Pig with bound legs dies of exhaustion
Santa Fe, NM (US)Incident Date: Saturday, Aug 23, 2008
County: Santa Fe
Disposition: Alleged
Alleged: Raul Trinidad-Enriquez
Santa Fe County officials plan to cite a La Cienega man for animal abuse for allowing a pig he bought for a weekend matanza -- a traditional gathering where an animal is slaughtered and cooked -- to die of exhaustion on a public road.
Santa Fe County Animal Control Officer Monica Pi�eda responded to a call about a pig on La Cumbre Lane about 10 a.m. Saturday, said Undersheriff Robert Garcia, who also went to the scene southwest of Santa Fe.
Garcia said locals reported the 150-pound animal had been lying in the lane for two to three hours.
Although the pig's back legs had been bound with twine, he said, it apparently had managed to break out of its pen and roll or hobble down a hill onto the road. The pig was found lying atop a piece of plywood, which officials believe came from the broken pen.
Pi�eda was "able to untie the animal and assist the animal to getting on its feet and guide (it) down under a tree to a shady area," Garcia said.
He said Pi�eda, who realized the pig was in distress, first contacted the New Mexico Livestock Board, but was told it handles only cattle and horses, not pigs. Pi�eda tried but failed to reach the pig's owner or a veterinarian, so she left the pig and drove to the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society off N.M. 599 for help, Garcia said. When she returned with an animal shelter worker, the pig was dead.
Meanwhile, after other pleas from the Animal Control Office, Garcia said, a livestock agent also arrived in La Cienega to find the pig dead and allowed the owner to start butchering it.
Garcia said he's not sure if the pig died from injuries sustained in the fall from the pen, but Sheriff Greg Solano said the death was more likely to be from exhaustion.
"Pigs don't have sweat glands, so when they get excited - it was probably trying to free itself from the hind legs being tied - they tend to exert themselves and actually die from exhaustion," the sheriff said.
Solano and Garcia said the livestock agent gave the pig's owner, Raul Trinidad-Enriquez of 14 La Cumbre Lane, a verbal warning, but they have instructed Pi�eda to cite him for animal abuse for tying the animal's hind legs inside its pen. Trinidad-Enriquez was not available for comment.
The sheriff and undersheriff, who oversee the county Animal Control Office, said animal-control officers are equipped to deal with dogs and cats, but not large pigs or other domestic livestock. Animal-control officers do not carry weapons with which to kill injured or ailing animals, they said.
Myles Culbertson, the executive director of the state Livestock Board, one of New Mexico's oldest agencies, dating from 1887, said the board's name "suggests we're the animal-everything agency, which isn't exactly true," but it does have responsibilities for preventing animal abuse.
Culbertson said agents were initially reluctant to respond because the closest agent was in El Rancho, and the call came in during the weekend when agents respond only to emergencies. He said the agent supervisor was not told there was a possible animal-cruelty situation and understood initially a pig was running down a street in La Cienega.
"In a situation where there is livestock on a public highway, it's a public-safety issue, and the Livestock Board is in a position to be able to support the public-safety entity, but we can't really be put in a primary position," he said. "There needs to be sheriff or state police."
Told that Undersheriff Garcia was there, Culbertson said he didn't think the three-and-a-half-hour response time was unreasonable given it was during a weekend and the nearest agent was an hour away.
"It's a little unfortunate, I think, that for whatever the reasons that provoked it, for the Livestock Board to become the recipient of whatever the criticism was, because we did more than we had the responsibility for or the capacity for at the time, considering the distance and the nearest officer," he said. References |
