Winnipeg Sun
Wed, October 29, 2003
Sadists get last laugh
Judge soft on cruel couple who ran satanic puppy mill
By Tom Brodbeck
When I ran into Walter Hiebert in the men's washroom at the courthouse in Steinbach last year, he didn't seem too concerned about the 15 charges of cruelty to animals he and his wife Marlene were facing. He tried to make idle chit chat with me, asking me where I was from. It's like he knew something about the justice system that I didn't.
He knew that despite the despicable acts he and his wife committed against 100 dogs, including stuffing a chihuahua with a crippled hind leg and a grey poodle with a life-threatening hernia into a pet carrier and dropping them in an abandoned outhouse, the justice system would probably handle him with kid gloves.
After all, he already had multiple convictions for cruelty to animals during the 1990s. Nothing much happened to him then, other than some fines and a few months in jail.
So when the Hieberts snickered and chuckled in the courtroom that afternoon -- as disturbing images and video tape were shown by Crown prosecutor Sean Brennan -- it was done with the comfort of knowing they would probably walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist. They were right.
Provincial Court Judge Heather Pullan is the winner of this month's 8-Ball Award, given out in this column to recognize some of the worst perversions of justice in Manitoba.
She spared the Hieberts jail time, giving them $38,000 in fines instead, which may or may not ever get paid.
The award is named after inaugural winner Provincial Court Judge Ronald Meyers, who last month handed down a one-day jail sentence to a 17-year-old youth for killing a man with a pool ball in a sock.
Provincial officials raided the Hiebert's puppy mill in July 2000 and found a kennel -- if you want to call it that -- so squalid, filthy and hazardous that officials said they had never seen anything like it before.
A chihuahua and a poodle were found in a hot, unventilated outhouse.
The poodle suffered from a severe hernia that caused a grapefruit-sized protrusion in its underbelly. It died several days later. It must have suffered terribly.
In total, four dogs died after the raid, including a pregnant Saint Bernard, a Great Dane and a dachshund. Dozens more had been squeezed into small, dirty crate-like kennels screened with wire mesh and soiled with dog feces and urine.
Rottweilers, boxers and cocker spaniels were forced to tromp through soupy mixes of feces, urine and mud on dirt floors.
Dogs were seen limping around.
The compound was made up of decrepit buildings and broken-down barns covered with shanty-like tin roofs and corrugated metal siding. Some dogs were kept in areas with no roofs or partial coverings, exposing them to rain and blistering sunlight.
Others had little or no ventilation, forcing them to live in sweltering temperatures as high as 40 C. It was, in a word, hell.
One pregnant Saint Bernard was found covered in hundreds of maggots and was forced to sit in her own excrement because a severely injured leg prevented her from standing up.
One by one she aborted her puppies after being seized by officials.
She even ate one of her dead pups -- nature's way of disposing of her 12 stillborn.
This wasn't just animal cruelty. It was torture. And these bums got off scot-free.