Animal cruelty strikes local neighborhood By: Raquel Dixon, WSAZ Charleston


CHARLESTON, WV, Feb. 25 - Police say it's the worst case of animal cruelty they've dealt with in quite some time. Innocent pets injured and killed. Newschannel 3 takes you to the neighborhood where it all happened.

Knothead is just one of Jerry Shaffer's coon dogs. Shaffer makes his living training dogs and depends on Knothead's experience to help him. So when Knothead got caught in a trap near their home, Shaffer was upset.
"I'm mad, 'why?' Well to have someone out there you know that could do something like that, it's unbelievable," said Shaffer.
Unbelievable because police say, Earl Wilcox meant to catch animals like Shaffer's dog in his traps. Deputies arrested Wilcox and charged him with animal cruelty and other hunting violations. Wilcox told them he was trying to catch coyotes and bobcats. But instead they found dead dogs, hawks, raccoons and possums.
It's legal to set up traps in the woods, but the suspect used a deer carcass to bait the animals. Once the animals were trapped instead of letting them go police say Wilcox killed them and threw them in a nearby stream.
Deputy Noel Braley said, "The most disturbing thing to me is that I'm a hunter and a great percentage of West Virginians hunt. Obviously this individual didn't have any regard for wildlife or domesticated animals and its just really troubling to see a site like this."
A site that isn't far from homes like Shaffer's, where pet owners usually don't worry about letting their pets run free. But police are warning against it for now, at least until they know there aren't any more traps left out in the woods.
Deputies aren't sure how long Wilcox had been trapping animals. They're continuing their investigation and the EPA plans to clean up the mess left in the stream in the next week.

 

Shaffer's Training Facility

Jerry and Yvonne Shaffer
Rt. 5 Box 315
Charleston WV 25312
304-965-6824
coondogtrainer@hughes.net