Letter: Animal atrocities — despite the outrage, little has changed

Posted 7/18/17

To the editor:

It’s been a year since the Westport Police found 1,400 animals dead or in desperate condition amidst acres of rat-infested sheds and slaughter shacks, heaps of old tires and …

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Letter: Animal atrocities — despite the outrage, little has changed

Posted

To the editor:

It’s been a year since the Westport Police found 1,400 animals dead or in desperate condition amidst acres of rat-infested sheds and slaughter shacks, heaps of old tires and leaking oil drums, junked cars, and unregistered weapons on property off American Legion Highway owned by Westport resident Richard Medeiros. The ASPCA and Animal Rescue League of Boston, along with scores of volunteers worked for days to remove 1,200 surviving animals to a treatment facility on farmland off Pine Hill Road. Close to $2 million was spent on the effort. Westport, Mass., became known in news outlets across the country as the place where the “largest animal abuse case in the history of the Northeast” had occurred.

Especially damning for town and state officials was that they had allowed this to happen a second time, perpetrated by many of the same people. Six years earlier, almost to the date, 800 starving, brutalized animals had been found on the same property. The MSPCA (not part of the ASPCA) headed up the supposed investigation, but decided not to pursue animal cruelty charges against anyone, citing the “complexity” of the case as so many people were involved, i.e., Richard Medeiros and 16 tenant “farmers.” No one paid a fine; no one spent a night in jail.

The MSPCA did promise to make “future unannounced inspections of the property.” But it was back to grisly business as usual in the Medeiros hellhole the moment the MSPCA, the Westport Board of Health, and Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources turned their heads — which was pretty much the day after the case was dismissed by the Fall River District Court.

Town attorney Jeffrey Blake raised the question as to whether or not Medeiros should to be able to keep his 61A farming tax break. In FY 2009, 50 of Medeiros’s 74.7 acres were exempted from property taxes, saving him $4,152 of the $5,898 he would have otherwise owed. The Westport Board of Assessors had no problem with continuing the tax break. Apparently Assessor Stephen Medeiros (no relation to Richard Medeiros, but a self-described “life-long farmer”) and his two colleagues saw pasture land where the Westport Police saw “animals chained in dirt and mud with no water, no grass.”

It is noteworthy that, about the same time the 2010 Medeiros case came to light, four other properties along American Legion Highway were also under scrutiny for animal abuse, unregistered junked vehicles, trash, and wetlands and zoning violations. This April an owner of one of those same properties was again cited for failure to meet the state’s sanitary code for Minimum Standards of Fitness for Human Habitation, and for keeping unpermitted pigs in substandard conditions and feeding them garbage with rotting meat. Four days before that farmer was cited, a farmer on Sodom Road was found to have anywhere from 30-100 more pigs than the four for which he was permitted. The pigs on both farms had been eating rotting meat — the difference between the two farms being that the Sodom Road pigs were eating the flesh of a long-dead sow that had been left to rot in the middle of the barnyard.

Westport, we have some serious problems. We have farmers who do not properly care for their animals or the land for which they are receiving tax exemptions. We have people who use their property and our wetlands as garbage dumps. We have a lot of long dirt roads down which all sorts of bad things happen. And we have too many town officials who ought to be paying attention to major public health and environmental transgressions who choose to look the other way.

After the 2010 Medeiros travesty not one thing changed. What about after the 2016 sequel?

We have two new BOH members, after former BOH Chairman John Colletti resigned and BOH member Karl Santos declined to run for another term. Senior “Health” Agent James Walsh who, along with Santos, falsified inspection records of the Medeiros property, voluntarily stepped down with full pension. We have a semi-functioning ad hoc “Animal Action Committee” that has, if nothing else, demonstrated (to the few of us who pay attention) the breathtaking non-communication between the BOH, Animal Control Officer, Westport Police, and Town Administrator on any and all matters pertaining to animal abuse and neglect. Beyond those achievements, we haven’t gotten much of anywhere.

How about at the state administrative or legislative level? Nothing or, more accurately, worse than nothing with state legislators and out-of-state agribusiness trying to overturn last year’s ballot approved Massachusetts Minimum Size Requirements for Farm Animal Containment (Question 3). But back to the thousands of animals who over the past decade have suffered and died on the Medeiros tenant farm.

There is one ray of hope. Twenty-seven people (Medeiros and every one of his 26 tenant farmers) have been arraigned on 151 charges of Animal Cruelty. And this time, thank goodness, it is being handled by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. Pretrial hearings are set to begin on July 26.

Animal cruelty is a felony in Massachusetts. Although, looking at the paltry fines and lenient sentences handed out to those few abusers who are actually prosecuted and convicted makes one wonder what level of depravity it takes for the court to send someone to prison. (The MSPCA investigates over 3,000 animal abuse cases each year, but brings charges against less than one percent of alleged offenders.)

If the perpetrators of the Medeiros farm atrocities do not face substantial prison time, then there is no justice for animals in Massachusetts. We already know that is the case in Westport, but some of us still hold out hope for what the AG’s Office is able to accomplish.

Constance Gee

Westport

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