Animal Services Department Says Coyote Skinned Dog

The Los Angeles Department of Animal Services declared Thursday that a mutilated dog discovered in an Encino yard earlier this week was attacked by a coyote. But a Los Angeles city councilman, backed up a veterinarian who examined the animal, insisted it had been skinned by a human being.

The pug, named Pal, was the companion of an 84-year-old Encino woman who is deaf and nearly blind. She found it injured beneath a bush in her yard in the 16600 block of Morrison Street on Tuesday morning.

The dog died at the office of a Northridge veterinarian, who said it had been skinned alive in a shocking example of animal cruelty.

However, after animal services’ chief veterinarian and a second private veterinarian examined the dog’s body at the West Valley animal shelter in Chatsworth, they concluded that the injuries were inflicted by a coyote, a spokesman for the animal services department said Thursday.

“The dog was found to have multiple puncture wounds, skin tears and bruising, mostly in the head and neck areas. When coyotes attack small animals, they will pull the skin off them,” said the spokesman, Peter Persic.

But Councilman Nate Holden called for a $5,000 reward for information leading to anyone responsible for mistreating the dog. Holden said he would hold a news conference today to show photographs of the animal.

“Based on all of the evidence, I am convinced it was done by a human being,” Holden said, citing the findings of Dr. Melvyn Richkind, the veterinarian who first declared the dog had been skinned.

Richkind stood by his initial report Thursday. “In my professional opinion, based on experience as an internist and surgeon, the evidence produced before my eyes was that of a very sharp knife which was responsible for the removal of the skin,” he said in a letter to Holden, whose office has been involved in animal rights issues in the past.

Richkind said that upon inspecting the dog’s injuries, he also found plastic-like nylon fibers.

Other animal welfare activists argued that a coyote would not have left the dog the way it was found, bleeding but alive.

Coyotes “don’t play,” said Michael Bell of Encino, director of Citizens for a Humane Los Angeles. “They eat and run.”

“There’s no possible physical way a coyote could have done that,” said Chuck Traisy, director of the Fund for Animals Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in San Diego. “Coyotes kill their prey and eat them--pure and simple,”

The Los Angeles chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which also had been conducting an investigation, has tentatively accepted the coyote version, but is awaiting results of an independent necropsy, said Executive Director Madeline Bernstein.

Bernstein said she has asked that contributions to a reward fund established to find the perpetrator be returned. She has contacted the Calabasas lawyer who put up a $10,000 donation on behalf of an anonymous donor and “that is on hold now,” Bernstein said.

The SPCA has also contacted the dog owner’s daughter, Carol Johnson of Reseda, to relay an offer of a puppy for Johnson’s mother from the owner of a pug who is about to give birth.

“She’s very happy about it, but she wants to talk to her mother first,” Bernstein said.