Humane society rescues 100 dogs in eastern Oregon

 This kind of "hoarding" has got to stop.  As a psychiatric nurse, I understand the compulsion these people may have felt and the obsession they had with collecting more dogs, but these are living, breathing, feeling beings--not things.  Animal abuse is animal abuse, period.  Please help stop such terrible abuse.  If you know of any animal that is being abused, please report it.  An investigation may or may not support your claim, but at least you will have tried to help.  Dogs, cats, other animals cannot speak for themselves and depend on us to provide safe and secure living conditions.  Don't we owe them the respect we would want given to our own loved pets?


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December 08, 2009, 8:14PM


A suspected case of dog hoarding has turned into one of the largest cases of animal neglect in state history, the Oregon Humane Society said Tuesday.

The case involves about 100 dogs on a sprawling, desolate piece of property about 20 miles south of Burns.

David Lytle, spokesman for the Oregon Human Society, said the dogs were living without shelter in icy conditions, surrounded by cattle bones gnawed clean.

The dog owners, who live in trailers on the property, fed them carcasses from a local meat processing plant.

"The whole property was scattered with the carcasses," Lytle said. "I've never seen anything like it."

A couple and another woman living on the property were arrested by Harney County Sheriff Dave Glerup on suspicion of animal neglect.

Glerup said the couple -- 43-year-old Ronald Steven Anderson and Anita Darlene Anderson, 55 -- and 34-year-old Kathlean Fuchs-Goyogana,  34, agreed to give up the dogs and were released on their own recognizance.

Glerup said the couple has lived on the property on Frenchglen highway for more than a decade and are currently unemployed. The property is owned by a woman who used to live in the area but moved near Joseph after her husband died. Glerup said the Andersons sublet to Fuchs-Goyogana, who has a 9-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl.

A friend of the girl's sparked the investigation, telling her mother about conditions on the property. The mother called the Department of Human Services, which in turn called the Harney County Sheriff's Office.

Glerup said Fuchs-Goyogana agreed to take her kids off the property. She is currently under investigation for child neglect, he said.

As for the dogs, most of them are border collie, Shiba Inu and Australian shepherd mixes. Lytle did not see any obvious injuries, though he said some had nails so long they were curled over and growing into their paws. But he said the dogs did not appear to be malnourished.

"I would call this a hoarding case," he said. "The woman was very attached to a lot of the dogs."

This is the second large animal rescue from Harney County this year. In March, sheriff's officials and the humane society rescued 131 dogs from breeder Ted Tellefson, who had dogs chained, in house trailers and roaming on his property in Burns.

This latest rescue also involved dogs stuck outside without shelter. With temperatures plunging to 11 degrees below zero Monday night, officials found dogs tied to posts and farm equipment or trapped in a wire pen. Several small dogs had sought shelter by digging a hole below a few wooden planks.

"When we came by, they popped their heads up out of the ground like prairie dogs," Lytle said.

He spotted the carcass of one dead dog on an oil drum.

On Monday, Lytle and two other people from the humane society rescued 14 dogs, including a mother and four 1-week-old pups, and brought them back to the agency's headquarters in Portland.

A second humane society crew left Tuesday in three vans to bring back as many dogs as possible.

The first group should arrive at the humane society on Wednesday to very full shelter. On Tuesday, the agency was rescuing at least 70 rat terriers from an overwhelmed breeder in Tillamook.

Lytle said the agency's investigators had been talking to the woman for a long time, trying to persuade her to give up the terriers.

Dogs from the two rescues will take up half of the agency's kennels at its headquarters in Portland.

"Fortunately, a lot of the dogs are small dogs so we can put several in the same kennel," Lytle said.

But the humane society said it needs donations of puppy food, large crates, shredded paper and cash as officials scramble to care for the dogs.

The dogs will be examined, given medication and neutered to prepare for adoption.

"Our medical staff is going to be very busy over the next few days," Lytle said.

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-- Lynne Terry

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