British that an ugly row has broken out between those who say they love dogs and those who say they love dogs more. But just such a royal catfight has ensnared the country's most prestigious dog show, Crufts, which opens today here in Birmingham, a four-day extravaganza of four-legged bliss that has drawn millions of viewers to the British Broadcasting Corp. since 1966. But not this year.

The head of the company that owns the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus acknowledged in federal court that all of his elephant handlers strike the animals with metal-tipped prods, but he said it doesn't harm the pachyderms and is necessary to control them. Feld Entertainment Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Feld said the circus probably couldn't have elephants without the prods -- called bull hooks -- and chains that are at the center of the trial in U.S. District Court.

For a few days, the roads were paved with mink. Dead ones mostly. They were mangled by dogs, withered by summer heat and run over by cars and trucks. Their carcasses were reduced to tufts of blue hair on the pavement. In the early morning darkness on Monday, in what residents call an act of eco-terrorism, animal activists released 10,000 Blue Iris minks from the Roesler Bros. Fur Farm in this former logging town east of Everett. The animals spread like a flash flood. "They were everywhere.

When a security guard in Tustin discovered an opossum on a wall one night, he beat it to death with his flashlight. When a Santa Fe Springs man spotted an opossum in his backyard, he shot it three times with a crossbow. The animal survived until the next morning, Easter Sunday, when the man finished it off with a shovel and a pipe. One man pleaded guilty to cruelty to animals. Last week, the other was acquitted of the same charge.

A Nebraska man who stuffed his girlfriend's kitten into a makeshift bong and filled it with marijuana smoke says that he had done it before and that it had calmed the kitten down. Acea Schomaker, 20, of Lincoln said Tuesday that he never intended to hurt the kitten, 6-month-old Shadow. He says the kitten would bite and scratch him and his girlfriend but he didn't want to discipline it by swatting it or squirting it with water.