Arriving at a rural property, an Arizona sheriff’s deputy approaches a group of starving dogs behind a chain-link fence. Some are sleeping, while others bark and wag their tails. The deputy lays out food and water to corral them, body-camera video shows.
“This is going to suck,” he says.
The deputy then pulls out a handgun and shoots the dogs one by one, killing seven, before dragging their bloodied bodies to his truck, according to the video. He later dumped the canines’ bodies near railroad tracks, an incident report says.
The Apache County Sheriff’s Office, which serves roughly 65,000 people, maintains that the deputy did nothing wrong that day in September. Chief Deputy Roscoe Herrera said that since the county has no animal control service, deputies have discretion to handle animal issues as they see fit. The deputy, Jarrod Toadecheenie, declined to comment.
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But the incident in Adamana, Ariz. — an unincorporated community about 100 miles east of Flagstaff — has outraged local animal advocates who say that shooting the dogs was the wrong solution and that the area desperately needs to address animal hoarding and abandonment. Some residents have launched Facebook groups to try to find homes for abandoned dogs and to expose people who illegally hoard animals.
“The Apache County Sheriff’s Office won’t do anything to fix the problem,” said Teresa Schumann, founder of the nonprofit Northern Arizona Animal Search and Rescue. “Animals are dying everywhere in the county.”
Molly Ottman, executive editor of the Mountain Daily Star, first obtained the body-camera footage of the incident and shared it with The Washington Post.
The dogs who were shot were owned by a divorcing couple who had abandoned the property, Toadecheenie wrote in the incident report. He wrote that he visited the home several times over a span of three weeks after neighbors called to complain about the canines.
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On the first visit, he counted 10 dogs, “all of which seemed to be in good health.” A few days later, the deputy wrote, he responded to a call that the dogs had chased a neighbor’s donkey.
Toadecheenie contacted Schumann, who said she was struggling to find new owners for the dogs when the deputy called and said he would “handle it.” Schumann said she told him the dogs may need to be euthanized if they were feral.
On Sept. 22, Schumann told Toadecheenie that she hadn’t been able to find new homes for the dogs. After telling his supervisor that he planned to shoot the dogs, the deputy bought dog food and a tray, and collected water from a fire station.
Then he went to the couple’s property, corralled the dogs with the food and water, put on headphones and began to shoot the canines, the body-camera footage shows. Toadecheenie shot one dog two additional times as it continued to move.
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Two dogs ran away uninjured and hid under a shed. They were later brought to a local animal shelter by Schumann. One died of parvovirus shortly after arriving, and the other was adopted, said Brandon Smigiel, a supervisor at Holbrook Animal Care and Control.
In the incident report, Toadecheenie recommended that the couple who allegedly abandoned the dogs be charged with animal cruelty. No charges had been filed as of Friday, according to county records.
Herrera, the sheriff’s chief deputy, acknowledged that the situation had caused the community “distress.”
“This tragic decision was made under extremely difficult circ*mstances due to a combination of limited resources, the willful neglect and abandonment of the dogs by their original owners, and the considerable amount of time spent seeking assistance from outside resources,” he said in a statement to The Post.
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In a separate statement provided to KPNX 12 News on June 6, the sheriff’s office seemed to blame a lack of funding.
“Apache County does not have an animal care and control department. In the unincorporated areas that responsibility is left up to the deputies and actions taken vary and are considered on a case-by-case basis. We do not have the infrastructure or budget to support such a department.”
Schumann, who runs the rescue nonprofit, said she never thought the deputy would shoot the animals.
“It infuriates me when the sheriff’s office says they don’t have the resources” to handle animal situations differently, she said. “There are plenty of people who are trying to help.”
The Arizona Humane Society called the situation “entirely preventable” and lamented that the sheriff’s office had not asked it for help.
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“This awful incident lacked all compassion and judgement,” Jennifer Armbruster, a spokeswoman for the humane society, said in a statement. “And what is most clear is that establishing an animal care and control service in Apache County is an absolute necessity to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”
Animal hoarding is at “epidemic levels” in Arizona, creating dangerous situations, said Terri Hoffman, founder of Animal Rights Champions of Arizona. Last summer, three mixed-breed pit bulls mauled a 2-year-old Apache County girl to death. Still, Hoffman said that she wants the deputy to be held accountable and that killing abandoned dogs is not an appropriate solution to hoarding.
“I’ve been to homes where there’s over 53 dogs,” Hoffman said. “Some people hoard horses and goats out here, too. I’ve seen dogs with open wounds, severe infections. Animals are dying.”
