Glad wolves are gone

It won’t shock anyone to learn that Alaskans love their dogs.

Evidence of that love is on display daily in our parks and homes, and often in the pages of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

It was a singular experience for us at the Frontiersman to see protestors in the Beverly Cutler atrium of the Palmer Courthouse Wednesday. Nobody protests the child abusers and wife beaters who regularly walk those halls unmolested.

But when someone starves, neglects and mistreats more than 150 dogs, people show up en masse looking to weigh in on the appropriateness of his sentence. We sympathize with dog lovers. The Frontiersman employs many, and we can understand why people might get emotional on the subject.

We’re not quite as sympathetic, however, with one dog lover in particular. Werner Schuster is, by all accounts, a lover of dogs. His animals have been well cared for and have been in movies.

But Schuster, knowing that the law in Alaska prohibits him from owning the animals — a law he feels is unjust — has for years been running a tourist attraction featuring his 40 wolf dogs.

On Friday, we believe Schuster did the right thing in handing his dogs over to a California-based rescue group.

Were we those wolves, we would not be thrilled at the prospect of moving to a community just outside Los Angeles. But by most indications, the animals will be well cared for there. The rescue group taking them has gone so far as to build enclosures especially for them and won’t disrupt their established social structure.

So, in a sense, the case turned out for the best.

While Schuster is not alleged to have abused his animals in any way, he still broke the law and the Alaska State Troopers, though remaining tight-lipped, seem to be unwilling to let the case go now that the animals are gone.

We’re not so sure they should, either. It comes down to an issue of public safety. Here is Schuster’s take on the safety issue:

“How many people in this state have been bitten by a wolf in the past 20 years?” he asks in today’s front-page story about the relocation of his animals. “A thousand more have been bitten by black Labs.”

Point taken. But how many have to be?

There is also evidence in criminal cases leveled against people who bought puppies from Schuster that his dogs have been aggressive before. One attacked a 6-year-old, another bit a person and a third got loose and killed a neighbor’s dog.

In our view, laws prohibiting the owning of wolves and wolf hybrids attempt to avoid a very real danger to public safety. That Schuster broke that law, flagrantly and for years, should warrant the attention of the courts.