MARYLAND -- A Prince Frederick man was acquitted April 28 of accusations of animal cruelty after allegedly killing his neighbors’ English pointer with a bow and arrow while hunting on his property in November.
Dennis Taylor Hanvey, 46, insisted on the witness stand that, from his perch in a tree stand as daylight faded away, he had believed the animal he’d shot at was a deer — and that, furthermore, he thought he’d missed his target altogether.
If that were the case - that he thought he missed the 'deer', why wouldn't he go and check for a blood trail? A responsible hunter would not have left a deer to suffer with an arrow in it. A responsible hunter would have gone and looked for the damn arrow. This idiot knew what he was doing. He shot that dog and then got the heck out of there and left it to suffer and die.
Although Calvert Circuit Judge Marjorie Clagett acknowledged the suffering of the dog’s owners at the conclusion of the non-jury trial and said she had no doubt it was Hanvey’s arrow that killed their dog, she said his actions did not appear to constitute animal cruelty.
The defense argued that Hanvey may have believed he was looking at a piebald deer, which have a relatively rare genetic defect that causes them to be white with dark markings — similar to the white and brown English pointer, Abby — when he took aim and shot that late afternoon.
Hanvey was originally charged with animal cruelty and aggravated animal cruelty following the Nov. 8, 2014, incident — which led Abby’s owners to search for her throughout the evening and night before finding her the next morning about 30 yards into the woods behind their home, dead and covered in blood.
Amanda and David Marko, along with the 4-year-old dog, Abby, had moved into their rental home on Dennis Monnet Road about a month before the dog’s death, and had never met Hanvey.
From the witness stand at the circuit court trial, Amanda Marko described Abby as “extremely well-trained” and said that she was allowed to run free in the area behind the Markos’ home.
"She could wander anywhere if she never came back, but she always came back,” she said, explaining why she was perplexed when the dog did not return after entering the wooded area at about 4:30 p.m. “I never would have dreamed someone would be hunting that close to my house.”
Her husband, David Marko, remembered during his testimony viewing his dog’s body in the woods after his wife discovered her, removing her bright orange collar and following a blood trail about 200 feet to the tree from which Hanvey allegedly shot the arrow, which was littered with apples and corn at the base.
Deputy J. Buck of the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office responded to the Markos’ home on the morning they found Abby dead from the arrow wound, and told the court he had then questioned Hanvey at his home. When Hanvey admitted he had been hunting at the time the dog was out in the woods, his demeanor allegedly was nervous, his hands shaking and voice “vibrating.”
Hanvey said during the trial that he had been hunting from that tree about 200 times in five or six years, but had never before seen a dog in the area. On Nov. 8, he had not shot anything as light waned and his window to continue to hunt legally (up to a half hour after sunset) dwindled.
During questioning, prosecutor Frances Longwell accused Hanvey of wanting to shoot something, anything, and of wanting to allegedly “get rid” of the dog that was eating the corn and apples used to bait deer scattered around his tree.
Most tellingly, she said, Hanvey had not bothered to “track” his kill via the blood trail she said was obvious to anyone who looked.
Hanvey maintained that he had never seen the trail or any other clue that he had shot an animal, such as hairs, and that he had found the arrow “clean.”
(Gazette Net - May 6, 2015)
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