Horse Sense Lacking in Cruelty Case, Official Says

As a county investigation began into the handling of a horse cruelty complaint in Saugus, a Humane Society officer charged that county animal control workers in heavily equestrian areas are not adequately trained to spot and handle cases of horse abuse.

“I don’t think they really have anybody who is qualified as far as horses are concerned, so they really don’t have the personnel experienced in investigating horse cruelty,” Lisa Mandeville, state humane officer for the society’s Los Angeles chapter, said late last week. “This could be a problem, especially in horse country.”

Los Angeles county and city officials estimate that residents of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys keep about 35,000 horses on properties zoned for equestrian use.

Kept in ‘K-districts’

In the San Fernando Valley, about 15,000 horses are kept in areas known as “K-districts” in such equestrian communities as Sunland, Tujunga, Lake View Terrace, Sun Valley and Sylmar, said Gary Olsen, district supervisor for the city’s Department of Animal Regulation.

Much of the Santa Clarita Valley is zoned for horses. About 20,000 are kept on properties measuring at least 15,000 square feet, said George Enriquez, a senior animal control officer at the Department of Animal Care and Control’s Castaic facility.

An investigation into the animal control department’s response to the alleged neglect case involving 43 horses in Saugus was launched last week at the request of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich. Animal control officials are scheduled to report their findings to the Board of Supervisors by Nov. 17.

The probe was requested after residents complained last week that officers at the county’s Castaic animal shelter had been told of the conditions on the Saugus horse ranch as many as four years ago but failed to act speedily. Gerald Ingle, 67, owner of the ranch, has been charged with animal cruelty in the case.

Limited Experience

“We’ll be checking to see if we might have been too gentle . . . when we should have been more firm,” said Brian Berger, director of the county animal control department.

Some county animal workers agree with the Humane Society’s concerns about their training to handle horses. In addition, they say they are often overworked and concede having limited experience with horses before starting their jobs.

“No, I’m not that knowledgeable on horses,” said Enriquez, one of five officers at the Castaic Animal Control Shelter. “I wish I knew a lot more. But there’s a lot to it.”

Enriquez said he has learned most of what he knows about horses while on the job responding to calls. Calls on horse cases make up less than 10% of the Castaic shelter’s workload, he said. Countywide, they number about 5,000 annually. The city animal regulation department gets about 2,000 calls on horses each year, authorities there said.

“With the small amount of training we’ve had, it isn’t really enough to make us professional and it’s really hard to keep up on horses,” Enriquez said. “We can do the easy part of it. We’re here to control, we’re not here to take care of a horse all day long. We’re just here to make sure the public is safe from the horse or the horse safe from the public.”

The county and the city train their animal control officers to care for a wide range of animals, from dogs and cats to birds and livestock, officials said.

Although cases involving exotic breeds of animals surface occasionally, both city and county officials said the majority of calls they answer are reports of unleashed or vicious dogs and lost cats.

County animal control officers receive 240 hours of training before taking their posts, Berger said.

The city animal workers receive an introductory 280-hour training course--some of it at Pierce College in Woodland Hills--and also must attend annual seminars to continue their training, Olsen said.

Training ‘Too Basic’

Because of the demands of covering a 3,000-square-mile area, the county’s officers must be generalists with wide-ranging knowledge, Berger said.

“The same person who might work Santa Clarita Valley one year might be working Compton the next,” Berger said. “There’s a whole different realm across the area we serve, from inner-city to rural.”

He said, however, that the officers’ required training does include working with horses and livestock. “Whether or not it’s enough is hard to tell,” Berger said.

Much of the training focuses on understanding ordinances, mastering governmental red tape and the basics of animal care.

Mandeville of the Humane Society contends that the training is too basic. “It’s like ‘This is a horse, this is the front end, and the back end, and the part that kicks,’ ” she said.

To improve county officers’ familiarity with horses, Mandeville suggested that they take advantage of seminars sponsored by private animal organizations. For example, the Humane Society held a seminar in July on horse handling and the warning signs of disease. Fifty people attended, but none were from the Castaic animal shelter, she said.

Mandeville said animal control officers are best equipped to handle calls about dogs and cats: “That’s basically what they do all day long and they’re pretty good with that. But with larger animals and livestock, they really don’t deal with them.”

Berger said the department, which does not keep a record of complaints about its service, might have responded more quickly to the Saugus case if it had more officers.

The county’s animal control officers are stretched too thin and often overworked because of a limited budget, financed primarily through the sale of dog licenses, he said.

“My staff is always overworked,” Berger said. “That goes without saying. You can’t be St. Francis everywhere at every time. There aren’t that many officers to cover that kind of area.

“If people in the . . . Saugus-Newhall area would just buy their dog licenses, I’d have a couple more officers and trucks out there and maybe we would respond better to situations like this,” Berger said.