Luck and Pluck : Nearly 1,000 Abandoned Ducks Rescued, but Some Are Headed to the Dinner Table

WINCHESTER, Calif. —  Regina Domenigoni saved nearly 1,000 ducks on Tuesday, but whether you consider her backyard a duck refuge or a duck halfway house depended on who ultimately was taking duck delivery--and what plans they were cooking up.

The ducks were the last of an estimated 5,000 domestic ducks that were abandoned several months ago at a poultry farm across the street from Domenigoni’s house here in rural southern Riverside County.

Most of the ducks perished for lack of water and food, and Tuesday morning Domenigoni and some friends took action, rescuing the last of them and placing them in her own backyard before they were supposedly to be destroyed.

Throughout the day Tuesday, neighbors and strangers alike came calling to pick up as many ducks as they could carry off. It was a daffy scene as people scrambled around a pen, grabbing the ducks by their necks and carting them away.

Some people, like Larry McArthur, planned to give the ducks a fine new home. McArthur said he wanted them for their eggs; others took ducks to simply release in neighborhood ponds.

And some had decidedly different duck designs.

“I’ll put them in a little corral and fatten them up,” said Eleidio Rodriguez with a scheming smile. “And I think that, for Christmas, I’ll have some duck tamales.”

He had 40 of the doomed ducks in the back of his pickup and was chasing down still more in Domenigoni’s back yard. “They’ll taste like chicken,” he said.

Domenigoni didn’t mind that she had opened a duck soup kitchen of sorts. Even that fate was better for the ducks than what they were facing, she said.

According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, the ducks belonged to An Binh Do, who rented the house and an old chicken ranch earlier this year from Kenneth Goldmann of Redondo Beach and Kathleen Booher of Torrance, whose parents owned the place for years.

According to Booher, Do stopped paying rent around April 1 and advised the family that the 5,000 ducks--which he had raised from ducklings--were theirs. Sheriff’s Deputy Jeff Reichmann reported that Do told him he ran out of money and could no longer afford to feed them.

Booher said she and her brother tried to feed the ducks and asked the Humane Society for help until the problem could be resolved. But help never arrived and with about half of the ducks dead, Domenigoni unilaterally sprang into action.

“Pens were filled with dead ducks, there were baby ducks suffocating in boxes, and rotting eggs were everywhere,” she said. “Ducks had died with their heads poking through the fence, trying to find something to eat or drink. It was ugly.”

Last Thursday, Domenigoni said, an animal control officer delivered 18 bags of feed. But since the ducks technically had not been abandoned--the Goldmann family still owned the ranch--the animal control office took no action.

Since Friday, local feed stores have contributed more than 300 additional bags of feed. While some of the ducks began to recover, still more died.

On Monday, according to Domenigoni, the Goldmanns said they were going to dig a pit and destroy the remaining ducks. Booher, however, said the family wasn’t going to kill the surviving ducks and hoped to give them away.

On Tuesday morning, Domenigoni and friends pulled up to the old chicken shacks like a cavalry in pickup trucks. They moved about 800 ducks to her own backyard.

Thanks to some midday television news coverage, duck Samaritans and would-be duck diners began showing up.

The Riverside County district attorney’s office is considering charging Do, 25, with one count of cruelty to animals, according to the Sheriff’s Department.