MAINE -- When teenagers Michael and Nate Bonzagni went outside to check on their fowl at around 4 p.m. Saturday, they were greeted with a gruesome sight.
A Husky had gotten into the family's poultry pen and killed more than 100 young chickens and turkeys.
"We found the dog jumping over everything, just going over the rest of them that he didn't kill," said Michael Bonzagni, 13. "It was a gray Husky."
The boys immediately called their mother, Amy Tremblay, who was out of the house at the time. "They called me and said, 'There's a dog in the chicken pen, killing the chickens,'" Tremblay said. Her sons caught the dog and hooked it to a run, she said.
The Husky wiped out the family's young flocks of about 105 Rhode Island Red and Cornish Rock chickens, she said.
"It's tragic. They're gone. There's some still alive but they're so badly hurt they aren't going to make it."
They were to be food for the winter, she said. "We're a family of five, and only my husband works."
It's too late now to buy more chicks, Tremblay said. "We got these ones in May."
The family also was raising 20 turkeys for friends and relatives and others who ordered them. In addition, they have two goats, a rabbit and several laying hens - "just a little farmstead to keep ourselves going," Tremblay said.
The baby chickens and turkeys had an indoor-outdoor pen with a 6-foot-high fence. The assumption, Tremblay said, was that the dog jumped the fence.
The Husky, which was young and had a shock collar and a tag, was not dangerous to humans, Animal Control Officer Wendell Strout said Saturday. "I handled him. Everybody there handled him."
The dog probably got excited after scaling the fence, Strout said. "The freakin' birds went nuts," he said. "Once a dog gets in there and the birds start going crazy, the dog starts going crazy, and it just escalates."
[Funny, no mention of how the poor birds suffered. Yes, they're livestock - meant to be eventually killed and eaten - but they do have feelings, people. They feel terror and pain just like you and I do.]
He estimated the dog was in the pen for about an hour. "You'd have to be there for a while to kill that many chickens," Strout said.
Tremblay said the dog didn't eat any of the fowl. "He just mangled them to death. They just have bite marks in them. He just tore right into them."
Strout estimated the damage at around $1,000. The dog's owners will be responsible for damages and will have to pay a fine for letting a dog run at large. "I raise birds, so I know what they cost, new," Strout said. He said the birds were probably between 5 and 8 pounds, ready to be slaughtered.
The dog will be in lockdown, at least until Monday, Strout said.
(Sun Journal - June 29, 2008)
