Oregon Dog’s Chase Ends on Death Row

The place where the city meets the country here in small-town Oregon keeps getting harder to figure out. Houses give way to small pastures, most with a horse or a few head of cattle out back. Almost everyone has a dog.

One of them is named Nadas--and how this dog got jailed and sentenced to die has as much to do with Medford and the people who live there as it does with the errant rovings of a rambunctious canine.

Nadas, a collie-malamute mix who got caught chasing the next-door neighbor’s horse, is scheduled to die Tuesday or soon thereafter under an Oregon law that imposes a mandatory death sentence on dogs that kill, injure or chase livestock.

That the horse was not injured is irrelevant. That Nadas had never been known to injure livestock and was most likely engaging in some deep-in-a-dog’s-soul herding play is not a defense. That no one except a 13-year-old girl saw the alleged chase did not deter the Jackson County Board of Commissioners from imposing the sentence.

The commission and Gov. John Kitzhaber have been flooded with letters and faxes from across the country urging a reprieve for the 3-year-old dog, whose normal administrative remedies ran out last week when the Oregon Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. The only existing picture of Nadas--who has been held incommunicado in a secret location since county authorities began to fear someone was going to bust him out of jail--has been seen in the National Enquirer and on the TV tabloid show “Hard Copy.”

The commission has set up a Nadas hotline to handle incoming phone calls. An economic boycott of two major Medford companies is underway. A national animal rights Web site is updated daily with news on the case.

“To tell you the truth, I originally thought, ‘This dog’s gonna get off. Everything’s going to be OK.’ Who would know that all reason and compassion and logic would be completely ignored by these commissioners up there?” said Vernon Weir, programs director for the Ark Trust, an Encino-based animal rights group that has championed the dog’s cause.

“Sure, it’s only one dog. And in the big scheme of things, when we’re out there to save 8 million dogs from being euthanized, you think one dog doesn’t matter,” Weir said. “But the thing of it is, this dog has a home, this dog is loved. . . . There’s other people in other states that have offered to take the dog. Yet these people are blindly plowing ahead without any reason to kill this dog.”

Longtime residents of this place, where new gas stations and housing tracts have seeped out into former ranchland like spilled milk, profess to be more than a little perplexed about all the hullabaloo. The dog, there seems little doubt, chased a horse. Granted, the horse wasn’t harmed--but what if he had been? What if he had run straight through the barbed wire around his pasture? What if he had run into the road nearby, where cars are supposed to go 35 mph but generally speed by at 50?

“Whether a vicious Rottweiler intending to maim or injure the livestock animal, or a playful Chihuahua merely having a romp, my reaction at finding a ton of Hereford flesh coming through my windshield at a relative speed of 55 to 65 mph is not going to be largely different based upon the intentions of the dog,” Sams Valley rancher Art Coolidge wrote in a guest column for the local newspaper. “We currently have a law that helps to ensure that domestic dogs won’t have multiple opportunities to endanger road users.”

Nadas’ owner, Sean Roach, whose mother has paid more than $4,500 in kennel fees to house Nadas since his arrest in September 1996, already had been warned once that the dog was chasing cattle in a nearby field. When Roach left for work that morning, he tied the dog up, as he always did.

Hours later, Amanda Morgan was looking out her window next door when she saw her horse go by at a dead run, followed by Nadas. She yelled at the dog, and her mother ran out in time to see Nadas disappearing into the blackberry bushes toward Roach’s house.

She phoned animal control, which contacted Roach. He and his mother, Sharon Roach, arrived too late: Nadas was already in the back of animal control officer Andy Lane’s truck. Desperate pleas got them nowhere. State law, county animal control officers said, requires dogs who do what Nadas did to be humanely killed. They brought out photographs of livestock that had been mutilated by dogs. It would be cheaper, and in the long run kinder, to get it over with, they said.

Nadas was held in a small kennel for a year and five months. Roach initially was allowed five-minute visits, petting the dog by prying his fingers through the tight wire mesh of the cage. Last Halloween, he dressed up in a clown suit and walked into Nadas’ kennel. Shelter employees slammed the door, locking him in, and had him charged with criminal mischief.

“What really surprised me is I went in there, after all that time, dressed as a clown, and he knew exactly who I was,” says Roach, 21. “I sat down in tears, and Nadas laid right across my lap. I just put my arms around him and waited for the police to come.”

After an activist posted an Internet appeal for support, which county officials believed to be a warning that sympathizers were preparing a break-in, the dog was moved to an undisclosed location, where he has been held without visits or photographs while the legal fight presses on.

Lake Oswego attorney Robert Babcock says he will--as a last-ditch measure--file a federal suit alleging Roach’s constitutional rights were violated when his dog was summarily seized and sentenced to die.

“The biggest problem with this is the dog owner and their dog are presumed guilty, and it’s up to them to prove their innocence, which is contrary to our whole system of law,” said Bob Schlesinger, a Hillsboro activist whose web site, Arkonline, has taken on the case.

While Nadas has attracted almost daily headlines in Oregon, the livestock protection statute has been invoked frequently in a state that once relied on farming and ranching as an economic mainstay.

In Jackson County alone, there were 182 cases last year of dogs killing, injuring or chasing livestock, and 64 of the culprits were legally shot by the livestock owner or euthanized by the county. Other states have similar livestock protection statutes, including California, although many of them provide an appeal for the dog.

In Oregon, the appeals court concluded that in Nadas’ case, there is no alternative: If Nadas chased, he must die. The Supreme Court’s 21-day stay of execution expires on Monday. The county has offered to take a photograph of Nadas before his death and send it to the Roaches.

That it has come to this is stunning to the thousands who have written appeals on the dog’s behalf--but perhaps not so surprising after a drive through the neighborhood on the outskirts of Medford where it all happened. The house Roach lived in--he has since moved--is a duplex, the only rental in a long block of ranch-style houses with neat barns and grassy fields.

Roach works in town, in his mother’s real estate property management office. He didn’t know that many ranchers at school. He hung out with the town kids. He had barely met the Morgans until the day he walked next door to appeal for his dog’s life.

“I went over there in tears. I said, if it causes you any emotional stress, I’ll give you $500, but I don’t want my dog killed,” he told Michelle Morgan, Amanda’s mother.

Morgan has a different version. She talks about all the times Roach left Nadas to roam the neighborhood, chasing her horse and the cattle in a nearby field. When Roach tied him up, Nadas would sit howling in the yard, sometimes all night long, she said.

She said Roach and the friend he was living with had loud parties and leered at her daughter; Roach says Morgan is mistaking him for the boys who lived upstairs. The issue got more confounding when Lane, the animal control officer, called county commissioners’ attention to the fact that Nadas, whose name is spelled “Natas” on some official papers, is Satan spelled backward. “He’s a real spooky dog,” he said of the animal almost everyone else has described as an affectionate couch potato.

For Morgan, who has received threatening phone calls since the case began--”We know where you live,” said one caller--one thing is abundantly clear: “Our horse was where he was supposed to be, and that dog wasn’t,” she said. “Plain and simple.”