Fighting mad

Stepping over earth piled with carcasses, Paul Tuennerman points out exactly where they found Sadie. Once identified, the stench induces chills. Bodies bloodied, bruised and decomposing fill the landscape of the dumping ground. Something is biting, clawing, destroying these dogs, and someone likes leaving them all right here.

Paul and his wife Ann recovered evidence of the crime. There in the canine graveyard, amid marshy woods off Palmer Road between George Watts Road and Hwy. 42, workman’s gloves with the initials “R.O.” written in Sharpie were just a few feet from their lifeless Weimaraner. Close by on their Livingston Parish property, they discovered a length of yellow nylon rope tied like an awful leash with a noose at the end. An identical leash turned up among the dead.

While visiting relatives in Florida last Thanksgiving, Ann received a text message from Karen Calandro, their longtime housekeeper and dog sitter. Calandro was concerned because Sadie, who always followed closely behind the Tuennermans’ 15-year-old Golden Retriever, Grazi, had not come back to the house. The next morning, another text: Sadie is missing.

“She’s not like a little Yorkie who’s hiding under the bed,” Ann says. “She’s a Weimaraner. We were panicking.”

During their 13-hour speed race home, the Tuennermans contacted the Weimaraner Club of America and Sadie’s breeder. They phoned Ann’s mother and sister in New Orleans, who helped launch what they call the largest dog hunt in Livingston Parish. The Tuennermans posted an ad on Petfinder.com and printed fliers and yard signs. They told strangers at convenience stores. They called the sheriff.

“Sadie was trained, and she knew where she wasn’t supposed to go,” says Paul, an executive for Raising Cane’s. “She had a routine, a loop around the property, and would always come back. We knew there was no way she could just disappear.”

Some tips from the American Kennel Club for protecting your pet. For more, visit akc.org.

• Do not let your dog off its leash or leave it unattended in your yard.

• Do not leave your dog unattended in a car or tied outside of a store.

• Use microchip identification and a companion animal recovery program. For more information visit akccar.org.

• Keep the phone numbers for area pet shelters, animal control offices and police on file.

• Have fliers with a recent photo ready in case your dog goes missing.

The Sunday they returned from Florida, Paul showed Deputy Sheriff Clint Walker through Sadie’s kennel inside a barn next to their home. He asked the officer if the parish has a dog-fighting problem. According to Tuennerman, Walker asked him if he wanted to know the truth. When Tuennerman said yes, Walker told him dog fighting is a problem. Dogs are being stolen up and down Hwy. 42, he said, and used to bait other dogs trained for fighting.

This account, however, contradicts what Livingston Parish Sheriff Willie Graves and Chief Detective Stan Carpenter told 225. In January, both denied knowledge of the canine carcasses off Palmer Road.

“There’s not a large number of dog thefts,” Graves said. “There are some but not a disproportionate amount. I have very strong feelings about it, personally. Dog fighting is barbaric.”

In 2007 Randy Stegall founded the Tangi Humane Society, a nonprofit he uses to assist Tangipahoa and Livingston Parish law enforcement in animal cruelty cases. Stegall says dog fighting is evident in the area but difficult to catch in the act. “Sometimes the sheriff’s department needs help,” Stegall says. “They don’t always have the time.”

According to Graves, dog fighting is never a low priority for his office, and he pursues leads aggressively as they surface. But in January, he said his office had no leads.

Ann Tuennerman got her first lead a week after Sadie went missing. A woman who would not identify herself called and said her husband had been horseback riding in the area and recognized the dog. “She said, ‘I think it’s not good news, but it’s your dog,’” Ann says. The woman described the area off Palmer Road, turf Paul and Ann had already searched looking for Sadie. The mystery woman said dogs had just been dumped there, including a Weimaraner. She was right.

Paul filed another police report and turned over the gloves with the initials to a deputy. He and Ann began monitoring the Palmer Road area, obsessively checking for more dead dogs. “You would not believe the bones, just everywhere,” Ann says. “Paul was almost tripping over dogs.”

But even with the initialed gloves, the yellow nylon rope and a dozen garish photos from the dumping ground, the Tuennermans’ investigation stalled. Just before Christmas, Paul wrote a letter to Sheriff Graves. The letter thanked him for the attentiveness of the deputies who responded quickly to his calls, but asked that the office take more action. At press time the sheriff’s office had not responded to Paul’s letter.

In March the Teunnermans contacted local TV stations whose reports on their story prompted Graves and his officers to exhume several dog carcasses from the dumping ground for analysis.

As for buying a new Weimaraner, it’s too soon. Now more cautious, the Tuennermans drop off their Golden Retriever with Ann’s mother in New Orleans before traveling. They can’t take another chance; not with a dog sitter, and not in the area they now view with suspicion.

Paul suggests the sheriff mount infrared deer cameras at the dumping ground to record the perpetrators. “It can’t be that hard to find out who’s doing it,” he says.

If the sheriff’s department does crack down, chances are the dog thieves are involved in a variety of other crimes.

“The same people who are dog fighting are mixed up in a lot of things, drugs and other theft,” says Detective Carpenter. “These people have criminal histories. The problem is they’ve wised up. A lot of this stuff is very secretive and takes place behind locked gates.”