Tips Bring Likely Killer Dogs to Heel

The hunt for the dogs that mutilated four sheep on a ranch here ended Wednesday evening when a husky named Bear and a husky mix named Cheyenne were led peaceably from their well-tended Ojai home.

The dogs were driven by a county animal control officer to the Humane Society of Ventura County’s shelter, where two witnesses grimly identified them as the pair seen lurking near a livestock pen at a boarding ranch off California 33 on Sunday morning.

The animals are “pretty probably” the killers, said Jolene Hoffman, the shelter’s director.

Their prospects are uncertain. County animal control officials will likely give owner Joan Lemper, who described herself as a surgical technologist, the choice of finding a rescue organization to take them or having them euthanized, Hoffman said. Because Lemper has been cooperative, criminal charges are unlikely, she added.

The outcome left no one happy.

At the shelter, Laurie Reyes, whose family was raising the sheep as part of a 4-H program, choked back tears both for the loss of her animals and the possible loss of the dogs.

“I love animals,” she said. “And those dogs are beautiful. I hate to see animals put to death. But . . . “

At her home, Lemper was also crestfallen.

She had found the dogs last July in the Oregon woods.

“The female was hurt and the male was standing guard over her,” she said. “They followed us to our campsite.”

The dogs’ tags led Lemper to their home in Medford, Ore. But it was not a happy reunion; the dogs cowered on seeing their owners and the owners said they didn’t want them.

Lemper bought her house three months ago partly because she thought its half-acre yard would give the playful pair room to roam. But she said they kept escaping--despite a 6-foot-high fence and electric wires that emit a mild shock to keep animals within bounds.

“If they did this thing, then I feel horrible,” she said. “I’m an animal lover.”

Lemper said the dogs are fond of her 5-year-old granddaughter and have never been the source of any complaints for threatening people or animals.

“But if they’re capable of this, I won’t want them back,” she said.

She said she would make restitution to the Reyes family if authorities definitively conclude her dogs were involved.

The dogs are to be taken to the county animal shelter in Camarillo today, where officials will examine them and determine their involvement in the attack.

The carnage was discovered Sunday afternoon by Reyes’ 15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Three of the family’s sheep had been fatally mauled, including Moe, a lamb Nicole was preparing to enter in the upcoming county fair. The fourth, a lamb named Sweetpea, is being nursed by the family, but remains in bad shape.

Since then, the Humane Society and county animal control officers checked out tips daily. They compiled a list of huskies licensed in Ojai, huskies that have been known to bite and huskies that have been impounded and released.

Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury, an Ojai resident who is a friend of the Reyes’, even urged people to send contributions to the family through his office. Nicole’s father, longtime 4-H advisor Italo Reyes, had hoped to donate the offspring from the lambs to 4-H youngsters who could not afford their own.

A tip led authorities to Lemper’s dogs. A nearby animal owner had heard their descriptions and thought they were the pair that had been seen recently chasing horses.

Lemper’s home is in the vicinity of the ranch where the sheep slaughter occurred. One of her dogs look like a typical husky while the other is tawny--just like the dogs reported at the scene of the attack. A tuft of brownish-gold hair was caught in one of the fences surrounding the sheep pen.

At the shelter, a cursory physical examination of the dogs revealed puncture wounds consistent with crawling under a barbed-wire fence, Hoffman said. One of the animals had a sticky substance--perhaps dried blood--on its side and manure under its collar, as if from rolling in a pen.

While none of that would constitute positive proof, it all suggests that the animals took part in the attack, Hoffman said.

Coyotes had been ruled out because they generally would try to drag their prey away and eat it, rather than mauling it.

But huskies are related to wolves--and husky owners often don’t realize how close to the surface their pets’ wolf-like tendencies lie, said Hoffman, whose neighbor lost some goats to a husky a few months ago.