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CARIBOU — Despite the recent case of a Van Buren couple charged with allegedly abandoning cats in the freezing cold and a group of young people reportedly intentionally running over a wild turkey in Caribou, police in Aroostook County said this week that they have not noticed a rise in animal cruelty cases in the region.
On a statewide level, Liam Hughes, director of the state’s Animal Welfare Program. said Monday that it was difficult for him to gauge at this point if there had been any rise, due to a change in the way his office collects data and the various animal control officers, police departments, and humane societies who currently deal with animal cruelty, abandonment and neglect cases on their own.
Caribou Police Chief Michael Gahagan that his department has not seen a rise in either animal cruelty cases or in animals being abandoned in the past year.
“There have been some cases where we have received reports where someone suspects an animal has been abandoned and it is only a person who has gone out of town and left the pet in another person’s hands and that person has not checked on the animal that day, but that is it,” he said.
Aroostook County Sheriff Darrell Crandall said Monday that he doesn’t believe that his deputies have noticed a change over the past year.
“We did deal with a case in 2015 where a subject allegedly stabbed his dog during the course of a crime,” he said. “But other than that, we don’t often deal with animal cruelty or abandonment cases, because when we see them, we call animal control.”
Crandall said that deputies have a list of the animal control officers in each town and unorganized territory with them while they are out on patrol. When they come across an abused or neglected animal, they call the officer or an animal welfare agent.
In Fort Kent, Chief Tom Pelletier said that besides a case where five dogs and several cats were abandoned in a rental home in late December 2014, they have not experienced an increase in cases.
Pelletier added that the Fort Kent Police Department has a kennel and does intake for the towns of Eagle Lake, St John and St. Francis.
He said that they have not taken in any abandoned animals for those towns in the past year.
According to Van Buren police Officer Nathan Chisholm, on Jan. 16, Peter Gervais, 40, and Amy Gervais, 29, each were charged with two counts of cruelty to animals after an investigation determined the pair had “abandoned cats on various rural streets in Van Buren.” Both cats survived and are now doing well, according to officials at Halfway Home Pet Rescue in Caribou.
On Jan. 25, a car occupied by two or three young people allegedly intentionally struck and killed a wild turkey on Mitchell Road in Caribou, according to Caribou police Officer Craig Peterson. The suspects have not been identified.
From his office in Augusta, Hughes said Monday that his office has changed its data system to assure that multiple reports on a case are condensed into one report. He said that a new development that just started last month is t hat the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now collecting data on animal crimes the way it would for other serious crimes like homicide.
There will be four categories of crimes: simple or gross neglect, intentional abuse and torture, organized abuse — like dog fighting and cock fighting — and animal sexual abuse.
“I am interested to see what the data will show for Maine,” said Hughes. “We have always gotten good reports and are doing better than other places in the country.”
Hughes said that there are many animal abuse cases that people do not read about in the paper, ones that are dealt with by animal control officers or animal welfare agents every day.
“It will be a long time before this office will be out of business, unfortunately,” he said Monday.
