Adding to Anguish Over Dog’s Death
Imagine yourself at age 84 and not in the best of health. You’ve survived a couple of minor strokes, your mobility is limited, your vision is failing. You live alone except for the dog you’ve had since he was a puppy.
Imagine that you, or perhaps your mother, had to suffer what Avis Louise Wilkinson has suffered.
Avis Wilkinson is a central figure in a controversy that I’m tempted to call Palgate in memory of Pal the pug, whose mysterious death April 7 has cast such an unflattering light on the city’s Department of Animal Services. Still unresolved is the dispute over whether Pal was skinned alive by human hands, as a leading humane organization contends, or was mutilated in a coyote attack, as the city agency claims. But there should be no question that nobody grieved for Pal more than Avis Wilkinson.
Last Saturday might have been the worst day for Avis Wilkinson since Pal died. She picked up her morning paper and saw this front page headline: “Prosecution of Pal’s Owner Sought.” Next to the story was a boxed feature called the Daily News Line promoting a phone-in poll that invited readers to answer this question: “Should Pal’s owner be prosecuted in the death of her pet?”
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Avis Wilkinson broke down and cried. How could anybody think she was a villain? She heard the same buzzing in her ears that she heard before her strokes. A doctor prescribed medication to control her soaring blood pressure. Four days later, her daughter Carol Johnson says, her mother’s condition remains shaky.
Palgate has been bizarre from the start, but the suspicion leveled at a little old lady from Encino established new standards. Most of the weirdness has emanated from the Department of Animal Services itself, though animal rights zealots--”humaniacs,” some call them--are part of the story too. As for the Daily News poll, “God, what a lack of good taste,” Johnson says.
Palgate, in its gradual unfolding, has put the Department of Animal Services in a defensive pose that might be described as Nixonian. The more damage control they try, the more damage they inflict on themselves. Worse, the agency seems to think the best defense is a good offense. Before approaching the city attorney’s office with supposed evidence of animal cruelty against Wilkinson and Johnson, it had executed a search warrant on the veterinarian who first treated Pal, and issued press releases attacking the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles.
Steve Afriat, president of the Animal Regulations Commission, says the agency is often unfairly criticized because animal control is a dirty job nobody else wants to do. That’s easy to understand. Afriat also suggests there’s a benign explanation for the animal cruelty investigation. That’s very hard to understand.
The evidence presented to a disbelieving city attorney’s office--and rejected with a sharp letter of rebuke--focused on the hours of delay between when Pal was first discovered injured and when the dog was taken to a veterinarian. Officials also questioned why Johnson transported Pal several miles from her mother’s home in Encino to a veterinarian in Northridge.
When I first heard officials describe these facts I couldn’t understand their ominous tones. I’d seen the pictures. Pal had lost most of his pelt from its neck to its hindquarters. It seemed to me that Pal’s owner would be distraught and might expect the dog to die at any moment. Perhaps extraordinary measures could have saved him, but if Pal had been my dog, I might have thought that the wisest, kindest decision would be to put him out of his misery.
What really happened that morning, Johnson says, is that when her mother discovered Pal, all she saw was a blur cowering deep beneath a thorny bougainvillea. Apparently in shock, Pal wasn’t whimpering. Wilkinson realized the dog was injured but not how severely. Unable to help Pal herself, she called her daughter and asked her to bring hydrogen peroxide. En route Johnson stopped by a drugstore to buy the medication and found herself stuck in line for more than 30 minutes.
When she finally saw Pal’s condition, she became distraught. Johnson said she gathered the dog in a blanket and drove to Dr. Melvin Richkind. Why didn’t she go to a closer clinic? Johnson only thought of Dr. Richkind, she says, because the vet had once saved her own dog Ember’s life, after Ember had eaten some snail poison.
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Afriat says he was surprised by Saturday’s headlines, too, and says he later learned that the media mischaracterized a standard procedure by which investigators submit their reports to the city attorney for review. The city attorney’s office says that’s nonsense--that animal services has the discretion over the evidence they present.
Sunday’s news may have provided a measure of support for Animal Services, if not Avis Wilkinson. The Daily News published its phone-in poll results--and, go figure, 37% of callers said Pal’s owner should be prosecuted. Her daughter says she broke down and cried.
