Board to decide dog’s fate Monday

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Animal Care and Regulation Board will decide the fate of Wizard on Monday, a sled dog that attacked a child in May at the kennel of Iditarod musher Jake Berkowitz.

The dog broke free of his restraints as a family visited dogs they had kenneled at Berkowitz’s Apex Kennels. The dog attacked the 2-year-old girl’s neck before her mother fought the dog away. The child sustained life-threatening injuries in the attack.

Shortly after the attack, a borough Animal Care and Regulation Shelter officer recommended that Wizard be classified as a level 5 animal, which means the dog must be seized and destroyed. Borough rules say that a dog that attacks a person that severely must be classified as such. But borough code also says an animal control officer may make exceptions if the animal was defending itself or its offspring; if it was provoked or reacting to pain; or if not classifying the animal “reasonably serves and promotes justice, fairness, and the purposes and intent” of borough animal control regulations.

The “provocation” exception seems to be the one Wizard’s defenders wish to invoke. But, at a hearing last week about the incident, deputy borough attorney John Aschenbrenner argued that saying a child merely being in a dog’s presence is enough to provoke the animal would set a bad precedent, and would open the door to all sorts of bad behavior on the part of Valley dogs.

Berkowitz showed up to the hearing with his own lawyer, Myron Angstman who, by phone Friday from his Bethel office, seemed to say that was not the argument he was making. Such an argument ignores the context of the attack. A lot full of sled dogs, he said, can be a dangerous place.

“It’s certainly not a place for a young child unless the situation is very closely monitored or controlled,” he said. “It’s a situation where you have to know what’s going on and know exactly where every kid is and it has to be somebody or enough people in the case of several people being in the yard in order to monitor the situation closely.”

Research from the State of Alaska Epidemiology shows that most deaths caused by dogs in Alaska are children, with 45 months being the mean age for victims. According to the same 2007 study, there were nine recorded deaths from dog attacks in Alaska from 1991 to 2002.

Most breeders of sled dogs note on their websites that the animals have a strong prey instinct and that they, even as pets, are often not well-suited to homes containing cats or small-breed dogs.

Berkowitz has said in media accounts that he would not have allowed children in the lot. His wife has said the child’s mother also forbade her children from coming to dog lots.

Angstman said there are different expectations of safety on a dog lot.

“Expectations are different in a house, because when you enter a house there’s certainly a reasonable possibility that you don’t know that there’s a dog in there,” he said. “When you walk into a dog yard in broad daylight, there’s no question that you’re walking into a dog yard and there’s no question that in this case there were 50 dogs.”

Public opinion seems to support sparing Wizard, as does a petition on thepetitionsite.com, which contains signatures from 1,588 people who want to see Wizard granted a reprieve, a large portion of the signers are in Europe, particularly in Germany. And at least three signers appear to be Iditarod veterans.

The Animal Care and Regulation Board is set to decided Wizard’s fate Monday at noon at the animal shelter. Mat-Su Animal Care and Regulation chief Carol Vardeman said that negligence either on the part of Berkowitz or the girl’s parents isn’t the point.

“This isn’t about negligence, this is about the dog. It’s about that dog,” Vardeman said. She said she believes code holds that this dog in particular needs to be classified a level 5 animal and she hopes the board will see that Monday.

Either way, it’s unlikely that Monday will be the end of the story. If the board decides the dog should be listed as level 5, either side can ask the decision be reconsidered. Then if the decision is finalized, either side can still appeal it to state court for a judge to decide.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.