Willow musher convicted of animal cruelty

April 8, 2005

KATE GOLDEN/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - Before going to trial Wednesday, local musher and Iditarod finisher David Straub said he wasn't worried about the $5,200 he could be forced to pay for failing to feed and water his 28 dogs.

He turned down the Mat-Su Borough attorney's offer to reduce the number of counts from 17 to one $300 count of animal cruelty if Straub pleaded guilty.

"I've got to stand up for the dogs that they destroyed," he said, crying. "They didn't have to destroy all my veterans."But Straub failed to prove his case. Palmer District Court Magistrate David L. Zwink found him guilty and levied a $300 fine against him.

On Oct. 12, 2004, John Frey, deputy animal care and regulation officer for Mat-Su Borough Animal Care and Regulation, paid a visit on Straub after two people reported him for mistreating his dogs.

Frey found 28 skinny dogs. He charged Straub with animal cruelty, and gave him four days to adopt out or destroy the dogs before troopers came to take them away.

"I had some thin dogs I'd been feeding fish heads and fish carcasses. And I didn't realize they had whipworms," he said.

Straub scrambled to prove the injustice of the borough's destruction of his dogs, which he said were worth at least $100,000. The shelter destroyed four dogs for kennel cough and five for behavioral problems several weeks after their arrival.

Yet the borough's treatment was irrelevant to the case against Straub, as Judge Zwink continually reminded him. The case was about Straub's own treatment of them on Oct. 11, 2004.

"Value is not an issue in this case," Zwink said. "It's the condition of the dogs, whether these are fantastic dogs or mutts." And there, the facts were against him.

On Oct. 12 at Straub's kennel, shelter veterinarian Lisa Espey rated each dog on a standard 10-point scale ranging from "emaciated" - bony prominences visible from a distance, no palpable fat, an observer's hand sinks in above the hip bones - to 10, "grossly obese." Five is a normal-weight dog.

Espey called out the scores as she got to each dog. Ten dogs were emaciated, scoring 1. Nine dogs scored a 2, and nine scored a 3.

She also testified that the dogs were 5 percent dehydrated, which she said could not have happened in one day. Straub said he thought the dogs were thin only because it was such a hot summer, he said.

Espey said she saw no signs of food at the kennel. And she testified that it would take weeks to bring a healthy, normal-weight dog to the level of emaciation she saw.

Straub said he had run into hard times since injuring his spinal cord on the job a couple of years back. He'd sold his Red Lantern trophy and several Iditarod finisher's patches for $4,000 to feed his dogs.

"You didn't feel that I would have been adequately able to provide for my dogs?" he challenged Espey, mentioning a $1,000 dog box and a $30,000 Dodge pickup truck that sat in his yard. He could have sold those, he said; she should have known there was no immediate danger. But he hadn't done so by Oct. 11.

Adam Cardwell, Stanley Lasater and Steven Heinrich testified to the presence of a larger support system. They lent him money, bought food and were willing to buy more when they heard the authorities were getting involved.

Straub's well-wishers ended up working against him, for their impetus to help was that his dogs were, in fact, too thin.

Four-time Iditarod winner Martin Buser testified that other mushers originally called him to help Straub.

"I was appalled," Buser said: If his own dogs looked like that, he would give up mushing. As to the dogs' value, he said, "You couldn't give those dogs away looking like that."

One dog died at the shelter without the borough's help. The small black-and-white dog was a "wheezer," according to Straub, which Espey had taken to mean laryngeal paralysis.

But Espey's necropsy revealed dark, mottled masses choking five of six of the lobes in the dog's lungs. These suggested a cancer or an infection that had developed over months to a year had gone untreated.

Straub said he's looking forward to moving on to a lawsuit for "at least $1.2 million," he said, for the destruction of what he called his livelihood.

He seemed indecisive on whether to stay in a place he thinks is working against him. His kennel permit has been revoked. A dozen of his dogs are dead."It took me nine years to raise them, and it took the Mat-Su Borough 30 minutes to destroy them," he said.

Contact Kate Golden at 352-2284 or kate.golden@frontiersman.com.